Melbourne Social Hour

Well, Americans might be widely regarded as the friendliest people on the planet (present regional skirmishes, excepted), but Aussies are no slouches when it comes to striking up a casual conversation.

While waiting on the wife in the CBD last weekend, I sat myself down on a bench, basked in the sun, and sucked down a tasty Boost Juice (which I still enjoy, despite the recent unpleasantness).

A short time later, a middle aged man strolled over and started chatting me up. Had I been back home on America's fertile religious ground, I would have smelled what was up a mile away, but can't say I've been a party to much proselytizing in Australia. But hey, Australia continues to go the way of America, so I guess we just have to accept that and get used to bible thumpers rocking up to bring Jesus into an otherwise perfect Aussie day.

So anyway, the usual dance commenced as he set about trying to catalog my many and varied sins and offering to throw me a life line from the hell I've committed myself to. I countered with the secular humanism bit, but he wasn't buying. Apparently honouring my mother and father, my marriage vows, and my fellow man isn't enough - I'm still going to hell (why is God so freakin' selfish? It's always ME, ME, ME!). He told me to abandon my scientific beliefs, embrace faith, and beware of all the false prophets employed by Satan. I suggested for all I knew he was such a minion of Satan come to lead me astray. He countered with a clumsy attempt to take on science head-on, attempting to convince me that C-14 dating is proven rubbish and that scientists were wrong 500 years ago in thinking that the world was flat. Now as far as attempts to debunk science go, these are pretty lame, being the former goes against fundamental physics (presumably God created the physical universe so maybe one should have a little more respect for its structure and properties) and the latter recorded history. So I lit him up with these points, at which point he got a bit sad and opted to end the debate. He parted with "there is only truth and lies", to which I said "don't you mean truth and faith". Overall, I still haven't figured out why such folks continue to have such piss poor knowledge of fundamental science - this reminds of the time I got jumped on New Year's Eve by thumpers, one of whom (on the subject of evolution) stated, "what, do you think monkeys just fell out of trees and started walking around like men?" followed by "humans have 36 chromosomes, right . . . [I don't remember what he said after this because I got hung up on the 36 chromosomes bit]. I don't insult fundamentalists by butchering the bible, how come they can't show me the same courtesy? Maybe because fundamentalists only have 36 chromosomes?

That nonsense, aside, I was immediately joined by a far more pleasant elderly gentleman, who had stopped to see what the fuss was about. The 85 (soon to be 86) year old was an expat from Belgrade who'd migrated to Australia in 1949 and had been living in St. Kilda ever since. He asked where I was from, to which I replied "America". He said, "South America". "No," I said, "the US". "You don't look like an American," was the reply (go figure). We chatted for a bit, at which point work-mate Julian strolled by (see, what a social town) and so I broke off to catch up with him, before returning to Mr. Belgrade. At this point, Uta walked up which added another dimension to the conversation, which continued on in German (with the occasional lapse into French, Italian, or Spanish - this guy was talented). Anyway, we enjoyed getting the dirt on one of Melbourne's old guard, and he seemed to be highly amused to speak with us (particularly in German - I think it'd been a while since he had occasion to use it).