Christine Kenneally

The smoke has barely cleared over lower Manhattan, but in addition to incidents like that at Grand Central, confusion is still thick. A week after the attack, many phone lines remain down, while others work intermittently. Still, enough connections are working for the cranks to get through. In a press conference last week, NYPD Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik stated that New York City bomb threats had jumped from an average of seven a day to more than 100. The hoax threats, acts of terror that exploit an already vulnerable population, have hampered rescue and salvage efforts and caused a wave of evacuations that are themselves dangerous.

Professor Robert Ziller, a psychologist at Florida University and a specialist in terrorism, believes that people who make bomb threats fit the terrorist profile with respect to self-esteem. “Like the terrorists, they’ve almost certainly been disappointed by life; it hasn’t met their expectations. Making the calls gives them a sense of power.” Dr. James Janik, a forensic psychologist at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, agrees: “People who make crank call bomb threats have a desire for power, but they lack the courage to be public about what they want or need.”

In stark contrast to their private desires, the effects of a crank’s threats are very public when taken seriously. Indeed, for the callers, the entire point is to witness the ensuing disruption knowing that they were responsible for it. Many hoaxers linger in the vicinity of an evacuation they have caused. “It’s similar to arson,” said Janik. “Many arsonists get a secret charge from knowing something that no one else knows. While watching the fire trucks and all the flashing lights, they feel very pleased with themselves and proud of their deception. They bask in the commotion.”

Arsonists tend not to exhibit other pathological behaviors, says Janik, who suspects that this is also the case for bomb threat hoaxers. It’s likely that the crank callers of the last week are not also robbing banks, committing fraud or perpetrating other more frightening crimes. However, in addition to their craving for an effect, such people tend to have trouble meeting their needs for interaction. “Because of this,” says Janik, “they may be unsuccessful socially.” They can be anxious loners, often less intelligent and less engaged with the world. Says Ziller, “Whereas violent terrorists have above-average intelligence, these people do not.”

It’s not unheard of for terrorist groups that carry out bombings to include bomb threats in their arsenal. The IRA has been held responsible for countless bomb threats in Ireland and England, and over many decades, public events such as Britain’s Grand National horse race have been evacuated as a result of their calls. In 1999, 20,000 people were forced to leave the horse races at Kempton park after an IRA threat, but no bomb was discovered. While it is possible that some of last week’s crank callers may be aligned with actual terrorist groups seeking to further disrupt the nation, experts think this is unlikely. Most calls are not political but pathological, and can be characterized as psychopathic.

The signature characteristic of psychopaths is a lack of conscience. This trait, says Dr. Kim Gorgens, a clinical psychologist in Colorado, would color all their interactions. Such individuals would have no empathy for either the victims of last week’s terrorist attacks or for the victims of their hoax threats. But Gorgens cautions against the assumption that all psychopaths are jail-bound loners. “It may actually be the people who didn’t really cut it as psychopaths who are in jail,” she said. Some psychopaths are well served by their condition and are successful in day-to-day interactions, developing charm and wiliness, even being in positions of leadership within the community. “While they are characterized by the true absence of feelings diagnostically,” says Gorgens, “these people can turn on the appearance of feelings if necessary.”

Individuals with an extreme antisocial personality disorder like psychopathy may be wealthy or poor, employed or not. They tend to be younger, between 17 and 44 (psychologists believe that many die young or lose the impulse as they get older), and they also tend to be male. But this is the age and sex group that researchers focus on anyway, says Gorgens, who feels that further research is required. “Psychopathy may be an equal opportunity personality disaster.”

Hearing about bomb threats can stimulate crank callers to make more. This kind of copycat behavior is illustrated by the recent epidemic of malicious threats spreading throughout not just America, but the world. The AP reported that New Zealander Marco Eldon Kerkmeester, 35, an IBM manager, was charged in Singapore on Friday for sending an e-mail claiming a bomb was planted on a Singapore Airlines plane. Also reported was an incident concerning a Virgin Airlines Boeing 747 carrying 314 people from London to New York on Monday. The flight was escorted by four Canadian F-18s to an unscheduled landing in Newfoundland because officials received a bomb threat allegedly coming from someone external to the flight. No bomb was found, and passengers had to spend the night in Newfoundland.

