Monday, October 23, 2006

It's the End of the World, and I Feel Fine.

Traffic and weather together on the radio is twice an hour here in Australia, as opposed to the every ten minutes we find back home in the Bay Area. Funny thing is, they cover the entire continent of Australia during these quick updates. Congestion in a tunnel in Sydney, some construction on a by-way in Melbourne and (3000 miles away) in Perth, you've got a back up on a bridge. All casually delivered in thirty seconds. There is not the obsession about a minute-to-minute status report of every lane on every highway. This may be that in Australia, there are no alternate routes. Your path is pretty well determined if you're going on any major roads. Therefore, you're damned if the traffic sucks and there's nothing you can do about it anyway - so why worry?

And the weather... we can always talk about the weather. The defacto descriptor for weather here is dryly, 'fine'. As they rattle off the towns in this country / continent, it is by and large just 'fine'. Must be the most boring part of any broadcaster's job, to say 'fine' twenty times for eleven months of the year. Sometimes we'll get a 'fine and warm' or 'fine and breezy'... just to mix it up a bit. Spring is hanging around these days and we're getting a few too many 'fine with a chance of showers' days, would like a 'fine and warm' in the near future.

posted by ncawthon at 11:45 AM