Comments on Austria Is Not Australia

That pig is both ugly and attractive at the same time. Kind of like Steve Buscemi.

Great post. Humble, informative, and whimsical all at once. I love it. From what I understand, the area around Adelaide (in Australia) is quite similar to the Palouse as well.

Nice photo of Newt Gingrich.

Omar could never remember if that fancy gun that Wee Bey was always flashing was from Austria or Australia either, but he know he seen it plenty of times.

Meat is murder, by the way.

I put a wooly pig shoulder in the crock pot with some carmelized onions, red wine, apple cider, and soy sauce, and it was unbelievable. Highly recommended.

@2: Except that it doesn't snow hardly at all around Adelaide...

The idea that pork can taste even better than it already does fills me with happiness.

Austria has some of the strictest animal protection laws (if they're poultry or livestock) in the world. I think that's probably for the best, because over there, ham is an anytime food.

@4 Bird

That Mangalitsa is absolutely amazing, the best meat I have ever had in my life. Heath is a blast to talk to, dude is passionate about pork, he's been at the U District farmers' market all year.

OK, fine. It was Bird.

I think it's that guy that won $1 million from Jim McDermott, thanks to the activist judges on the US Supreme Court, you know, Pesticide Guy.

My sister's currently living in Vienna, Austria... as opposed to "Venice, Australia" as my possibly senile grandfather announced in a mass email.

One more geopolitical error to correct:

Spokane is not on the Palouse. You have to go half an hour south of town to get to the Palouse.

Australia also has to live with the shame of producing that other pig: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Bethany, Bethany, Bethany.

It looks like you have wrested further offence from the jaws of apology. Or is it, perhaps, the mandibles of mortification…

You've added insult to previous injury by observing that the "climate out there in the Palouse... (...is dissimilar to the climate in, say, Australia.)"

Australia is big, as big as the continental United States as it happens, so the idea that it has a single monolithic climate that could be compared to the Palouse is rather funny. I’d be startled to discover that there wasn’t a similar climate in Australia.

I can only assume that by your logic the climate in Maine, Florida, Southern California and Washington State are all exactly the same.

I hear the cross-country skiing in the Florida Keys is excellent.

~GC

There are places it snows in Australia, but they're in the mountains, and the Palouse isn't mountainous. It is a big wheat-growing area, though, and Australia has a huge wheat industry, though it's suffering horribly right now from drought and salinity especially in the Margaret River area in the southwest corner of the state.

But then, I don't think Austria's climate resembles the Palouse in the slightest, either. Austria is alpine.

That is the best picture of Ken Hutcherson's wife I've seen in years.

Oops.

I'm moving to Austria. Sha la la la la.