D.C. Diary

Shercliff and the Romance Writers

For those of you who have been hounding me for an update on Simon's involvement with the Washington Romance Writers, here we go:

   

The keen-eyed amongst you will note that the meeting has already taken place. Simon spoke last week to a group of lovely ladies: WRW attendees include both fledgling and published authors who are keen to hear from speakers who might give them ideas for characters or settings for their novels. Past guests at the monthly meetings include best-selling novelist Nora Roberts, military intelligence personnel and 'a one-man FBI intelligence analyst, bomb analyst and fiction aficionado', so Shercliff had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, being a loyal diplomatic spouse and the soul of discretion, I cannot possibly reveal the details of the Embassy escapades and evacuations, secret assignations and international incident that Simon unveiled. (Actually, it's not really because I'm the soul of discretion; Alex and I only arrived in time for lunch and totally missed the talk).

However, all is not lost. The two-hour session was recorded and the tapes or mp3 discs are available to WRW members who were not able to attend the meeting in person. An annual membership fee of $45 seems a small price to pay to hear Shercliff's tall tales. Alternatively, you could have a word with Julian Assange and ask him to hack into the system and post the audio files to Wikileaks. I dare say Simon's talk would be far more diverting than the leaked State department cables.

The Turkey Tycoon

        

We've had a very quiet Thanksgiving holiday this year, most of it having been spent in our attic. We did venture out for Thanksgiving Day itself and had a wonderful evening involving some good friends, a lot of eating, much laughter and a game of charades. Of course, the festivities were somewhat marred by the sad news that the Turkey Tycoon, Sir Bernard Matthews, had passed away. (But what spectacular timing for the news of his death to break at Thanksgiving, and as UK families are gearing up for Christmas - yet further proof of Mr. Matthews' marketing genius). Being from Bootiful Norfolk myself (I was one of the few people at my school who did not have a holiday job skinning turkeys or working on a Turkey Twizzler production line), I was particularly interested - and actually somewhat surprised - to see that there was so much coverage of the local boy done good. The news of his death even made The Washington Post. The most entertaining obituary appeared in The Telegraph, which gave a great quote:

" Though sensitive to criticism, [Matthews] was robust in defending himself. "Turkeys have a very low IQ," he said, rejecting criticism of the conditions in his turkey houses. "All they need is food and warmth. They don't need to be taken to a cinema twice a week." "

Brilliant.

And so back to the attic. Rather than taking a trip to North Carolina, which had been our original plan, we decided to be sensible, stay home for the long weekend and start preparing for our departure. We will be leaving the US in January - a fact about which we have been, thus far, in total denial. (I keep thinking if we don't mention it then maybe the Embassy might forget that we are supposed to go home and we could just stay in Washington forever). So we have spent most of the Thanksgiving holiday clearing out the attic, packing boxes, sorting baby clothes and wondering why moving countries never gets any easier. We seem to be encountering the problem faced by every family on a diplomatic posting: one spends three years living in a nice big house in a foreign country, during which time one's possessions mysteriously expand to fit the available space, before remembering that we will be returning home to a small flat in London (or in our case my mother's house in Suffolk)  where the Persian carpets and crystal glasses seem distinctly out of place.  So we have spent the last three days dividing our worldly goods into five categories: long-term storage, medium-term storage, stuff to sell, stuff to give away and stuff we actually need when we get home. We've got the packers coming round soon to estimate whether our belongings will be within our allotted shipping allowance. I just hope they'll be able to advise us exactly how to squeeze the contents of a three-bedroomed house into four small suitcases and a couple of cardboard boxes.

The world's youngest diplomat

There have been some pretty impressive young diplomats over the years. An American schoolgirl named Samantha Smith was just ten when she wrote to President Andropov asking if he was planning to go to war with America. Andropov replied to Samantha's letter, which was published in Pravda, and invited her to visit the Soviet Union - an invitation she accepted, becoming America's youngest goodwill ambassador. (Smith later wrote a book about her 'Journey to the Soviet Union', visited Japan to meet Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and speak at a the Children's International Symposium in Kobe (where she argued that Soviet and American leaders should exchange grand-daughters for two weeks every year), and went to Washington to interview candidates for the 1984 Presidential election. Tragically, Smith died in a plane crash in 1985, when she was just 13). Following in Smith's footsteps, Eleven year-old Katya Lycheva became a Soviet 'child-ambassador' when she visited the US in 1986, meeting various dignitaries, including President Reagan. 

