Back-Flipping My Way Overseas - Part1

Tokyo to New Jersey

"Dating Service here I come!"

Being left-handed in the United States doesn't come with a whole lot of perks. You can't play shortstop. The spatulas are backwards. You have to learn the guitar upside down. And damn those half desktops in college! My left arm muscles are still quivering, and I didn't even take many notes.

In Japan, however, being a leftie is like having a famous parent; everyone likes you for it even though you had nothing to do with it. Rare is the dinner party where someone doesn’t comment on my left-handedness as if it were some kind of achievement. "You are left-handed! Ooh, GREAT!" Their admiration is so genuinely contrived you'd think I was doing something truly amazing. Like using chopsticks, or eating raw fish.

"Yes, hidari-kiki," I say, raising their laughter to authenticity level and eliciting cries of "Joh-zu! Great Japanese! Jooooh-zu!"

Then I tell them I text with my right hand and they go completely bananas.

Hidari-kiki is the general term for left-handedness, though some will use the term ‘southpaw’. It was funny to hear it the first few times – ‘sow-sue-po-a’they say – but then the novelty wore off and I figured I should start contributing to the conversation.

“Do you know where the term southpaw comes from?” I’d ask.

Baseball might be Japan’s national pastime, but understanding its terms is not.

Another bonus for us lefties in Japan is that books and magazines are often the opposite of books in the West; our back cover is their front cover and our last page is their first. So we lefties get to start from the front when we're standing in the 7-11 flipping through an adult manga.

United Airlines should consider this for their in-flight magazine Hemispheres – for their service to and from Japan at least. And for any flight with a leftie on it. Until then I am relegated to flipping backwards through the pages and ridiculing the process (which really has nothing to do with direction but anyway here we are).

A Leftie's View of Things
 

The back cover of the December 2016 issue of Hemispheres features an ad for Tissot watches. It’s time for Christmas magic reads the catch phrase that is supposed to compel me to buy a PowerMatic 80. More subliminally, the two watches featured, his and hers PM-80s photoshopped onto two red Christmas balls, seem meant to hypnotize me into buying one for myself and one for my significant other – as if that would be magical for me and not Tissot’s shareholders.

My apologies to Tissot (slogan: “It’s your time”) but United has already socked me with five plane tickets’ worth of Christmas magic.

So I start flipping backwards thru my Hemispheres, and my thumb stops on the fold-out map of United’s worldwide flights like it was a Playboy centerfold. (I mean, I imagine that’s what it’s like. Based on, you know, secondhand hearsay.) Facing this fold-out is an ad featuring Jeanne Huyhn, a beautiful woman with enchanting dark brown eyes, perfect cinnamon skin and a creamy white smile – none of which reminds me of a Playboy magazine since, again, I’ve never seen one.

Miss (I hope) Huyhn traveled from Hong Kong to a place (or maybe a compound) in Texas called The Woodlands, to have a bit of cosmetic dentistry done courtesy of Guy Smiley, DDS. “There was no distance I wouldn’t have gone to have the perfect smile,” she says.

Wow. Meanwhile I’m over here thinking I’m some kind of Navy Seal of dental hygiene for flossing once a month.

And Ms. (forget it, she’s out of my league) Huyhn likely won’t stop there. Her next presumable port of perfection is going to be the door of top global matchmaker Kelleher International (Hemispheres pg.31). Because there’s probably no distance she won’t go to change her last name, which everyone mispronounces and no one can spell.

So over there on United’s fold-out map of the world, three hundred or so arcing blue lines show all the routes United flies. The USA is placed in the middle of the map to (a) take a subtle geopolitical jab by slicing Russia and China in half, and (b) make sure none of those arcing blue lines goes shooting off the edge of the page, thereby creating a subtle psychological sedative for any passengers with a Bermuda Triangle complex.

The International Date Line (not to be confused with the International Dateline that Miss soon-to-be
Not-Huyhn is heading for) is clearly visible to the left, and clearly shows at least one place where the person out there drawing this line must have gotten seasick. To be fair, there are around four trillion Pacific islands – with most scheduled to disappear by 2090 – so it’s impossible to run a straight line through them all without angering a few large men in grass skirts. But down around Western Samoa the line is so wacked you’d think the Republican Party had been gerrymandering the ocean.

Seriously, is Apia such a bastion of liberalism that it had to be cordoned off like this?

Flipping Aloha
 

My next thumb flip brings me to a 20-page insert on Hawaii called DOSSIER (from the French J'dossier meaning "I am more important than anything.") Inside are plenty of neato infographics and high-falutin ads; spotlights on influential people and touristic places; and an indigestible smorgasbord of information on Hawaii’s developing industries: environmental research, niche technologies and (strangely) urban air masks.

Things are looking up there in the US’s #1 healthiest state according to the United Health Foundation. (This despite the fact that “more than 7 million cans of SPAM are sold in Hawaii on an annual basis.”) And really, can you beat the weather there? I love snow, but sand feels a lot nicer on your feet so I’d consider making the trade just for that. But the Out of Office bit near the back of this self-important info-insert was what got me.