It’s possible that for some callers, the fear and powerlessness aroused by the actual attacks provoked the crank behavior. Such a horrifying event can bring out first-timers, stimulating people with deviant tendencies to make a call. For some individuals, this will be the only crank call they ever make. If theyre caught, it could also be the most expensive call they ever make. Making false bomb threats is a federal offense, punishable even for first-time offenders by up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Daniel Alonso, the assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York says his office is taking bomb threat cases very seriously. On Monday, he began proceedings against a man who told a Verizon operator last weekend that there was a bomb in the Empire State Building.

Many of last week’s evacuations in New York City and elsewhere resulted from scares rather than specific threats. In one Times Square building, the act of merely wondering aloud about a perfectly normal package rapidly escalated and set off an evacuation. A worker in the building described opening a fire door to see a “river of people flowing down the stairs.” Similarly, not all bomb threats resulted in evacuations. Savvy citizens are learning to discern which threats to worry about.

Even though many of the workers evacuated in Manhattan last week knew their bomb threat was almost certainly a prank, they had no choice but to run. Most were painfully conscious that their panicked flight echoed what others went through at the World Trade Center only days before. One midtown worker, who asked not to be named, remembers running down a flight of stairs last Thursday thinking, This can’t be real, but how do you not take it seriously? She noted, “We only had to travel down 10 floors, but I couldn’t help thinking what 80 or 90 would have felt like.”

But gently flicking at the boundaries of space and time is child’s play for “DOOL,” which prefers psychosurgery to particle physics. In fact, the show sits firmly on the cutting edge of 21st century scientific research — long before the completed draft of the human genome heralded the new sexiness of the biological sciences, “Days” was swapping brains, transplanting memories and shuffling identities galore. It was Stephen Hawking, clearly a “DOOL” fan, who said, “Today’s science fiction is often tomorrow’s science fact.” Thus, here follows a brief guide to the real science facts behind the 35-year-old serial and its answers to some of the most important scientific questions of our day.

GENIUS

What is the one essential ingredient of any true scientific endeavor? The dodgy guy in the white coat: Los Alamos had Robert Oppenheimer, Celera has Craig Venter and “Days” has Dr. Rolf. With such crazy, bastardized vowels that he seems to come from eastern Europe (the entire geographical east of Europe, unfettered by national or linguistic boundaries), Rolf is a scientist’s scientist. As comfortable with biotechnology as with psychotherapy, Rolf will operate on you as soon as he looks at you, and if necessary, he’ll shoot you, too. Taking his orders from “DOOL’s” crime boss, Stefano Dimera (a Svengali’s Svengali), Rolf sails effortlessly from one experiment to another in the neurological wonderland that is Salem. His high-tech lab is impressively packed to the rafters with computer banks that look a little like stacks of stereo amplifiers.

OUR BODIES, OURSELVES. OR ARE THEY?

What will happen when human cloning gets off the ground? Months ago, the New York Times published photographic evidence of the dangerous side effects of this process. An obese mouse clone was pictured alongside its normal-size progenitor. Why was the clone obese? Scientists still don’t know. But before the mouse was cloned, “Days” had us prepared. In addition to three kinds of Hope, two John Blacks, a couple of Marlena Evanses (Black’s wife) and two Romans (Marlena’s ex-husband), the show featured four versions of Kristen, Dimera’s daughter. The beautiful Kristen’s carbon copies varied just as inexplicably as the mouse’s: One was a nun with buck teeth and another a gormless bumpkin.