The youngest ambassador in Washington in recent times was a 32 year old Macedonian named Nikola Dimitrov who served as Ambassador to the US from 2001-2006 before being appointed as the Macedonian Ambassador to the Netherlands, and then as Macedonia's Permanent Representative to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. (No offence to the Dutch and the OPCW, but that sounds like a downward career trajectory to me - just shows the pitfalls of peaking too early).

There was much media interest in 2009 when President Obama appointed whippersnapper Susan Rice as the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations. At 44, she was the second-youngest person to hold the office (the youngest having been Donald McHenry, appointed at age 42, who served as the US Perm Rep from September 1979 until January 20, 1981). However, the record for the youngest diplomat ever to grace the UN stage has just been taken by a little-known Brit by the name of Alex Shercliff. 

Shercliff, aged 11 months, took his seat in the General Assembly today and delivered prepared remarks on a variety of topics ranging from nuclear disarmament to the cost of diapers. He also made a brief appearance in the Security Council where, supported by his mother and standing in for the British Permanent Representative, Sir Mark Lyall Grant, in his capacity as President of the Council, Shercliff reaffirmed the Council's strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, peace and stability of Sudan. Shercliff then chaired brief discussions on the recent elections in the Cote D'Ivoire, current unrest in Guinea-Bissau and the situation in Somalia.

At a press conference after a busy day of meetings Shercliff was asked what he enjoyed most about the new job. 'Sitting next to the delegation from the United Republic of Tanzania in the General Assembly' was his reply. 'It gives me a chance to practise my Ki-Swahili'.

Shercliff's closest competition for the title of 'world's youngest diplomat' appears to come from a baby giant panda but the Brit remains confident that Tai Shan (known to his friends as 'Butterstick') is ineligible to present credentials at the U.N., which does not currently recognise animals of any description. The two young diplomats have met just once, in January 2010. Shortly after their  private meeting, held at the National Zoo in Washington DC, Tai Shan's diplomatic career came to a sudden halt. Shercliff refused to comment on the incident, which has earned him a fearsome reputation in international circles, but it appears to have been no coincidence that, just days after their meeting, the panda's visa was revoked by the American authorities and he returned to China in February 2010. Shercliff's career, meanwhile, appears to be very much in the ascendancy. Judging from today's debut performance, a long and glittering future awaits Ambassador Alex.

New York, New York

The first time that I visited New York, I flew in from Melbourne for a sales conference, stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel (sadly before its multi-million dollar facelift) and spent the weekend clubbing with my friend Neil. Today, my day in the Big Apple was spent trying to get Alex to notice the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum (he was more interested in his own feet), feeding the young man in Central Park and checking out a large number of family restrooms. Having a youngster in tow certainly makes one view New York differently and I must admit that by mid-afternoon I was wondering why people insist that New York is such a good city for children. Yes, there are some wonderful places to visit with kids - the Children's Museum, the zoo, the aquarium, Central Park - but I was not sure that these sights were really spectacular enough to merit the effort needed to drag the stroller up several flights of stairs every time one wished to use the subway. Only one of the stations we used today was stroller/wheelchair accessible - and that involved me having to use three different elevators (all of which stank of stale urine) to exit to street level.

And then we visited the New York Public Library. The NYPL comprises 4 research centers and 85 branch libraries and owns more materials than any other American public library - an estimated 52 million items. The NYPL main building on 5th Avenue was constructed in 1911 and is an iconic NY landmark, having featured as a backdrop for dozens of films  - from The Wizard of Oz to Sex in the City. The Rose Main Reading Room, with its gilded and frescoed ceiling, huge vaulted windows, dazzling chandeliers and enormous wooden tables, has hosted hundreds of famous authors and scholars, as well as millions of ordinary Americans in search of respite from the hustle and bustle of the Manhattan streets. The library houses a large collection of historical and literary treasures: a Gutenberg Bible; Thomas Jefferson's manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence; a letter from Benjamin Franklin to George Washington; the Bay Psalm Book (dating from 1640 and the first book ever to have been printed in the USA) and the most valuable baseball card in the world.

Still rather over-excited from my recent visit to the Library of Congress, I was keen to see as many of these gems as possible. In actual fact, we made it only as far as the children's library (partly because it was the section of the library most accessible with a stroller). And it was wonderful. After all, Gutenberg Bibles are two a penny but the Children's Library is home to Christopher Robin's ORIGINAL stuffed animal toys. Alex and I met Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Kanga and Eeyore, who were sitting in a little glass case in the middle of the library, just waiting for us to visit. Here was the very teddy bear that Christopher Robin received for his first birthday in 1921 and which proved the inspiration for his father to create the world-famous Pooh. Alex didn't pay much attention to the treasured toys, preferring to crawl round and round the case at high speed, but I thought the little menagerie was just wonderful. And cutest of all was the tiny Piglet.