Waimea Canyon is 14 miles long and 3,000 feet deep and looks like the Grand Canyon’s brother. The Molokai Sea Cliffs, at 3,500 feet high, are the world’s tallest. And the UNESCO World Heritage Hawaii Volcanoes National Park includes tropical rainforest, arid desert and one of the world’s most active volcanoes, spitting out enough lava to resurface a two-lane road twenty miles long every day.

If I'd thought of it in the first place there'd be no need to rethink..

Add to this the world’s tallest mountain (if you include the part that’s underwater) and I have to wonder why I didn’t apply to the University of Hawaii which, as evidenced from their one-page ad, only admits high school graduates who have been to Dr. Smiley.

A flip back to the front of this Hawaii-mercial brings me to a page of Tips for when your flight is delayed or canceled. This reminds me of what I said to our last babysitter.

“Here’s what to do in case we never come back.”

Flipping Doctors and Rich Folks
 

The next flip of my thumb gets me a special little promotion for (1) the top doctors in America, (2) the best doctors in New York, and (3) the best plastic Surgeons in America. Along the right margin of each of the three pages are names and contact info for doctors in a variety of fields. The three doctors featured, though, are all plastic surgeons.

Seems United is changing its business strategy. Forget on-time performance or customer satisfaction, between Dr. Smiley and these three plastic surgeons United is evidently aiming instead for the most attractive passengers in the sky.

Flip Four gets me an invitation to Reynolds Lake Oconee, a hoity-toity lake and golf community somewhere in Noplace, Georgia where a few ridiculously huge homes sit set back from a vast blue lake. Perfect lawns, impeccable landscaping, boats moored to the docks, thick forest keeping the rest of the world out – and not a hint of a living creature anywhere. The place is literally deserted, it looks like a Twilight Zone episode.

Your perfect lake house is waiting to happen, the people from Reynolds tell us.

Reynolds is waiting for someone to happen upon their lake houses is more like it.

Three Flipping Days
 

I’m done with the thumb-flipping. But I’m far from done with this magazine. Because United is persisting with its “Three Perfect Days” feature article series. United has been deprecating themselves with these pieces for at least as long as Sarah the Brave made it through her Three Harrowing Days in the rugged wilds of Sonoma, California. I blame my incurable travel-itis for not being able to resist these melodramatic narratives, all written by people trying to make their cab ride sound like a trip on the space shuttle. I don’t even like the idea of the series. Three perfect days according to whom? These articles seem to be written for the kind of people who try not to get their hands wet when they have to wash the dishes. There’s never any sense of unpredictability. And they never let loose, they never talk about doing anything unprintable.

Wait a minute…

Pampered in paradise. Or dead in the water.

This issue’s Three Perfect Days takes place in the Florida Keys. The teaser on the cover shows a photo of a row of lounge chairs on a beach, their front legs in the water. At the far end someone is lying on a lounge chair that has all four of its legs in the water. Bent over this lounging (or passed out) specimen is a massage therapist (or an EMT giving them CPR). The one-line extract from the article, floating in a very un-Florida-like gray sky, reads “I get the sense we’re following the perspective line in a painting of the sea.”

Look, Jules Verne, the only line in a painting of the sea is called the horizon. Get back in your space shuttle and go home.

Yet I remain intrigued. Probably because it’s December and the Florida Keys sound pretty damn good about now. And I know my wife will never agree to Hawaii. She likes hibernating too much.
 

“Jackie” gets her article off to a good start, talking about a place where “chickens walk the streets, the lobsters are striped, and people eat meat out of conch shells.” For this I can forgive her for using that trite sun-bleached archipelago bit. Further on she creates a great visual of a gentleman by saying he is “wearing an eye-popping Hawaiian shirt that is completely unbuttoned.” This compensates for describing 6:30am as “blearily early” – which isn’t bad but is kind of hard to say.

The space shuttle came into view when Jackie tried to tell us she “dragged her boyfriend here”. But I will be fair and honest and say that I enjoyed her well-written, humorous narrative. As far as I’m concerned, Jacqueline Detwiler has given a much-needed shine to United’s ongoing Three Lackluster Days routine.

Flipping People

The rest of the 122-page December Hemispheres brings a short list of notable content. There are more infographics and numbers about cruise ships, dating and the history of the hamburger. There are short bits on a blind barber in China, a busking bear in Boston and Freddie Mercury fans flocking to Montreux, Switzerland. Matthew McConaughey (the second last name today to fail my computer’s spell-check test) gives an interview about being skinny (for a movie), being chubby (for another movie), being nervous (for every movie) and being a family man (when there was no movie). Mixed in throughout is an inordinate amount of ads for watches – a subliminal tie to that Tips for when your flight is delayed or canceled bit of marketing genius – and two mentions of the one English word I hate more than any other: mixologist.

Look. Dropout. You’re a bartender.

 

"Eat up, Bentley, the little people are paying."