PSYCHOSOCIAL IMPLICATIONS

What about the social consequences of unconstrained body/brain swapping? They’re not pretty. Witness Bo Brady, the man who mistook his wife (Hope) for her clone (Princess Gina). Apart from a few physical (a small birthmark) and behavioral features (narrowing of her eyes, trying to kill her son), there was little to distinguish Hope the housewife from Gina the dashing art forger and seductress. Over the course of many years (time is relative), Princess Gina masqueraded as Hope. Hope, once thought lost, was found. Hope masqueraded as Gina. Gina eventually died. And Dr. Rolf made Hope think she was Gina by inserting the princess’s memories into Hope’s mind.

John Black, another character similarly manipulated by Rolf, alternates between experiencing flashbacks to a former personality as a brutal commando and his current life as a man who experiences flashbacks to his former personality as a brutal commando. You don’t need to watch more than five minutes of Black and his surgically enhanced nostrils (all the better for flaring at you) to know that brain swapping is a bad idea.

BIOTECH

What is the future of cybernetics and nanotechnology? Recently, biological computer chips were developed in the real world for livestock. The chips are used to identify the animals, detect the presence of disease and record other biological changes. Take this just a few steps further, and you’re back on “Days,” where Rolf developed a microchip to be inserted into the head of character Vivian Alamain. Building it so perfectly that the chip docked seamlessly with Vivian’s neurons, Rolf was able to control Vivian’s moods. With the flick of a switch, he swung her emotional pendulum back and forth from manic through to depressive, hitting all points in between, including sad, happy, kooky, crazy and wacko. Cheaper than Prozac, it may not be long before the technology is available from a surgeon near you, your family, your illegitimate children and their lovers, who are also their cousins.

EPIDEMIOLOGY

Are viral diseases increasing in number and virulence? Yes. “Days” foresaw these uncertain times during which epidemics like foot-and-mouth, West Nile virus and even bubonic plague threaten. The show faced down the threat in the form of an insidious pathogen, “jungle madness.” Found in the swamps of the jungle, the bacteria responsible for this disease are not exactly airborne — they just sort of hang in the air, like an oppressive mood. Jungle madness can be transmitted to humans via liquid, and once the liquid is consumed, the incubation period is about one or two seconds. Symptoms include swollen glands, blurred vision, fever and barking mad behavior. Jungle madness is 100 percent fatal, unless you drink the antidote made from rare orchids, in which case it is zero percent fatal.

COMA STUDIES

What is the future of brain trauma medicine? Poorly understood in the medical community, comas are frequently regarded as a bad thing. Indeed, it’s not often that real-world patients awake from comas and go on to a full recovery. But on “Days,” a show that is a pioneer in coma and paralysis studies, virtually every character has surrendered consciousness at one point or other, some more than once, only to awake refreshed and, crucially, more attractive and much slimmer. Along with the curative powers of amnesia, “Days” shows how comas can help you avoid painful realities, like the fact that your husband is sleeping with your sister.

Seeking not just to distract primary caregivers and freelance writers, “Days” pushes back the boundaries of science like no other soap opera has dared to do. Does it deserve a Nobel? Or just a daytime Emmy? The answer is logical, as logical as this classic “Days” teaser: “If his father’s father slept with my father’s son, then who am I?”

Ever since Charles Spearman, a British psychometrist, came up with the idea of “g,” an innate, measurable general intelligence, the idea of “mental aptitude” has been a thorny topic. Researchers disagree about whether it’s genetically determined and about how many separate components it’s made up of (theories range from two through 70). For his part, Richardson dismisses Spearman’s “g” and its conceptual cousins as acts of imagination, and for good measure he points out the famed statistician’s bad math.

According to Richardson, IQ tests do not measure fixed cognitive ability but rather cultural background, education and, to some degree, confidence. General knowledge questions on IQ tests are clearly culturally biased, but even supposedly culture-neutral logical items, such as “All A’s are B’s/Are all B’s A’s?” elicit more correct responses if couched in more familiar language. Richardson shows how even nonverbal questions that require the completion of line drawings carry cultural baggage that can prefigure the testee’s response. What’s more, he points out that various studies have found little or even negative correlation between performance on an IQ test and the ability to solve complex, on-the-job problems.