          

As if this wasn't excitement enough, we were then told that a free pre-school Story Time was just beginning. Story Time sessions in public libraries in DC are packed with hundreds of hyperactive children, which means it is generally impossible to either hear the story or see the book. After a particularly chaotic session last week at the newly-opened Georgetown Library (which is wonderful in every other way and indeed is where I am sitting writing right now), I vowed never to attempt to attend one again. I assumed that Story Time in central Manhattan would be considerably worse. But instead, we entered the beautifully decorated room to see a small group of a dozen or so children sitting quietly on little mats, singing along obediently to 'Where is Thumbkin?'. Alex sat mesmerised by the librarian as she led the children in several more songs and a couple of stories. Twenty minutes of wriggle-free silence; now that alone makes it worth considering a permanent move to New York.

Bristol the Pistol

The Milwaukee Sentinel Journal is rapidly becoming my favourite newspaper. They broke a story yesterday that has been all over the media today:

'Enraged by Bristol Palin on 'Dancing', man shoots TV, prompts standoff'.

That's some way to react to the fact that Bristol Palin might not be quite up to the standard of the other competitors at this stage of the 'Dancing With The Stars' contest. Fortunately, as the article reports it, the only casualty of the unfortunate incident was the man's television, although a 15-hour standoff involving hostage negotiators, a dog team and numerous other law enforcement authorities is an impressive way to voice one's dissatisfaction with a TV programme. Mr Cowan's anger had been aroused by the fact that, despite consistently coming at the bottom of the judge's scoreboard, Bristol keeps scraping through to the next round each week with the public vote, who clearly love the fact that she's just a young down-to-earth girl who's trying her best to master some challenging dance routines, look after her young son and cope with the fact that her mother is going slightly round the twist. (I promise to blog separately about Palin's new reality TV show once I have actually watched it). Incredibly, the shooting took place BEFORE the results show revealing that Bristol had, rather controversially, made it through to next week's finale - goodness knows what shape Mr. Cowan's home entertainment system might be in had he learnt that news at home rather than in state custody.

Mr. Rushdie and his Badly Behaved Gods

So a friend and I went this evening to hear Salman Rushdie read from his new book, Luka and the Fire of Life (of which there was a very favourable review in today's Washington Post). Rushdie was an extremely entertaining speaker and entered into some fine repartee with the audience during the Q&A, particularly when asked about the writing process ('Generally, I go from left to right and so on down the page') and what being under a fatwa did for the trajectory of his literary career (''Haroun [and the Sea of Stories] was the first book I wrote after the fatwa. And it is my funniest book. I therefore must conclude that the fatwa was very good for my sense of humour. And I suddenly became very interested in happy endings').

Rushdie read a couple of passages from the novel, which was written as a gift for his second son, now aged 13. The first extract was rather sweet and gently amusing, about how the protaganist was born and all the unreasonable questions his father asked of him when holding him in his arms for the first time ('Who'd have thought it? Where did you come from, buster? How did you get here? What do you have to say for yourself? What's your name? What will you grow up to be? What is it that you want?'). The second passage he read was from the middle of the book. Luka sits on Soraya's Flying Carpet, as they pass over the Heart of Magic, home to all the gods in which nobody believes in any longer. His father, Rashid, reels off the names of some of the fallen deities:

"Stop, stop", Luka begged. "No wonder people stopped worshiping them. Nobody could pronounce their names."

"Or maybe it was because they all behaved so badly," Rashid said.

This got Luka's attention. [Just as it did mine]. The notion of gods behaving badly was an odd one. [And a great concept for a bestselling novel, I thought to myself]. Weren't gods supposed to set an example to the people whose gods they were? "Not in the Olden Days," Rashid said. "These Olden, and now Jobless, gods usually behaved as badly as people, or actually much worse, because, being gods, they could behave on a bigger scale. They were selfish, rude, meddlesome, vain, bitchy, violent, spiteful, lustful, gluttonous, greedy, lazy, dishonest, tricky, and stupid, and all of it exaggerated to the maximum, because they had those superpowers. When they were greedy they could swallow a city, and when they were angry they could drown the world. When they meddled in human lives they broke hearts, stole women, and started wars." [By this point, I seriously thought old Salman was reciting the synopsis of a diffferent novel, but I checked my copy and he was definitely reading from page 130 of his own book].