I was about to close the lid on Jacqueline and Matthew and Freddie and Hawaii when I noticed an Aren’t We Smart there’s a new trend emerging where wealthy people (it doesn’t say so but no normal person eats at a place called Per Se), who simply cannot fathom the idea of taking care of their own kids but want to look like they can, get together and reserve private rooms at lavish restaurants so they can have their high-society dinner while the restaurant, according to the formal agreement written up by the high-powered lawyer of the group, has to let these nanny-bred kids run wild.
article under the ostensibly-recurring title of Hemi-IQ. According to this piece of

The kicker is, these people have managed to make these restaurants feed their kids for free.

The Nibble & Squeak dining club redefines the kids’ meal, reads the sub-heading of the article.

I think that’s a misprint. It should read refinances the kids’ meals.

And with that I put away my Hemispheres, slide out of my middle seat, climb over my daughter and head for the back of economy for a complimentary cup of coffee.

Far below the emergency exit window lies the frozen tundra of Alaska, or maybe Canada. Somewhere up ahead the gray New Jersey winter awaits.

 

I think I’ll ask Jacqueline if they need someone to spend Three Perfect Days in Hawaii.

Talk is Cheap. Our Fees are Not. Hey, Valuable Customer, Listen To This!...

'...And may the odds be always in my favor...'

Every time I want to fly west from Japan I go online thinking ‘This time, dammit, I am not flying a Chinese airline.’ And every time the cheapest fare is on another eponymous Chinese airline and I say to myself ‘Okay, dammit, but this is definitely the last time…’ And I promise in advance I’ll be making up for any and all unrequited expectations by going college with the free in-flight beer. (Apparently they know this and return the sentiment by going gorilla with my Samsonite.)

Flying between Japan and New Jersey is a more subtle tragedy.

In his State of Our Awesome Airline address in the beginning of this month’s issue of Hemispheres, United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek goes on a rant against the dark powers at work causing his industry to lose $55 billion dollars a year. Poor guy. As I’m reading (a guise to make my kids become uninterested in me and not from any sense of commiseration with a man who just wouldn’t feel right paying himself a penny more than $1.2 million a month), that same smarmy Smisek appears on my personal in-flight video entertainment system screen. ‘We’ve got the most lay-flat seats in the industry,’ he tells me as I fight to wedge my feet around my knapsack, shoved under the seat six inches in front of me. He goes on with his State of Our Awesome Airline addendum by touting how many new planes they have, and how many new Economy Plus seats people somewhere are putting onto those planes. Conveniently he makes no mention of the sticking my twenty-pound two-year-old with the same fuel surcharge Bob the Elephant across the aisle pays, or the shitty disposable ear buds passengers are given for free…for now… or the fact he’s about to stuff my kids full of saran wrap greaseburgers for the next thirteen hours.



I’d say smug Jeffy is trying to capitalize on some (mis)perceived notion of passenger jubilation stemming from the TSA’s recent decision to let children (and terrorists) under twelve through security without having to take their shoes off.

This past week my family returned to Japan, bringing considerably less luggage than the last time we flew across the Pacific. Yet we are paying more this time because one of our carry-ons happens to be my baby daughter. She gets no food or milk or diapers for the flight, though she does merit a boarding pass and thus another Bob-the-Elephant-sized fuel surcharge. Heck, Jeff has to find any way he can to put a dent in that $55 billion dollars, what with a Board rendered powerless to touch his stock.

This is the first time my wife and I are flying with three kids. Based on having to live with three kids for the last three months we are not looking forward to the experience. Yet the baby is sleeping, my older son is engrossed in Cars the Movie even though I’m making him watch it in Japanese, and my younger son, the one with the three-second attention span, is curiously busy figuring out the touch-screen system which will with any luck take him about thirteen hours to master. I’m flipping through the movie selection too, which in itself is a form of entertainment if you’re paying attention.

Checking the kids’ movies with my older son I notice among the Family section listings a film titled Gorilla. Rated R. Among the many dramas is a documentary on the Brooklyn rap group A Tribe Called Quest. Twenty years ago, or even ten, I’d be interested in this solely for the music. If it meant I didn’t have to hear my kids for two hours I’d be keenly fascinated. Now a film like this is intriguing to me for a different reason: I like to know where people come from. And I don’t mean Brooklyn.

We’re seated in a regular row, with the regular amount of legroom. (I refuse to pay Jeffy extra for his ‘Premium’ comfort, no matter how far ahead of arrival I have to begin the process of extricating my feet from under the seat in front of me.) We tried to get bulkhead seats, where they can hang a bassinet on the wall for the baby – or for my backpack and whatever greaseburgers my kids haven’t eaten yet – but there was only one remaining bulkhead seat available. Predictably it was a middle seat. Perhaps also predictably, but what didn’t occur to me at first, was that a couple had (presumably) reserved their aisle seats online, leaving the middle seat open in hopes that no one would take it. Shrewd. It worked. The bitter side of me imagines these people were hovering over their computer, waiting until the system opened up for advance seating – much like people who camp out overnight outside of Walmart for Black Friday, but without the sleeping bags. I hate people like that. And that is exactly what I am doing next time I fly with the family.

The description of another movie in the drama listings goes like this: ‘While traveling through Europe on a train, an American male (male? What, 'priapean human' sounds too primal?) meets a young French woman (oh, sure) and spends his remaining hours with her before he leaves.’

