Observations on Australia 5

• Product and retail names are often descriptive and obvious, e.g. sausages are thick and juicy, you get beds from the bed shed and furniture from the furniture spot.
  
• Advertisements are clearly and obviously embedded in the TV shows:
• e.g. the Gardening Guru show will include a section of Sheds and it will read totally like an advertisement for a specific shed installer.
  
• Another example is some of the restaurant reviews on eatingwa.com.au web site. This "independent" review is so obviously an advert. They are obviously written by an interested party. What impact will this have on people?
  
• The Morning TV show is the same, presenters pushing cheap exercise equipment.
• The TV cook that gets his salt out of the packet every time and uses paper towels for no particular reason
  
• This must work, I wonder why. This would not be a surprise in the US, but in Australia it surprises me. Need to look up the advertising standards.
• Also it is difficult to sell these programs overseas if the ads are embedded
  
• What is going on with the politeness or dislike of negativity?
  

• The movies in the news paper have a star rating system from 1 to 5 but even the totally worst movies get 3 stars. There has been no 1 or 2 star movies since I have been reading it.
• Similarly the restaurant reviews on eatingwa.com.au rarely get worse than 3 stars out of 5 and often you read the words on a review and they are negative and appear not to have had a good time which seems out of line with the rating
  

• The Australia idol reviews are all really quite polite, sue the say negative things but then it is always sprinkled with several positives.

• Sporting analogies are everywhere. Lift up your game, seems a universal suggestion.

• Cars are King here (don't step out into the road you will be run over, kind of like Italy, not like Canada) Even at intersections, the car is king, kind of rude really, once the metal box is on there is no need recognize the people sharing the space with you. Speeding on side roads also seems very common and different to the main roads where this is generally compliance with limits.