Following the reading, and the Q&A, I queued up to get my copy of 'Luka' signed. Sensing that Mr. Rushdie could do with a little light relief after having signed at least 100 title pages before mine, with the prospect of another 500 to go, I asked him whether he had read a book called 'Gods Behaving Badly'.

Mr Rushdie (clearly delighted to have an excuse to lift his head): No.
Me: It's a novel, written by my friend Marie Phillips. It's published by Jonathan Cape.
Mr. Rushdie (sitting up, leaning back, and raising an eyebrow): That's my publisher. What's it about?
Me: It's about Greek Gods in a flat in Hampstead. It's great. You should read it.
Mr. Rushdie (looking increasingly interested): When was it published?
Me: A couple of years ago.
Mr. Rushdie: I guess it's available on Amazon?
Me: Oh yes, it did very well in the UK. I just thought it was such a coincidence that perhaps you had read it.
Mr. Rushdie: And it's about Badly Behaved Gods?
Me: Yes, that's the idea.

Pause.

Mr. Rushdie (smiling broadly): Well, I guess I stole it.

All I can say is I'm glad that Marie got there first or else she would have been accused of copying Mr. Rushdie. Whereas in fact now we all know that he filched his idea from her.

(And, Marie, I promise this is all true and you should definitely get that nice Mr. Franklin to send Mr. Rushdie a copy of your book. And perhaps a letter demanding a cut of his royalties).

Rah-Rah for Royal Wedding

It has been great fun to watch American reaction to the announcement of the Royal Engagement. The ladies in my book group last night unanimously agreed that it was 'charming' and that they would all be tuning in to watch the wedding next year. 'Good Morning America' was besides itself with excitement at the news and rolled out Tina Brown and Katie Nicholls for some fevered speculation. Simon received several very genuine emails at work today from American contacts sending 'Congratulations to the British People' ('We're so happy for you'; 'What a wonderful day it will be') and one enquiry as to how someone's wife could obtain tickets to the ceremony.

I went down to The Newseum this afternoon to see what some of the State newspapers made of the whole affair. Most of them contained at least a small snippet on the front page, many focusing primarily on the news that 'the stunning sapphire engagement ring worn by Princess Diana has reappeared'. (Apparently there has been great excitement in New York where The Natural Sapphire Company has been working round the clock to take orders for replica rings - presumably there is a hope that the Royal Wedding can single-handedly serve to stimulate the US as well as the UK economy). After reading all the front pages on display, here are my top royal-related headlines of the day:

Casper Star Tribune (Wyoming): 'Sorry Ladies. William is off the Market".

Albuquerque Journal: 'Great Britain's dashing helicopter-pilot prince will marry a lovely commoner in another big royal wedding'.

The Detriot Free Press: 'Jolly News from England: Prince William, Kate Middleton engaged'.

The News Journal (Delaware): 'Rah-Rah for Royal Wedding: Britons welcome the engagement of Prince William (second-in-line to the throne and his long-time girlfriend Kate Middleton)'.

Idaho Statesman: 'Honoring Mom: Diana's ring seals Prince William's marriage plans'.

There were many references to Kate being 'a lovely commoner', partly because this was the line used in the widely syndicated AP report carried by a large  number of the regional papers, but also because I suspect that Americans haven't really got their heads around what the term means. 'But how can she be a commoner if she's a millionaire?' Indeed a difficult concept for anyone brought up in the land where a self-made millionaire is the epitome of success.

My favourite article was from the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, which ran a story suggesting what presents Americans might buy for 'their cousins over the pond'. 'We're game for throwing this generation's royal couple an old-fashioned American bridal shower' declared the paper, and their ingenious gift ideas include:

• Matching wellies (you know, those boots they wear over in England).

• Matching Snuggies in tartan plaid, for romantic nights at home.

• Something for the cookbook shelf. Collection of Paula Deen's greatest dishes and best wishes.

• Something for the fridge. Omaha steaks and Sheboygan brats.

And to be sure they remember their fans in Wisconsin, we would send a complete set of Regal Ware stainless steel cookware. It's a little something special from Kewaskum for those nights at home alone in the castle.

Brilliant. I bet Wills and Kate can't wait.