Wow, grab me a pair of those shitty ear buds. At an hour and forty minutes long I can watch it six and a half times. This movie, by the way, imaginatively titled Before Sunrise, was directed by the aptly named Richard Linklater.

Linklater.

Link…later…

Exactly.

Okay, so I gave in and watched the trailer. Which has cleared up the next ten hours for me.

The blurb for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – a popular movie based on a wildly popular book from what I’ve heard – reads as such: ‘After being convicted of libel (yes, that classic thriller catalyst, libel!) Mikael Blomqvist investigates the disappearance of a wealthy patriarch’s niece from 40 years ago to restore his honor.’

It’s the singer not the song I guess.

A flight attendant is coming down the aisle with the drink cart. Now usually on an international flight you have three languages – that of the origin, that of the destination, and gay. But this woman reaches our aisle and asks my older son: ‘And huh-wood you like zum-sing to da-link?’ He can’t hear her because Lightning McQueen and his friends in Radiator Springs are having a ball in Japanese. I tap him on the arm and point to the woman. ‘She’s asking if you want zum-sing to da-link.’ He looks at her then looks at me. ‘WHAT??’

I guess those cheapo ear buds really work.

Meanwhile my younger son has slid out of his seat and bolted down the aisle while I sit trapped under my sleeping daughter. Ah well, it’s not like he can get terribly lost. And if he does I’ve still got ten hours to find him, which is more than Jodie Foster had.

That slickster Jeff Smisek takes every opportunity to sublimate his skewed message into our brains. The cocktail napkins sport the following bit of propaganda in big blue letters: ‘Planes Change. Values Don’t.’ Really Jeffy? Cut out food and diapers for infants but soak them for $400 in fuel surcharges. Let families with three small and wired children wait in line to board your awesome airplane while pandering to people who’ve bought into your Premium and Elite and similarly-named privileges. Six bucks for a can of Bud!! Planes Change. Values Don’t. I haven’t been fed such irony since the 2008 Olympics when Beijing, in between sending the military into Lhasa to quell demonstrations led by those ultra-violent Tibetan monks, tried to pass that ‘One World, One Dream’ bit of bull off on the world.

To top this off, Jeff adds a subtitle to his misguided self-aggrandizing napkin scratch: ‘Your priorities will always be ours.’ More precise would be something like ‘Your change in flight plans will always be our extortionist fee policy.’

When the kids finally settle down I tune them out and watch Hunger Games. What strikes me most about the movie is how the people from the districts show absolutely no hostility, no resentment, no emotion toward the selfish, self-serving, sadistic bastards in power.

'In order for you to really move forward, you can’t forget where you been at.’
~~ Jonathan Davis (aka Kamaal Ibn John Fareed aka Q-Tip aka The Abstract aka etc.) from A Tribe Called Quest

Air Travel III - Thin Atmosphere Reading

People will sometimes ask me how long it takes to fly between Tokyo and New Jersey. My answer usually elicits a contorted expression and a syllable or two of pained commiseration, reactions I personally would reserve for someone in truly insufferable straits – a diehard Glee fan, for example. Or someone with a full-time job.

I don’t know why people consider thirteen hours in the air something akin to torture. First of all, in my case, I’m flying because I want to, unlike the poor saps up in the front of the plane who have no choice but to fly off to another meeting somewhere. Second, what’s so bad about being able to sit around and watch movies while people bring you food? If you’re flying with an Asian airline there’s the added bonus of free beer and wine. Plus the flight attendants are still selected in step with the time-honored tradition of chauvinistic arousal. Are you kidding me? If demurely beautiful women in flattering silky garb are bringing me free beer I’ll fly for weeks on end.

Continental offers neither free beer nor chauvinistic arousal. They compensate, however, with an almost comical overload of movie selections and an in-flight magazine that is worth its weight in glossy paper – though probably not in a way Editor in Chief Mike Guy and his team intend. I’ve long had an unabashed affinity for in-flight magazines – the travel articles, even the boring ones, in their own way, are good fodder for future adventures; the crossword puzzles make me feel smart (unlike the sudoku); and the fiction pieces inevitably reassure me that I really can be a writer someday.

The magazine on my most recent flight, however, was an altogether new experience. There was no fiction (unless you count the open letter by the CEO on page 11). I didn't even get to the crossword (I was mentally trashed after the sudoku and didn't want to risk what little self-esteem I had left). And my appetite for travel didn't have the opportunity to be whetted what with the distractions on almost every page.

The August 2011 issue of Continental's Hemispheres features (i.e. displays in the biggest letters on the cover except for the word Hemispheres) an article on Stockholm. I visited Sweden once; I spent three hours in Malmo, a short ferry ride from Copenhagen. This was quite possibly the most amazing three hours of my life, for reasons I will get into momentarily. Suffice to say I was eager to dive into whatever 'Three Perfect Days' in the Swedish capital might hold. (This despite the letdown I experienced from a previous Three Perfect Days piece of rubbish.) But we would be somewhere over the Kamchatskiy Peninsula before I'd even get a glimpse of the bar at Matbaren. Really, page after page, it was time-consumingly confounding.

