Strange Phenomena

Welcome, naturally suspicious reader, as I regale you with some of the weirder things that are happening here in Palo Alto. On the face of it, they might not seem that weird, but add it all up, and I'm sure you'll agree there's something strange going on tonight.

First up, here is a car in a garage:

Yes, the driveway project is complete here, and somehow I made it my mission to clear the garage to the point where I could actually drive the car into it. This was frankly an amazing development; I don't think I've ever been able to reliably do this anywhere else I've lived. Garages, as we all know, are for storing junk that might come in handy. Well, we know our time here is naturally limited (i.e. we're definitely returning to the UK at some point in the future), so there's no point collecting that kind of junk.

As you can tell, the car is a fairly snug fit in the garage, which, given that this is one of the tiniest cars in America, gives you and indication that this isn't a huge garage either. But to have a garage that isn't full of junk, in which I can really park the car, is pretty strange.

The other thing is... it's been warm here. Really warm. And it's not even mid-February yet. This week it's been regularly getting up to 25 degrees C (I've given up trying to get my head around Fahrenheit), and it's been glorious. Even for California, this is seriously unusual, and in the coming few days we're likely to see highs of 16 or 17, which is more typical for this time of year. But it's very clearly inexorably heading towards spring, with warmer weather and longer days. It feels good.

The other odd thing that's happening at the moment is the Winter Olympics. Now, the Olympics can't really decide if they're about exceptional achievement or the joy of competition, but the Americans have clearly made their minds up on that one: they care about WINNING and literally nothing else. An American athlete or team will only get airtime if they're going to win, or indeed if they've won (probably more coverage time is spent celebrating winning Olympians than actually doing their thing; I'm pretty sure Shaun White is the President or something now given how much time he's on the telly). This creates massive contradictions: in a disturbing echo of the Simone Biles controversy, this week champion skier Mikaela Shiffrin didn't win in her signature events, and spent a lot of time beating herself up about it on live TV.

Now there's various things wrong with this. First up, Shiffrin is, by any definition, one of the greatest alpine skiers of all time. She could give up the sport tomorrow and none of that would change; she doesn't have much to prove. Of course, disappointment at not winning is one of the things which drives these great champions, but the idea that Mikaela has failed in any way is pretty ridiculous.

But that's where the second piece comes in: when the coverage cuts to the adverts (which of course it does at least once every 10 minutes), there's Mikaela Shiffrin advertising how quick XFinity wifi is, because it turns out, hey, she's a fast skier. See what they did there? Well, she also fell over twice this week, which is pretty much par for the course with XFinity wifi too. If that joke seems like it's not in the greatest of tastes, well, it's not me running the adverts. The American capitalist machine needs a Mikaela story - ideally a winning story, but if not, the story of pressure and disappointment. Perhaps it would be better if we just left Mikaela alone for a bit, and celebrated the joy of competition rather than trying to win at all costs in order to maximize the marketing opportunity.

Of course, the ultimate marketing opportunity - the Super Bowl - is tomorrow, and it's indicative of just how much of a marketing opportunity it is that a lot of the excitement is about the adverts and the half time show. Anyway, it's the Year of the Tiger so I'll be rooting for the Cincinnati Bengals, despite them being significant underdogs (or as Helen put it, undercats).