Most interesting is Richardson’s take on the factors that shape individuals and their intelligence. Human potential, he explains, is always a complex matrix: Contrary to the popular notion that a person is a genetic framework that is simply overlaid with environmental effects (nutrition, education, the love of a good mother), there are many ways nature and nurture interact to produce an individual or a characteristic like intelligence.

Some of Richardson’s criticisms are familiar (many were outlined 20 years ago in Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man”), but they are still relevant. As he points out, we’ve seen several modern attempts to use IQ as a “weapon of social policy,” such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s controversial 1996 book, “The Bell Curve.”

“The Making of Intelligence” draws from many sources, and this broad sweep is both the book’s strength and its weakness. It gives the reader access to slices of thought from linguistics, philosophy, biology and neuroscience. But Richardson’s jostling sound bites are often wide of the mark: for instance, his take on the field of linguistics, which he presents, wrongly, as completely dominated by an oversimplification of Noam Chomsky’s theories.

And, unfortunately, he doesn’t address in any satisfying way the question of why, if IQ is culturally determined, obvious IQ differences are found within the same socioeconomic group. This is disappointing, since these differences help explain why people are so willing to believe that an IQ score is an indelible intelligence brand. As things stand now, once that number has been burned into your rump, it can feel like you’re marked for life. “The Making of Intelligence” is unlikely to change that, but it’s an admirable attempt.

British, American and Australian varieties of English are, of course, equally distant from gladiator-speak, i.e., second century Latin. So how are decisions about accents made for a film like “Gladiator,” in which the language of the characters is not just foreign but spoken only by small bands of classics professors and a dwindling number of oppressed boarding school students?

Judy Dickerson, Crowe’s voice coach for “Gladiator,” “The Insider” and “Mystery, Alaska,” said that her main goal was to “corral Crowe’s Australian.” Because they had done so much work together on his accent for “The Insider” (for which he played a Southern tobacco exec), they didn’t need to prepare as much for his trip to the Forum.

So the goal was not consistency, and the result was accordingly weird. Maximus emphasizes the occasional “r” after a vowel (as in “mouRned”), the way an American would; but he pronounces “before” as “befaw,” with the pursed lips of an Englishman. And then there are the moments when Crowe’s Australian vowels slip out. The giveaway sound for him (as for most Australians) is the “ay,” as in “Spain” (which he pronounces halfway to “spine”) or in “mate” (on its way to “mite”). Maximus’ “ay” is somewhat constrained, but compared with the clipped and regal enunciation of Derek Jacobi as Gracchus, it is as long and broad as the Great Sandy Desert.

According to Dickerson, Crowe brought his own ideas about his character’s voice to the film. Because Maximus was a soldier, a protector and, most important, an outsider, Crowe felt that his dialect needed to be different from the other characters’. (Maximus is nominally from Spain, but Spanish, of course, didn’t exist yet.) This distinction was especially significant for underlining the contrast between Maximus as “man of the people” and the regal characters, including Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), the doomed Caesar; his son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix); and Jacobi as Gracchus, a patrician member of the Senate. Scott, the director, agreed with Crowe and, according to Dickerson, didn’t want Maximus to sound too “posh.”

Because many of the actors playing royalty in the film were British and the British accent does sound “posh” to 21st century audiences, it is used in “Gladiator” for Roman royalty. The same was true for “Spartacus” 40 years ago; its stars included Britons Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov.

This, in turn, was a challenge for Phoenix, who was forced to try to match the “aristocratic” vowels of Harrison and Jacobi. Like Pontius Pilate and his lisp in Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian,” Phoenix affected an occasional substitution of “w” for “r,” pronouncing “proud” as “pwoud,” saying “wrote” as “wote” and, in an unfortunate Elmer Fudd kind of way, calling the “barbarians” the “barbawians.” Lisp plus toga is of course cinematic shorthand for pure evil; accordingly, his character spends his film time displaying all manner of nogoodnickness in between trying to bed his sister.