The first three pages sent a crystal clear message: I am not the target audience for this magazine. On page two was an ad for a thousand-dollar Bang & Olufsen speaker dock thing - the Beowolf 8 or something - for an iPod, iPhone or iPad. If I gave up traveling I might be able to afford one of these doo-hickeys eventually, though I’d have to give up something else to get an iProduct to go with it and my wife insists the kids eat every day.

Before this though was a two-page spread for Wellendorff, maker of the finest German jewelry (and the most incongruous-sounding name for a jeweler) since 1893. The ad centers around an actual letter from a woman in Latvia who describes in pristine, poetic English how she lost everything in a fire except her ring, made by the elves at Wellendorff. Somehow, according to the Fuhrer at the Dorff, this is a reminder for all of us that 'the true value of jewelry' is 'to offer joy and protection.' Joy? Perhaps. But I don't see jewelry offering protection to anyone outside of Wonder Woman. Entschuldigen Sie bitte. No sale to the guy in 43-D.

This, by the way, is Continental's self-proclaimed first annual food issue. Accompanying the table of headlining articles is a picture of fresh-baked kanelbullar, or cinnamon rolls, found at a restaurant at a museum inside a zoo on one of Stockholm's fourteen islands. That they are so hard to find makes the mid-flight plastic-wrapped microwave tamale that much more disappointing. Or less, I'm not sure. Heading the second page of content listings is a photo of a covered wagon amid the great American West. I just recently drove across the country but I could never get enough of the west and had to turn immediately to page 42 – only to find a one-column overview of an upcoming PBS mini-series and a close-up of a lizard colored like an Easter egg. (Likening lizards to eggs; this food issue thing is apparently having an effect on me.)

In this month's message, United Airlines President & CEO Jeff Smisel talks about 'the world's most rewarding loyalty program'. True, my wife and my four-year-old will both be flying to the States for free this month; yet my wife, loyal mother that she is, refuses to smuggle our one-year-old onto the plane in a carry-on. Instead she will hold him on her lap for the duration of the flight. For this level of loyalty Continental-United is charging us $400.

To their credit, Continental-United (C-U from now on, I'm already sick of typing it out) seems to be trying to put on a personal, approachable face. To wit: page 12 is dedicated to Customer Service Representative Mary Brown, who has been overseeing the evolution of the usability of the check-in kiosk system. Actual quote from the article: 'I've learned to think like the machines,' she says with an empathy that extends beyond customers to the kiosks themselves. Just a hunch: Mary had R2D2 bed sheets when she was a girl. Mary’s manager offers further insight: She comes in early, sometimes at 2am, to make sure the machines are working and coming on all right. Meanwhile her kids are at home, punching buttons on the mom-kiosk in the kitchen for a glass of water and a virtual hug before going back to bed.

The people article on page 14 features 'Ten Million Mile Man' Tom Stuker, an automotive sales consultant who has flown United close to 6,000 times, including more than 200 hundred times to Australia. Now, I'm no automotive sales consultant expert, but if this guy has to go back and repeat himself 199 times maybe it's time for a personnel change on one end or the other. To celebrate this achievement, this mega-miler joined United employees...his immediate family, friends and United executives at a special event held at Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Which was so much fun he missed his flight.

On the next page, an ad for The Ritz-Carlton Residences building offering one to three bedrooms and penthouses from $1.4 million, shows a woman with perfect hair, a smashing dark blue silk dress and diamonds on her ears, wrists and shoes – diamonds that probably don't offer much protection from the pit bull she's nuzzling noses with. My guess is if this woman stepped out of her $1.4 million pad dressed like that and saw a pit bull sitting in the lobby she's not going to get cuddly, she's going to have someone shoot it. (Note: The fine print at the bottom reveals the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has nothing to do with this building except that someone paid them a lot of money for the use of the Ritz-Carlton name.)

Next page: 'The Original Hawaiian Slipper Pendant with Diamonds, various sizes from $199'. Chain sold separately. Matching earrings available for those who wish to walk around looking like a shoe rack.

The short, spirited piece on page 18 covers Barack O'Bama's recent visit to Moneygall, Ireland where his grandfather's grandfather lived before escaping the famine in 1850. Obviously the President has his Gaelic going on: he weathers the rain, he sips Guinness, and he's got that national bankruptcy thing down pat.

From the photo on page 19, it seems the ostentatious beachfront Grand Solmar Spa and Resort in Cabo San Lucas does not actually offer guests a way to get down to the beach – not that they might want to.

Another short article features an interview with Perry Farrell, founder of the genre-mixing music festival known as Lollapalooza. (Coincidentally the interview takes place in Perry's suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago. No indication if this is a real Ritz-Carlton or another name-renting gimmick.) This year is the 20th Annual L'pooza will include a 'Kidzapalooza tent' where 'seven-year-old kids with sprayed Mohawks,' as Farrell describes them, can get temporary tattoos before going to see Eminem. (Suddenly I feel an urge to get my kids interested in Justin Bieber.)