Billboards, Badlands and Brutal combat

 

Nuclear missile silos are all well and good, but to my mind the most quintessential of all Great Plains objects is the advertising billboard. They are everywhere. To be fair, there is not much else to break up the landscape, which basically consists of dry, grassy, windswept plains and the occasional small-holding, but it does which means that almost every vista in South Dakota is marred by a succession of giant signs. Just as one is imagining hordes of Indians on horseback stampeding over the plains, a sign pops up advertising 'Mistletoe Ranch, The Ultimate Christmas Store' or a Holiday Inn 75 miles away. Lady Bird Johnstone had a point, and her crusade is continued today by 'Scenic America', a non-profit dedicated to preserving and enhancing the visual character of America's communities and countryside, Their number one priority is tackling 'Billboard Blight', which they describe as "Visual pollution. Sky Trash. Litter on a stick. The junk mail of the American highway". And after four days in South Dakota I tend to agree.

The exemplar par excellence of the power of the South Dakotan billboard is a family-owned pharmacy (or drugstore) in a tiny town called Wall, whose original advertising idea was so successful that it served to establish a multi-million pound business. What do you if you buy a little drugstore in the middle of nowhere at the height of the Depression and discover that you have no customers? Put up lots of signs advertising free ice water, of course. Now, this wouldn’t work in the UK as a) nowhere is far enough from anywhere else to make it worth a detour to get some free water and b) we don’t have the same obession with iced water as Americans do. But in the middle of the prairie on the route between Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park, this turned out to be a brilliant idea.

We encountered our first Wall Drug sign just a couple of miles outside Rapid City: 'Free coffee & bagel for all Veterans - Wall Drug'. Bearing in mind that Wall is 55 miles from Rapid City, that's a long way to go, however good the free coffee and bagel. The tempting offers continue: '5c hot coffee - Wall Drug', 'Homemade Pie - Wall Drug', 'Western Wear - Wall Drug', 'Free hot coffee & donut for Hunters - Wall Drug'. (As well as veterans and hunters, other favoured travellers include honeymooners, priests and truck drivers). In total, Wall Drug has over 500 miles of billboards on the I-90, costing an estimated $400,000 per year. And it works. Apparently by 1981 20,000 cups of free water were being given away per day during the summer season, attracting a huge number of tourists to the Wall. The Drug Store itself is an incredible emporium, an Aladdin's cave of cowboy kitsch, Western memorabilia and tourist tat. Amongst other things, it contains a Traveller's Chapel, a Western Art Gallery, carvings of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and a life size animated Tyrannosaurus Rex. This is not your average small-town pharmacy.

     

Having had our fill of Sioux Indian pottery,  cowboy calendars, moustache wax, horseshoe toilet roll holders, frontier style tomahawks, wall-mounted jackalope, South Dakota pillows, state refrigerator magnets, spoons, patches and pins, we reluctantly left Wall to visit the nearby Badlands. Over a million people a year visit the Badlands National Park to admire the eerie, twisted rock formations and prehistoric mammal fossil beds. The park extends over 244,000 acres and is the largest protected prairie ecosystem in the United States. Unfortunately both Simon and Alex snoozed for the majority of our meanderings through the park, the enormous helping of Wall Drug homemade cherry pie having taken its toll on Shercliff Senior.

     

We drove back along the northern edge of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, through flat, dry scrubland reminiscent of the prairie around the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in eastern Montana. This part of the Dakotas has a similarly tragic past - an estimated 300 unarmed Lakota Sioux men, women and children were killed at the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee Creek in December 1890. The unhappy legacy of a turbulent history lingers today: The Pine Ridge Reservation is the poorest county in the entire country, with 49% of the inhabitants living below the Federal poverty line. The statistics make grim reading: unemployment on the reservation runs as high as 85%; teen suicides are four times the national average; many homes are without electricity, running water or decent sewerage systems. The average life expectancy amongst the Pine Ridge population is approximately 47 years for males and 52 years for females (that's significantly lower than Tanzania, where the rate is 51 for men and 54 for women) and the infant mortality rate is five times the U.S. national average. 

Dwelling on the sorry story of the Plains Indians, we returned to Rapid City to witness a night of brutal combat, one tribe pitted against another, fighting to the bitter end. Yes, the local ice hockey team were in action. The Rapid City Rush faced the Mississippi River Kings in a hotly-contested show-down. The Rush began by scoring twice in just eleven seconds, which represented the fastest two goals in team history. (Unfortunately I missed boths of these historic goals as I was busy in the family restroom changing Alex's nappy during the momentous moment).

