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very quiet day I decided to take a break from my Australia research today. Instead of hours of reading guidebooks, there were only two things related to Australia for the day, one of which included watching my copy of Gallipoli this morning. The second Australian event was an odd bit of news. It seems that four teenagers from Milwaukee died in a car crash in Australia. I can see why it made the news here, but I have to wonder if it made the news there. ... To make the transition back to work go more smoothly, I gladly let myself fall asleep this afternoon. So rather than having to suffer through the recent heat wave here, the afternoon was quietly passed away in the comfort of my air conditioning. ... The New Yorker had a long article about a man who may have killed his wife that I found vaguely interesting. It wasn't the fact that he killed his wife that caught my attention, but the way that the people that knew him started to speculate about his odd behavior that I found to be fascinating. A small group of women went so far as to form a little club just to discuss what they knew about this man. From this little gossip group all sorts of rumors started to fly and it was scary the amount of influence that their speculation had on other people that they knew. It reminded me of the Salem witch trials and how a few carefully placed things could destroy the reputation of a person despite anything they might say to refute the rumors. To the women it was just a game to pass the time and it didn't matter to them if what they were saying was true or not. In some ways I found their behavior to be even more disturbing than the man they were accusing. ... Then I read another article in The New Yorker that tried to explain the mass appeal of the Harry Potter books, which didn't convince me to read the series.
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