After a useless bit about four good hotels for star-gazing (one features a photo of the windowless hotel bar) there’s a full-page ad for the 'China Cultural Tour 2011' which consists of an image of a Chinese opera actress superimposed over mist-shrouded bits of the Great Wall – and nothing else, save for the China National Tourist Office website. I'd say the Party hasn't gotten their dictatorial heads around the whole marketing thing. Back in Tiananmen Square they throw up a few posters like this and the hoi polloi are scrambling for tickets for fear of their children going missing or their homes be ransacked if they don't attend. The rest of us are going to need a little more than a woman in a gaudy kimono and a hat that Princess Beatrice herself would refuse to wear.

On a related note, the Party recently advertised their new high-speed trains as 'not from Japan.' This is evidently enough, in their minds, to convince their subjects to keep buying tickets for a train system whose performance truly makes it non-Japanese.

On to Cotswolds, England and 'Russell's, a restaurant with rooms.' If that isn't enough to make you run for the British Airways counter consider that this restaurant, already so forward-thinking it actually includes rooms for people to eat in, is housed in the former workshop of a furniture designer named (quite coincidentally) Russell who 'drew his aesthetic inspiration in part from his experiences on the front lines during World War I.' Table in a trench for two please. One dish on the menu at Russell's consists of roast Cornish pollock with clams and something called 'samphire emulsion' – which I can only imagine is the saucy precursor to the delicacy known as Rocky Mountain Oysters.

Which leads me to an ad for Tempur-pedic, a mattress company whose slogan is, simply, 'Ask me.' Half the page is taken up by a group of smiling people with words floating in the air over their heads. The plain-looking brown-haired woman on the left is inviting you to ask her how fast she falls asleep. The guy on the right says 'ask me about staying asleep.' The sixty-ish couple in the back suggests you ask them about the twenty-year warranty (after which they'll have to settle for whatever the old folks' home offers). The attractive blond, front and center with a devilish grin on her face, has no words above her head – her apparent mattress-related invitation being 'Just...ask me!'

Page 35 presents a picture of what appears to be a suspension bridge missing half the suspension – which seems not to deter any of the hundred-odd people driving across the bridge. This is San Francisco's new Bay Bridge, $5.5 (check that - $7) billion worth of erector set parts 'nearing completion'. Yes, those people are indeed driving over an unfinished bridge. The article is comprised of three main points, none of which lend any added comfort. (1) So emergency vehicles can use the bridge in case of a big earthquake, engineers 'designed non-essential parts of the bridge to fail.' Wait a minute, what parts of a bridge, exactly, are non-essential? (2) Rebuilding the Bay Bridge required a construction schedule that would have a minimum effect on the flow of daily traffic – some 280,000 vehicles a day. The only factory that could conform production to this extremely tight schedule was in Shanghai. I think it's safe to say China built a factory specifically to win this contract so (a) they would own the bridge once it is done, and (b) they would have something to take people's minds off the non-Japanese trains that keep derailing. (3) The humble Bay Area lawmakers demanded the bridge have something called 'icon status' – so the engineers added these tall poles to (I guess) provide aesthetic balance in place of the bridge's half-missing suspension. These fifty-foot steel rods, sticking up like those traffic light things at the drag races, must be the 'non-essential' parts of the bridge designed to fall off in a big quake. They are very logically placed between the east- and westbound sides of the bridge, so no matter which way they fall they will crush whoever is driving across the bridge at the time.

Fairmont Heritage Place in something called Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco calls itself a Private Residence Club. No kidding. In the fine print at the bottom of this ad for luxurious fractional home ownership, offering an extensive ownership world-class benefits program, it reads: This is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation to buy to residents in jurisdictions in which registration requirements have not been fulfilled, and your eligibility and the resorts available for purchase will depend upon the state, province or country of residency of the purchaser. In other words, if we don't like your zip code stay away or we will sic our pit bulls on you. My advice: go with those Ritz-Carlton posers in Chicago, their $1.4 million apartments are easily available via the Equal Opportunity Housing laws.

The W.M. Keck Foundation has donated $150 million to the USC Medical Center, adding to a previous gift of $110 million. This is fantastically generous when you consider just how many non-medically-insured illegal immigrants this will support.

Advertisement for Tito's Handmade Vodka. Um...no. Tito's Handmade Vodka is gluten-free. Um...still no.

This brings me to the meat of the magazine – no pun intended. For the first feature, a guy was paid (I assume) to travel to northeastern India, hang out, take a bite out of a bhut jolokia, the world's hottest pepper, hang out a little more and go home to New York. I think I could do that. For the second article a different guy got to go to Singapore and eat for five days and then write about it. Excuse me, what exactly is the application procedure for this type of work? This piece starts out by illustrating just how goofy and crazy Singaporeans are: one guy, an aspiring chef, decided one day to put cheese on his braised pork belly dish, and so he did it, and...well...that's it. His restaurant is very popular. It's called Wild Rocket, named, apparently, in honor of the guy's favorite salad. 'Some people will think of the salad, some people will think of the spaceship,' he says of his restaurant's zany, no-holds-barred moniker. The writer eating his way across Singapore then tells us that this idea of mingling of food and spacecraft is a perfect metaphor for Singapore, a nation-state bent on cleanliness and efficiency while maintaining a love for food. Sorry buddy, I don't get the connection. Not surprisingly, the article is cut off, continued on page 128. Here the overload of dish names and their ingredients makes me feel like I'm reading the Cliff Notes version of The Joy of Cooking. The guy does point out two interesting things – neither of which bolster my admiration for Singaporeans. First, they love to eat yet they thumb their noses at anyone so low as to work in the culinary trade. And second, for all their economic and social achievements, Singaporeans are bent on eating mounds of durian, a fruit so stinky it is banned in all hotels and on all public transit. Give anyone caught chewing gum a good caning, but encourage the masses to walk around smelling like...well, stinky fruit. Brilliant culture.