The action on the ice was fast and furious, as was the crowd. The animated Rush fans had all come brandishing cowbells, which made such a racket I was worried they would permanently impair Alex's hearing. I covered his ears with a hat, a hood and my hands every time the crowd were requested by the announcer to 'MAKE SOME NOISE'. This had the added advantage of preventing him from hearing the choice chants ("River Kings Suck" and "I'm blind, I''m deaf, I want to be a ref" being the only two quotable on a family blog). Unfortunately, I was not quick enough to cover his eyes to prevent him seeing the on-ice fighting which is apparently de rigeur at all hockey matches. There was even music to accompany the action as an over-sized Rush defender took out the Kings' star striker to the cheers of the home crowd. The referees took almost ten minutes to decide who'd been to blame and then sent both men to the sin bin. This interrupted the flow of the game somewhat and made me seriously reevaluate my allegiance to the Rapid City team. Alex, however, thought this was great sport and merrily cheered the offending player, cowbell dinger in hand, as the referees wrestled the troublemaker to the ground.

The Minuteman Missile Silo

When Simon suggested that we venture into the wilds of South Dakota to take a look at the Minutemen, I had precious little idea that I would be spending my morning learning about ballistic missiles. It transpires that the LGM-30 Minuteman is somewhat different from the Lexington version that we encountered last month: These guys are not colonial militia; they are nuclear weapons - so named because they can be launched in approximately one minute. The Minuteman Missile Silo is a National Historic Site near the Badlands National Park which consists of three parts: a small museum detailing the history of the Cold War and the U.S. nuclear weapons program; a launch control facility (DELTA-01) - basically an underground bunker where two missileers were stationed, and in which they spent "hours and hours of sheer boredom, punctuated by seconds of panic" guarding the ten missiles within their control; and a missile silo (DELTA-09), the unmanned hole in the ground which housed the weapon itself. The Minuteman missiles were developed in the 1950s and, along with the air and sea-based nuclear weapons programmes, were the backbone of America's nuclear deterent throughout the Cold War, as they continue to do so today. From the mid-1960s until the 1990s there were 1000 of these missile silos, and 100 accompanying launch control centres, scattered across the upper Great Plains.

Our guide, a very nice man named Butch, gave us a detailed exposition of the workings of the Minuteman missile. I'm afraid I'm a bit hazy on the precise particulars of the Minuteman's inertial guidance system, propulsion replacement program, liquid injection thrust vector control, diode-transistor logic integrated circuits, post-boost vehicles, improved azimuthal coverage, gyro correction rates and increased payload delivery and throw weights, but I do remember being told that a single one of these missiles could reach the Kremlin in 30 minutes and contained more firepower than ALL THE BOMBS USED IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR, including the atomic weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the US  still has 450 of them, all hidden away under the windswept plains of Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota. That seems like an awfully large amount of unnecessary firepower to me.

As part of the 1991 START treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, whereby the two nations agreed to reduce their nuclear weapon capability by 80% (sounds impressive, but 20% of 10,000 nuclear warheads is still roughly 1,999 more than you need to anniliate each other), each side agreed to convert one of the deactivated missile sites into a museum - one in South Dakota; the other in Ukraine. As well as the launch facility, it is also possible to visit the silo itself - where you can peer into a big concrete hole in the ground containing not a nuclear missile, but an unarmed test missile (which I felt quite pleased about given that Minuteman II's warhead was 'the explosive equivalent of over a million tons of dynamite'). Nevertheless, there is still something very chilling about the fact that lurking under these sleepy plains lies the possibility of total destruction, as Ian Frazier encapsulates perfectly in his best-selling 'Great Plains':

" A nuclear-missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a conrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot Cyclone fence; but to the imagination, it is the end of the world".

Mountain lion meets his match

So apparently hunting in South Dakota isn't limited to the list of game and fowl I mentioned yesterday. The front page of today's 'Rapid City Journal' declares 'Mountain lion no match for 17-pound Jack Russell'. A local man named Chad Strenge went to investigate why his dog was yelping so violently to discover 'a full-grown, 150-pound mountain lion, up a tree staring down at the barking terrier'. So he did what any self-respecting South Dakotan would do; he 'grabbed the closest gun he could find' and shot it in the face. The paper features a photo of a grinning Mr. Strenge tastefully posing next to the carcass of the cougar, with the little Jack Russell peering inquisitively over the scene. What a glorious story to read over breakfast. And I particularly like the fact that the photo was taken with someone's finger half over the lens. Local journalism at its finest.