Dialect coaching, long a tradition in the theater, has only recently become important in films. Dickerson credits Meryl Streep’s renowned dedication to mastering accents and English dialects as one of the major turning points in this trend. So a mixed Aussie/Brit/American accent may not be an adequate substitute for Latin, but it’s a distinct improvement on “Spartacus,” where the issue doesn’t seem to have been considered at all.

Of course, the other alternative is the anachronistic splendor of TV shows like the current “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,” which revels in a pottage of ancient myth and modern-day underwear, primitive archetypes and 20th century psychoanalysis. (Hercules to Daedalus: “You can’t change the past. All you can be is the man that Icarus knew and loved.”) The bizarre visuals in this TV show are on a par with its Actors Equity mix of New Zealand and American accents and phraseology. So, like, as Hercules said to Iolaus, it’s a step in the right direction, y’know?

I sampled five of these restaurants during Winter Restaurant Week (Jan. 31 to Feb. 4) — Istana at the New York Palace (new and relatively unknown), the Gotham Bar and Grill (sort of new and famous), Aquavit (slightly newer and famous), the Russian Tea Room (old and famous) and Tavern on the Green (very old, and famous enough to secretly replace the fine coffee it normally serves with Folger’s instant). The prix fixe menus offered three entrees (with the
exception of Gotham, which offered only two) and at least two appetizers
and two desserts. Without exception, all the meals offered crazy value.

“Since the first Restaurant Week in 1992, there has been a phenomenal
response,” says Melanie Young, who has been involved in Restaurant Week
since its inception. “People plan trips to the city around this event.”

Aquavit’s award-winning executive chef, Marcus Samuelsson, says that it’s
“fun to see people in the restaurant who wouldn’t normally eat there.”
Despite his many awards and honors, Samuelsson’s genuine enthusiasm for his
diners is obvious. “Any time you can reach out to new people is worthwhile,”
he says. “It’s very tough for people to experience what the restaurant is
about when they just have an entree or an appetizer, but a prix fixe [meal] is a
great way for diners to have that experience.”

In some instances, I suspect that less care was taken with the prix fixe dishes
than with the other meals served. Presumably, the Caesar salad at the Gotham
Bar and Grill, the third most popular restaurant in the Zagat Survey,
doesn’t usually contain browning lettuce leaves. And both the seared salmon and the sautied calf’s liver entrees at Tavern on the Green were overdone. But for me, at least, and I suspect for many others, the Tavern experience was more about being there than about the food.

Still, most of the meals were striking in their creativity and in the love of food and color and experimentation they seemed to exemplify. Star-shaped
Russian fries and ruby-red pomegranates lay like scattered jewels on the
salad plate at the Russian Tea Room. At Istana, the lamb shanks were juicy and perfectly cooked; they contrasted deliciously with the sweet, curried Moroccan carrots. Even something so simple as a breadbasket seemed transformed here, with crisp herb and Parmesan toast and sourdough and olive breads.

At Aquavit, the appetizer, a pure-white, creamy cauliflower soup, featured a perfect grace note: fish roe bobbing atop a crisp
fingerling chip in the center of the bowl; the combination was as pleasing
to the eye as to the palate. The entree, steamed bass with vegetable confit dumplings and fried bok choy in an orange fennel broth, was a marvelous combination of contrasting tastes and textures.

And the desserts! I sampled all the chocolate offerings from each
prix fixe menu. Gotham’s chocolate cake was as restrained as its
clientele. The fallen chocolate souffli with cardamom at
Istana and the chocolate mousse and fudge cake at Tavern on the Green were
large, pretty and satisfying, but my most thrilling
encounters were at the Russian Tea Room and Aquavit. In the first case, the
chocolate mousse cake with ginger orange tuile hides other chocolate tastes
and textures like an edible Russian doll. And in the second case, the
chocolate ganache was so good it made me want to bang my head on the table; when you cut into it, a chocolate larva oozes out. It was
delicious with the accompanying citrus sorbet. Also served with the ganache is a small bowl of “Manjari” chocolate soup, which consists of layers of dark chocolate and white chocolate and a light sesame froth. Other artful and delicious creations included a creamy fresh-fruit tart from Istana of blackberries, raspberries, mango, strawberries and kiwi in a raspberry and orange coulis and a standard (but tasty) New York cheesecake from Tavern on the Green.