Ah, finally, here we are in Stockholm. I might have skipped right to page 78 here, but the preceding pageant of ill-literacy should make this trip to Scandinavia an even fresher breath of fresh air indeed. The two-page introductory spread shows a detail of wooden boats floating on blue waters and the back of a guy, presumably a castle guard, with a silver helmet so shiny it manages to momentarily disguise its overwhelming silliness. As I mentioned before, I once spent three hours in Malmo, Sweden. In these three hours I (1) saw the most incredible, most beautiful tall blond woman my twenty-three-year-old eyes had ever seen; (2) I put a few crowns on double zero at the roulette wheel in the lobby of some hotel and hit; and (3) saw that woman again. I read this Three Perfect Days in Stockholm piece thoroughly, but the guy makes absolutely zero mention of blonds or roulette, going on and on about cafes and museums and charm and Stieg Larsson. He does get points for renting a bicycle for a half hour, but loses them and more for staying in plush hotels instead of making friends and crashing on their couches – or ending up with a tall blond woman. Everyone has his own idea of perfect I guess.

My reading adventure is winding toward the entertainment listings at the back of the magazine, but Mike Guy and his staff manage a few more stupid human tricks. The head of the Obesity Treatment Centers of New Jersey has a noticeable double chin. When in Denver, try indoor skydiving. For easier, more confident traveling, here is a diagram of Guam International Airport's one terminal, which consists of a single straight hallway. The Brown hand Center considers four locations in Texas and one each in Phoenix and Vegas 'nationwide'.

And, at the bottom of the last page, this modest pronouncement: We are proud to recycle aluminum cans, newspapers and plastic bottles on eligible flights. On all other flights, CEO Smisel will explain in his next letter, loyal frequent flyers will not be charged $400 if they take their recyclables home with them. Women with babies on their laps will automatically pay as C-U has recently set a new policy in place that deems carrying babies and recyclables simultaneously unsafe and is therefore not allowed.

I bet Mr. Smisel has a $1.4 million pad. Perfect, I have a pit bull, let's have some fun.

Air travel II - (sk)In-Flight

I like airports, actually. They offer such good post fodder.

I step through the door and come face to face with a half-naked middle-aged man. Well not face to face; he’s turned toward the wall so all I see is his pasty, mealy back. On the shelf in front of him is his open carry-on. He’s slathering on his deodorant. I feel like I’m at the YMCA.

The door to my stall bangs shut as I step around the corner – to see another shirtless fifty-something man bent over one of the row of sinks. His gut rests on the countertop as he washes his face. This guy didn’t make it far in the Gladiator audition process either. I take one of the sinks on the opposite wall…and there’s the guy, his back and his front, reflected infinitely in our opposing mirrored walls.

Really, this is nothing compared to a Japanese onsen in terms of proximity to naked strangers and their degree of nakedness. Still, I can’t wait to get on my flight to Tokyo.

Along the otherwise drab walls of Newark Airport’s Terminal C large back-lit advertisements pine for attention. I’ve got plenty of time before my flight’s final boarding call so I stop to read each one. Brief and bold and paper-thin, they seem aimed at the time-pressed and travel-weary. I am neither.

A duck with a jovial look on his beak is standing on the middle of a row of three seats, doing that mating call thing with his wings. He’s ostensibly on an airplane, although those three seats are surrounded by a white empty void. (All that legroom and who do they give it to? A duck.) The ad is for an insurance company. ‘Nobody flies stand-by with our coverage,’ the sign states in proud blue letters. Someone just off a twelve-hour flight might nod at the duck in agreement and file the thought safely away in a rolling drawer of gray matter labeled ‘True – Don’t Know Why’. But really, can’t this be taken two ways? Inviting as he appears, I don’t think that duck is giving up his seat.

Beyond an ad for a cancer clinic (as if the time-pressed and travel-weary need that to think about) comes a promotion for 4-H. I’ve never belonged to 4-H, but I get the impression this is an organization dedicated to the empowerment and advancement of society’s youth. They even seem to be specializing now – this particular ad is sponsored by 4-H’s Science, Engineering & Technology faction. Imposed on another empty white void a young girl in a white lab coat is holding a test tube of soylent green. Next to her reads a supposedly uplifting pronouncement: ‘One million new scientists, one million new ideas.’ That averages out to one idea per scientist. I’d say 4-H needs to raise the bar a little.

