Today I hitchhiked from Revelstoke to Rossland. Rossland is smaller than Revy and is about 300kms due south down a pretty stunning valley. Unfortunately there's not a whole heap of traffic going between the two towns so hitching was a bit sketchy. I got some great rides though, including one really long trip with a local guy named Greg who made me exceptionally jealous by telling me about his hang-gliding trips up and down the valley.
But you don't want to know what I've been doing, do you? Surely no one who intentionally reads this blog has any expectation of hearing about the mundane details of my day to day life. Let's not kid ourselves, you want to laugh at my expense and discover whether I've had any important insights into the human condition while travelling the globe.
Fortunately, today I am in a position to fill you in on both topics.
When the going gets wierd, the recipients of said wierdness get going:
First off, the stupid thing that's dominating my life lately was my audition for The Sound of Music. What seemed like a hilarious coincidence, and an easy, no-strings-attached funny story is looking ever more like being a freight train of impending doom, rushing ever onwards towards my prone form tied to the tracks. Yesterday, after a turbulent night spent dreaming that I was escaping from Austria over the Swiss Alps pursued by the Von Trapp family, I half-heartedly pretended to apply for jobs and look for houses. While I was avoiding personal growth or acheivement in the hostel one of the ladies from the audition panel turned up out of the blue and said she'd found me a job and somewhere to live. This was both a lovely gesture and a 4.5 out of 10 on the scale of terrifyingness. She suggested we go immediately to this place to find out the situation. I agreed and on the way over she hinted very strongly that I had been assigned "the part". The needle on the terrifyingness scale immediately bumped up to a cool 6.5.
The job opportunity was (thankfully) pretty hand-wavy. It turns out that (in small-town fashion) some friend of a friend had a WWOOFer working for her who's gone back to Australia till early December and she needs someone to fill in. Since I've just come from Australia, there seemed to be some kind of karmic balance in getting me to fill the other guy's place. The friend of the friend also needed someone to stay in her house and entertain her cat while she was out of town, so I've signed up for cat entertaining duties for the end of this week. As for the WWOOFing job, we'll see what happens - it probably doesn't actually pay any actual money, and that's not ideal.
So, the next day, I quickly packed up my stuff and got out of town. Not only is this a good chance to check out Rossland before I'm due to chase someone else's cat around a kitchen with no less than seven entrances, it means that if anyone tries to find me another job I'll be safely hidden down here. Plus, a potentially neat job that is actually related to my previous employment has opened up at Red Mountain, so it's handy to actually have some idea of what the place is like as a sort out the applications.
OK, and now to the first in what will no doubt be a series of hard hitting cultural examinations,
The Inverse Law of Head Size:
The first thing you notice about Canadian vehicles is that there seems to be a range of sizes of regular passenger vehicles that extends beyond those found in Australia. It's like you normally shop in a clothes store where the sizes from XS to XL, and you've just wandering into a larger shop that has those euphemistically named "Plus" sizes. In Australia, if you would like a dual cab ute, you can expect the extra space in the passenger part of the vehicle to be taken out from what would normally be the tray. In Canada, you would expect the tray of the vehicle to also expand proportionally to the expansion of the passenger cab, resulting in a truck that looks like the automotive equivalent of a sausage dog. There are also vehicles which are identical in style to cars or trucks found in Australia, but which have simply been expanded or magnified to significantly larger proportions.
This is, of course, nothing new. North America is renowned for being full of gigantic fuel guzzling cars that run on engine oil made entirely from the tears of baby seals that suffered cruelly as they died. "Great work John," you're saying, "you have noticed the obvious."
Indeed I have, but I have also noticed the subtle. Because I have seen that there is a strong, but inverse, correlation between the size of these uber-cars and the size of their driver's heads. Of course, this is not to say that all drivers of such large vehicles have small heads, but rather that the distribution of head sizes among drivers of large vehicles is strongly skewed towards lower volume heads.
This effect is common to both male and female drivers. Indeed, the effect is made more pronounced by the unusually high number of female drivers with small heads driving these extra large cars. Not only are there more female drivers driving big trucks than small cars, but those drivers tend to have quite small heads. All this suggests that if Michelle Phillips (who is known to sport an exceptionally small head) were to drive in Canada, she might feel strongly drawn towards an exceptionally large car.
In fact, the distribution of vehicle size by gender seems to be reversed in Canada relative to Australia. Here, just about all the small cars I see on the road are driven by men, and most of the female drivers I see are in very large cars.
I should note that I am not trying to imply that the drivers of large vehicles are stupid. In fact, the big trucks must be pretty practical in winter and I rather wish I had one (although my head is probably a bit large). It should also be pointed out that although objective measurements are not yet available (if funding is found I would like to pursue this phenomenon in more detail) I don't think the effect is just one of perspective - regular sized people in unusually large cars. It really does look like these people have genuinely small heads.
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