Nope - Australian branch were Oppenheims and Singers. But it would be a heck of a coincidence.

That wouldn't make you related to Peter Singer, the moral philosopher, would it?

I hate when able-bodied people try to earn cred by being more serious about language than me. I just wanna tell them "eat a muffin, whitey." But some conversations are complicated. Like, I am extremely in favor of a woman's right not to bear everything that gets in her body but at the same time, I just chided someone for calling babies with down's syndrome "children like that"

The 'unamerican credentials don't transfer well' thing still exists - a woman I know from high school did law school in the UK (she was married to a British man) and when she divorced and returned the the US found that she could not use her law degree. She's currently enrolled in a US law school (while working as a paralegal.)

I attended a performance of the Vienna Philharmonic in Tel Aviv in 1996, with a (non-Jewish) Austrian woman who was working on the dig with me. She remarked that is was very clear, I guess from listening to them talk, that a lot of members of the audience were originally from Vienna.

Too many wake ups due to sinus headache. One day this week I don't have critical meetings. Called in sick. Only feel a little guilty. Would feel more if I felt I had the brain to set up new computer, but it took me 3 tries to remember to connect external keyboard to laptop to send email to work from laptop if I wanted to use asdecx letters in the email. So I think I need to try to find brain.

Will wait for sinus meds to kick in and try another shower. First just made me sneeze concussively. I think it is just the modicum of pollen plus the front that arrived last night, cause I'm not that congested, just...circulating.

That wouldn't make you related to Peter Singer, the moral philosopher, would it?

Yep. Peter is my dad's second cousin, and now that he's living in New York, one of his BFFs.

Can you say BFFs about a couple of 70-year-old dudes?

Can you say BFFs about a couple of 70-year-old dudes?

Certainly! That's cool.

The 'unamerican credentials don't transfer well' thing still exists

Oh yeah -- talk to cab drivers, and they have all kinds of stories about having been professionals Elsewhere. (And I'm sure this is true of all kinds of jobs that don't require credentials and are heavily staffed by immigrants, but I'm most likely to be having a conversation with a cab driver, among that group.)

Oh, yeah, my FiL used to complain about having to redo part of his, hm, I forget the details, certification? Trained as a doctor in South Africa, I know he worked as a doctor here and I don't think he had to go through med school again but he did have to do something twice that he thought was ridiculous (I don't think it was that I wasn't paying attention so much as everyone else in those conversations had heard all this a million times so an abridged version of the complaint was all I heard.

My head is much clearer today. In a congestion sense if not in a thinking sense, haven't tried much thinking yet but breathing is working pretty well!

Considering that I forgot was cooking eggs in the time it took to write that post, I'm gonna guess "thinking" is not at peak levels.

One of the ladies who was a cashier at the cafeteria at work was a biologist from Chile. I never got the story of why she was here.

Yep. Peter is my dad's second cousin, and now that he's living in New York, one of his BFFs.

That is very cool. I voted for him once, for the Australian Senate. (He didn't get in.)