Word: outbackers
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...Then there are the extremists. This year, three individual competitors set out to tackle all four legs in one calendar year, but already only two remain: 33-year-old South African physician Paul Liebenberg, who has a practice in Australia's remote Outback, and 45-year-old American professional runner and Ultramarathon Man author Dean Karnazes. "I am not a balanced individual," says Liebenberg frankly, "and I have found the only way for me to deal with the physical, and especially the emotional, demands of bush medicine in the Australian Outback is to push myself physically hard as well...
Eight kinds of beer and freshly shucked oysters make the Innamincka Hotel an oasis for travelers on Australia's remote Strzelecki Track. But keeping food and drink cold in the Outback isn't cheap. Every three weeks a diesel tanker must make a 1,600-km round trip from Port Augusta, South Australia, to keep the generators running...
...Republican side, John McCain seems to be running away with the race, with Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul in a battle for second place. The libertarian-minded Paul has a certain appeal to the leave-me-alone traditions of the Vermont outback - Naylor recalls meeting him at a 1995 secession conference in South Carolina - but it's not really a leave-me-alone state. Taxes are high. Government services are extensive. It's the only state without a balanced budget requirement, but its bonds are top-rated. Local affairs are still handled at the annual town meetings renowned throughout...
...since the profile of a would-be terrorist is becoming less and less obvious. In that kind of fog, small behaviors necessarily loom large. In Australia, the NYPD report noted, before 17 men were arrested with bombmaking materials and maps of government buildings, some had traveled to the outback for a group bonding and hunting adventure. One month before the July 7, 2005, London transit bombings, two of the suicide bombers went white-water rafting together. Given these flickerings of a pattern, the Circuit City tape, which might have been ignored 10 years ago, set off a cascading series...
Well, uh, no. Australians are among the most urbanized people on earth. They have seen their national animal, the kangaroo, only in a zoo or as roadkill on the Hume Highway. Nearly 90% of us live on the coast, not in the outback, wherever that elusive place may be defined as being. (The "bush" is outside the suburbs, the "outback" beyond the bush, and the "black stump" is the term for a very remote datum point, as in, "He lives way out there beyond the black stump.") Our country towns are in decline. Their inhabitants keep moving to the coast...