Monday
Friends in New York with non-American accents are careful not to go canvassing in swing states (or anywhere else). Stuffing envelopes is one thing. But the assumption among those in the US with non-American backgrounds is that, to a person in Pennsylvania or Arizona, the single thing more annoying than having a canvasser at your door, is having a canvasser with a British, Australian or Canadian accent telling you who they think you should vote for.
Like British gap-year students bothering other parts of the world with offers to dig unwanted wells and teach English to people who already know it, political tourists encouraged by the Labour party have been showing up in US swing states to volunteer for the Democrats, an entirely pointless action that, this week, was dignified by Donald Trump when he filed a legal complaint with the US election authorities crying foreign election interference. The volunteer numbers are negligible, the Democrats almost certainly don’t want them and I suspect those Brits currently on holiday in the US to “help out” are powered less by a sense of public duty than a self-aggrandising desire to Insta their involvement.
All of which might’ve been avoided had the volunteers in question remembered life’s top three rules of thumb: don’t do impressions of other races; avoid the phrase “in the field” unless you work for the CIA; and don’t offer to help in elections where you don’t have the vote.
Tuesday
If some spotty English person on the doorstep won’t move voters in Michigan, perhaps Eminem at the Kamala Harris rally in Detroit will. I’ve always had a soft spot for Eminem, and seeing him walk diffidently on stage in his massive white sneakers, cap pulled low, hurt my heart and sent me back to the early albums. The rapper, 52, who is soon to become a grandfather, urged voters in his hometown to think about the consequences of electing Trump and “to get out and vote, please”.
The most striking thing about Eminem’s appearance – apart from Barack Obama fan-boying him afterwards – was how little he appeared to be performing. Contrary to the George Clooney glad-handing school of celebrity campaigning, Eminem was quiet, serious and full of integrity, and in the wake of his endorsement, Trump’s silence suggests the Republican candidate doesn’t know how to mock him. Instead, campaigning in North Carolina this week, Trump called Obama a “real jerk” and limply left it at that.
Wednesday
With the world going to hell in a handbasket all that many of us want from our newspaper read in the morning is a story about an Aussie hiker who went head-first down a crevice to fish out her phone and emerged intact seven hours later. That the 23-year-old in question is, literally, called Matilda is just a bonus gift from the universe.
Matilda Campbell’s ordeal in New South Wales delivered one of those photos – feet to the sky, body wedged between boulders – that once seen is never forgotten and goes straight into the People Getting Stuck Down Things hall of fame. In 2022, a 61-year-old woman was found trapped in the door of a clothing donation bin in Santa Clarita in California, a freakish accident that is nonetheless common enough that, two years earlier in Canada, 30 donation bins were removed for reasons of public safety.
The motherlode among these stories, from 2003, is Aron Ralston’s 127 hours spent pinned to a canyon wall by a boulder in Utah, a situation from which he freed himself by hacking off part of his arm with a penknife.
But Matilda Campbell emerged cheerful and relatively unharmed in Hunter Valley, and in this week of anticipatory dread we’ll take it!
Thursday
A new and unpleasant term used by airport employees for queue-jumping passengers enters the wider lexicon this week: “gate lice” apparently refers to those travellers who swarm the gate before their boarding group has been called in an effort to jump the line and hog the overhead bin space.
Until now these people have mostly got away with it, either because gate staff don’t have the time to check boarding groups or because they understandably want to avoid confrontation. This week, however, American Airlines put its foot down. At three airports in the US – Albuquerque International in New Mexico, Tucson International in Arizona and Ronald Reagan in Virginia – the carrier is testing out new tech that will sound a loud alarm when a passenger’s group number doesn’t match the one being called.
There is, of course, no guarantee that even this sanction will deter the most aggressive travellers. Still, if the threat of public humiliation doesn’t tame the barbarians at the gate, it will at least offer some catharsis for those patiently waiting behind them.
Friday
Fire up your laptop for the hungrily awaited third season of Fisk, the Australian Broadcasting Company’s sitcom set in a Melbourne wills and probate office that is comfortably the best comedy on TV. There are no global politics in Fisk, just the brilliant Kitty Flanagan, a bunch of Aussie character actors you will be quoting for years (“bold choice”, “is she worried she’s going to be hit by a bus?”, “it’s the sulking I can’t stand”) and, in the new season opener, an unimprovable gag about Nicole Kidman’s sister. Hopefully it will be on Netflix soon.