The attentiveness and friendliness of most of the wait staff were exemplary,
though our waiter at Tavern on the Green offered us coffee halfway
through our entree and tried to remove my friend’s plate even
after he’d insisted twice that he really was still eating.

Apart from the warm glow of their own beneficence, the participating
restaurants hope to win the loyalty of new customers who, having
tasted the ambrosia, will now be willing to pay just about anything for more.
“And if you can get a good deal,” says Aquavit’s Samuelsson, “why not?”
Summer Restaurant Week 2000 is from June 19 to 23, and if you start drooling now, you might be able to clean up in time to secure reservations.

National identity and authenticity are deeply complicated issues.
Discovering that schism between who we are when we are at home and who we are when we are away can come as a shock. Uniting the two and working out what it means to represent a nation, an ethnicity and a family can be a
desperately confusing task, sometimes as painful as it is exciting. And
measuring the reactions of others who see us as the bearers of strange food
and diphthongs — seeing ourselves through their eyes — is an important part
of grappling with this issue. Unless, of course, you are just
in it for the money, which — if you are the Outback Steakhouse — means that you take the issue and cheerfully wad it into a tiny little ball before shoving
it as far up a roo’s bum as it can go. That’s right, right up its arse.

Before I discuss the real thing at Eight Mile Creek and whether it really is
the real thing, before I explain the inauthenticity of the Outback
Steakhouse’s “kookaburra wings,” “prime minister’s prime rib” and
“walkabout soup,” I am obliged to point out that if anyone tried to serve a
dessert called “chocolate thunder from down under” in Australia, the very
planet itself would tilt as my nation stood in one frenzied rush to milk the
dessert name for all of the scatological jokes that it invites.
Invites? Gets down on its chocolatey knees and pleads. Color, sound, lame
metaphors for your bum — it has everything, but it is not even remotely
genuinely Australian.

Syllabic exotica temporarily aside, what does a roo actually taste like and
what is the etiquette for eating an animal that stands proudly on your
national crest? Well, it tastes great. It is rich, dense and chewy, but as
served in the seared kangaroo salad at Eight Mile Creek, it somehow manages to be tender, too. The marinated vegetables (zingy peppers and cucumber)
and the mint leaf, crisp shallots and lettuce provide the perfect
counterpoint to the meat. Light and bursting with moisture, they prevent
the appetizer from being too heavy. You eat the salad Asian-style, rolling
up the roo and the vegetables in the lettuce leaf and eating the roll with
your hands. The other animal on Australia’s crest is the emu; it is served
as an emu carpaccio at Eight Mile Creek. The translucent red slice of emu
that sticks to the plate appears at first to be a jelly, but closer
inspection reveals the wide grain of the meat. If the roo is rich, the emu
is much more so. The carpaccio is an intense and delicious experience. As
with the salad, crisp vegetables and a black truffle vinaigrette provide
lighter moments so that the taste is full but not overwhelming.

While a bald eagle starter would almost certainly provoke a few letter bombs,
it seems that we Australians have fewer misgivings about eating the animals
from our currency than do Americans. We love the kangaroo no less for
eating it: It is a symbol that inspires affection and awe, but we are also
intensely proud of its uniqueness, and this pride is easily extendable to
its unique taste. Emus, on the other hand, are crabby, pecking, dangerous
buggers, and no one would really think twice about cooking one up for
dinner. But of course, we don’t. These national emblems are national
dishes only in the sense that no one else can serve them up and claim them
as indigenous. Most Australians do not eat them on a regular basis, and
many Australians today have never tried them. For tens of thousand of
years, these animals were game for the continent’s indigenous people, but
they are only beginning to gain popularity as exotic meats in urban
Australia.

