An Update With Facts

I first envisioned this blog serving as a replacement for group spam emails and as a way of charting my attempt to atone for the sins of my people. However, these noble intentions have been overwhelmed by a tendency towards highly speculative comparative anthropology. My goal in this post is to begin to remedy this imbalance. Today is Fact Day

I’m currently in Temple Basin, where the friendly white lion is conspicuously absent. This is Fact Day, so I won’t speculate about his location. There is reasonable snow cover here, but not as good as the Temple Basin website or breathless fanpersons claim. The snow is in pretty poor condition though, it’s really icy and lots of this field doesn’t get enough sun to soften it up. Because it is Fact Day, I am not allowed to take this opportunity to lambast Temple Basin for its ridiculous snow reports, because I officially had fun. One of the basins here picked up a few centimetres of fresh or windblown snow overnight. This dusting was just enough to give your skis some grip and left nice clean tracks that you could later admire. Some lucky timing meant that the rope tow in this basin opened just before the catered lunch got served. Since I’m making my own food rather than getting the catered option, I ate lunch later and while most other people were chowing down I was tracking out the fresh snow. Because it is Fact Day, I’m obliged to point out that there were a few other people who were also eating a late lunch that day skiing and the same time as me. They also appeared to be having fun. It is also snowing now, although Fact Day conventions require me to point out that it will probably be windy, wet or raining fire tonight to ensure that this new snow does not substantially improve skiing conditions.

Under normal circumstances, I’d claim that this ski field had so many Australians that it had its own voting booth for both federal and state elections. However, the stringent requirements of Fact Day disallow this claim. They almost certainly don’t get booths for state elections. Regardless of how many booths they do or don’t get and where the scrutineers for those booths come from, there are a lot of Australians here. Being around Australians is nerve wracking. What if one of them is named Sharon? What if they claim to be able to ski? What if one of them picks up my accent and blows my cover? The disdain of a nation is hanging over my head like the Sword of Damocles.

The final Fact of the day is particularly interesting. It turns out that Temple Basin is less of a sausage party than many other fields I’ve been to. By my count, there are three female guests here (of probably only 15 in total), and there are a number of female staff members. Plus, to further complicate matters, just about everyone here is fairly young. This place is almost completely comprised of people in their twenties and early thirties. Broken River always seems to have representatives from at least three generations (and the youngest and oldest representatives are usually excellent skiers to boot). Temple just has people who would easily pass for ski bums. I’m not sure that the standard is all that high (of skiing, I’m sure these people would all make excellent vagrants), but if you played some dubstep here, I doubt anyone would instinctively start looking to see which piece of farm machinery had just broken down. Perhaps this is just a quiet week, which might mean the ratio of women and Australians s more likely to be a statistical outlier.

In any case, the combination of women and Australians must be a devilish conundrum for the sorts of ski bums that end up at BR. It’s basically their favourite and least favourite things together in one place at one time, like if you were really hungry and someone made you a sandwich with ice-cream and dishwasher powder.

And because it is Fact Day, I must admit to a certain secret, guilty pleasure in having other Australians around. I just heard a guy ask where Timaru was. God, what a rookie.