Wash that mouth

In The Real McCain, a new biography, author and Democratic strategist Cliff Schecter reports:

"Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day."

I can't believe he called his wife a trollop!

Expat embarrassments

One of the disconcerting things about living away from your home country for a long time is that you start to forget things that it never occurred to you to put any effort into remembering. For instance, a while ago someone (an American) asked me the name of a popular New Zealand beer. He'd drunk it in Australia but couldn't remember what it was called. Unfortunately, neither could I. To add to my shame, he remembered the name before I did. It was Steinlager -- which is a very forgettable beer, but that's hardly the point.

I had a similarly alarming moment this week when reading a New Yorker story by David Owen on the costly anachronism that is the American penny. Towards the end of the piece, when Owen is marshaling his arguments for abolishing the penny and possibly even the nickel, he writes:

"In 2006, in an initiative called Change for the Better, New Zealand eliminated its five-cent coins, and dramatically reduced the size and weight of its ten-, twenty-, and fifty-cent coins... This total transformation of the country’s currency was received with calm pragmatism by most New Zealanders—even though the lowest-denomination coin in the new system, the redesigned ten-cent piece, is worth about eight American cents at the current rate of exchange."

The last time I was in New Zealand was early 2006, and I had no idea about any of this.

And now for something completely different

Taking a welcome break from politics, I recently wrote an article previewing The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, a contemporary opera based on Captain Cook's voyages to the Pacific. That sounds like a rather dreary entertainment featuring a lot of men in wigs and tight trousers singing jolly sea shanties. However, this opera, by the US-based New Zealand composer Matthew Suttor, was based on a book by the anthropologist Anne Salmond, who made a point of exploring both how Cook changed the Pacific, and how the Pacific changed Cook. Rather than merely fetishizing Cook as the model of an enlightenment explorer, she looks at some of the Pacific Islanders who boarded ships for England and did a considerable amount of exploring on their own.

This was a very interesting project to research, because Suttor found a lot of historical documents relating to Cook's travels at the British Museum in New Haven. My personal favorite was A Narrative of the Death of Captain James Cook, to Which Are Added Some Particulars Concerning His Life and Character and Observations Respecting the Introduction of Venereal Disease into the Sandwich Islands. They just don't write titles like they used to.