Lamb, on the other hand, is what your Mum put in the oven on Sunday morning.
As it slowly roasted over the day, it sent out Looney Tunes fingers that
beckoned you to the oven door and drove you mad with desire. The lamb shank
at Eight Mile Creek is so tender it practically falls off the bone. It is
succulent and juicy and the serving is large, almost as good as Mum makes.
Examples of other genuinely Australian fare offered at the restaurant are
the yabbies in the yabby bisque — even city dwellers know how to catch
relatives of these little freshwater crustaceans in the local creek or park
pond — and the pavlova. If you were lucky as a child, pavlova (“pav”) is
what Mum used to serve after the lamb roast on special occasions.
Allegedly named for the famous ballerina, a pavlova is a meringue, brittle on the
outside, sticky on the inside and served with varying combinations of cream
and fresh fruit. At Eight Mile Creek, it is served with passion fruit
cream; it is classic birthday fare.

So what does it mean when you live as an expatriate and the food you grew up
eating has suddenly become the cuisine de jour? I feel a distinct pride,
and in many ways I feel personally responsible for
this boom. Sure, the most I can take credit for is eating, but this
particular incarnation of Australian food is my personal Australia, it’s my
“real thing.” I feel, therefore, that a little thanks from the United States wouldn’t go astray. I also am very proud of and would
like to be thanked for vegemite, for koalas and for Dame Edna Everage. I
have a powerful urge to invite everyone I know in the U.S. back to my Mum’s
in Melbourne for a Sunday roast (note to self: Call Mum tonight).
Little bubbles of hysteria surge inside when I witness people paying $30
for the solid Aussie fare I grew up eating.

Of course the commodification of one’s cultural heritage, even if it is
genuine, leaves as much out as it includes. A good friend who grew up a
Catholic Italian Aussie would identify her default Australian meal as
lasagna. And other friends — Greeks, Vietnamese, Chinese and New Zealanders
– also have their different default dishes. So, along with the pride and the
unjustifiable sense of accomplishment comes an irritation at the
simplifications and inaccuracies that occur. But this is not an entirely
bad thing. Years ago, the last time my Mum tried to serve sheep’s brains for
dinner, I faked a dramatic bout of flu and spent dinnertime lying, grateful,
on the couch while my siblings groaned through their meal. Even though the
American economy is booming right now, it would without doubt stagger
horribly in the wake of an invitation to share in this Aussie experience.
Much better to stick to roasts and seafood.

Fortunately, the diversity of seafood on offer at Eight Mile Creek and the
ingenuity of its presentation also parallel the experience that most
Australians have eating out or at home. And all of this is made more
exciting by the extensive antipodean offerings on the wine list. Eight Mile
Creek is small (smoking downstairs, non-smoking upstairs), and seating will
be tight on busy nights. That’s OK, the friendliness of the waiters and
the owners as they prowl through the evening guarantee a relaxed and happy
atmosphere.

I have to admit that when I ate at the Outback Steakhouse, everyone seemed
pretty happy there, too. The restaurant was crowded, and I had to wait an
hour to be seated, but what did that crowd know? They probably think that Paul
Hogan is Australian. Well, OK, he is, but I wish he would shut up
about it. His appeal to international audiences is oddly inexhaustible, and
he wouldn’t be a problem for Australian expats if there were other popular
representations of Australians to balance him out.

But witness the insidious effect of Dundee and types similar to the “Croc
Hunter:” I was recently in an emergency room in the Midwest to get treated for a finger wound, and when the doctor stuck my thumb with an excruciating series of needles, for the first time in my life I screamed aloud and then passed out from pain. “Just pretend it’s a croc bite,” the doctor said.

It is true that Aussies themselves love that romantic image of the
Australian as a rural, no-worries Jack or Jill of all trades — probably
because most of the country’s 18 million citizens live in cities that cling
to the coastline. It’s hard to resist contributing to the misinformation
when someone asks you quite sincerely if kangaroos hop through the back yard.

A friend in New York recently convinced an associate
that the Melbourne rains are particularly dangerous because that’s when the
crocs come up out of the sewers. The big mutant crocs, that is, not the
small ones — those are around all the time. Because of jokes like this, we have to take
the blame for Hogan’s iconic status. I draw the line, however, at the
pottage of marsupials, place names and misappropriated jargon
that litters the Outback Steakhouse menu. It’s hard to explain why I
happily eat kangaroo, but I am offended by the suggestion of eating
so-called kookaburra wings (a.k.a. Buffalo wings). Any Australian would
agree: The P.R. people got that one horribly wrong.

A few more pointers: No Australian has ever said “Down under dinnies.” We do have the word “dunny” though: It is an
outhouse toilet. There is no such word as Aussie-tizers, but the attending
trademark, courtesy of Outback Steakhouse lawyers, no doubt, probably gives that one away. Regarding “Russell’s Marina Bay,”
as in “A bloomin’ onion … from Russell’s Marina Bay,” there is no such place.
As for “Hooley Dooley,” as in “a hooley dooley portion of our Caesar salad.”
Hmmm. Hooley dooley salad, perhaps with some squiggely squaggley sauce and
some yippety jippety croutons. Take note, Eight Mile Creek. Other
travesties: “Darned,” as in “The Wallaby Darned.” Used about as often as
wily (in the coyote wily) and grizzly (as in the bear grizzly). And the
“‘Shrooms” in the “Sauteed ‘Shrooms” is just not an Australian word. In
fact, this diminutive defies the rules of abbreviation in Australian
English. Mushrooms are, of course, “mushies.”

Offering the prime minister’s prime rib is like serving up loin of Clinton.
And it must be said that when Australian Aboriginals go walkabout,
they are generally not known to take soup. I’m pretty sure they have no
soup bowls for this purpose. The crap de resistance of the menu is the
startling use of the word “Aboriginal” to describe fried onions, as in “An
Outback Ab-original.” Get it? I can barely convey the hysteria and
distaste that this phrase provokes in me.

The food itself, standard American, not Australian, franchise fare –
grilled chicken, shrimp, burgers and Caesar salads — is served in a room
with stuffed koalas, pictures of Hogan, hanging akubras, whips and cans of
Fosters. The cutlery is comprised of a fork and a huge Dundee-like steak
knife, the likes of which I have never eaten with before. Still, there is
clearly a big market for such bullshit-a-roo. In the words of its own
publicity, the Outback Steakhouse has “bloomin’ boomed, mate.” Not only does it have restaurants in 48 states, it has others in
locations as diverse as Canada, Brazil and Guam. And apparently, it plans
to open a restaurant in Australia. There will be chocolate thunder down
under, mark my words.

Will this year’s Olympiad in Sydney and the attendant international focus on
Australia provide an opportunity for pseudo-exported Australiana
to become any more sophisticated? Perhaps. The instantaneous success of
Eight Mile Creek suggests that there is a hunger to connect with the real
Australia. The word of mouth about the restaurant is huge and there is a
sense that New Yorkers want the business to succeed. The brothers who own
Eight Mile Creek must be tired already of being compared to a franchise (who
would compare new American cuisine to McDonalds?), but it is hard not to
comment on the casual sophistication that the restaurant achieves against
the pretty shameful backdrop of so-called Australian food in the United States. It will stop and eventually it will be Eight Mile Creek that
newcomers are compared to — the restaurant sets a brave new standard that will be hard
to meet, no matter how many crocs you’ve wrestled.

All right then, to aid you in your Olympic TV watching and advertisement
discrimination this year: Yes, we do say, “G’day” and yes, it is a barbie.
No, they are not shrimp. We call the big ones prawns. Shrimp are small,
hardly worth the chewing, and we barbecue our prawns on television more
often than anywhere else. For your average barbie, we often prefer snags
(sausages) with tomato sauce (ketchup) and white bread (white bread). OK,
mate?