Newark’s Terminal C, by the way, is dedicated to Continental Airlines, as Newark International is one of their hubs. This would, on the surface, account for the inordinate number of ads for Continental. But really, pretty much everyone in the terminal is already a Continental customer. Shouldn’t they be hanging these ads over in Terminal A?

One of them is for Continental’s Mileage Club Credit Card. In the sky over a white-sand beach that rolls lazily toward a calm blue-green surf it reads: 'No one ever says I take too many vacations.' This is a lie. I myself have said just that, more than once. I was just kidding, of course. My wife, on the other hand, wasn’t. Either way, I don’t think Continental wants one of their cards in my hands.

Another ad states that this mileage club card is ‘The official card of the Continental loyalist.’ Maybe I watch too many movies, but aren’t the loyalists always the ones who end up dying for the king?

As I stated in my last post, Continental is merging with United. In the gate area (and not out at the check-in counter, where it would help people understand why Continental’s check-in people are politely cramming United Airlines policies down customers’ throats) there are signs everywhere announcing the developing collusion. ‘You’re going to like where we land,’ claims one. Oh yeah? Tell you what, your Highness, I’d rather you just land where my ticket says you are going to land.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s get through take-off, shall we?

It’s interesting how virtually everyone flying economy will casually rush to line up at the gate at the first mention of a boarding call – which of course gives priority to First Class, Business Class, Business First Class, Business Elite, Premier Club Members, Premier Club Gold Members, Advanced Club Members, Advanced Club Gold Members, Advanced Club Silver Members, Silver Select, Silver Elite, Express Pass Members and any poor souls flying economy with children. If I’m with my family you can bet I’m right up there taking advantage of the chance to board ahead of the rest of the back of the plane. It does make settling in easier, but more than that I’ll take anything I can from an airline that says my little kids qualify for the same fuel surcharge as the fat cats up front who are being served free beer and wine while most of economy is still standing on line at the gate.

Last week I flew alone, and since I am not a member of any pay-to-feel-special clubs I had to wait to get on with the rest of economy. So there I am in the lounge, sitting tight through each general boarding call, wondering as I always do why everyone is so eager to get on line only to have to stand there for ten minutes with their carry-ons and laptops. But I guess if everyone stayed on their butts like me waiting for everyone else to board no one would go anywhere.

I’d like to see it just once. It would be magnificently surreal.

Besides being able to relax in the waiting area those extra minutes before settling into a seat on a plane for twelve hours, boarding last brings another, slightly more sinister pleasure. By the time the other remaining stragglers and I are coming down the aisle, anyone sitting next to an empty seat begins harboring fantasies of having that extra space to themselves for the entire flight. Some of them even start spreading out their stuff, overcome with hopeful anticipation. Others keep one sideways eye on us last few passengers, pretending to ignore us while simultaneously trying to will us away. I know, because I’ve done the same thing. In either case, it’s funny to see the disappointment suddenly appear on someone’s face when I show up in the aisle, apologizing for having to make them move all their crap.

I’m nice about it though; we’re going to be sharing an armrest for the next twelve hours after all.

My flight last week took off at 11:05. I was still making my way toward my seat near the rear bathrooms, and people were already fluffing and propping their pillows behind their heads. Some had those horseshoe cushion things around their necks. A few of them were already wearing them, before they even got on the plane. The flight, by the way, was at 11:05 am. What was there, a narcolepsy conference in Newark this weekend? These people are going to miss first beverage service.

Amazingly, they all seemed to make the flight – no empty seats anywhere.

So I’m settling nicely into my aisle seat. 43-D. My shoes are off and stuffed under the seat in front of me where they will stay until we reach the gate at Narita. (I’ll have plenty of time to put them on while everyone else is standing in the aisle, waiting for First Class, Business Class, Business First etc. etc. to clear out so they can rush off the plane and go stand on line at customs and then again at the baggage carousel.)

I’m flipping through the in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, checking to see if the previous passenger screwed up the sudoku, when the woman next to me leans over and puts her ear over my nose. She’s talking (in Korean, I think) with the woman across the aisle in seat C. Meanwhile the girl behind me, perusing the channels and games on the TV on the back side of my headrest, seems to think ‘touch screen’ means ‘jab at screen hard as you can’. My head is literally bouncing off the headrest; my nose bumps up against my neighbor’s eardrum. Fortunately this woman and the person across the aisle I figured was her mother suddenly agree on something and they both begin waving at someone a few rows up on the other side of the plane. Then they sit back, both of them eyeing me.

A tap on my shoulder. A girl appears in the aisle next to me. She smiles and leans over. She’s not unattractive. In broken English she asks if I wouldn’t mind switching seats, adding with a few hand gestures she’d like to sit with her mother and grandmother. She tells me she’s in 40-K, a middle seat. ‘Sorry,’ I tell her. ‘But you can switch middle seats with your mom if you like.’

It’s likely a good thing I don’t speak Korean.

Meanwhile the girl behind me is frantically scrolling through the children’s movie selections. I get up and turn to her for a no-nonsense round of show and tell. After that she either understands what touch means or she decides she’s better off just not watching anything for the entire flight.

A flight attendant emerges from the service area at the rear of the plane and comes walking up the aisle. ‘Newspaper? Newspaper?’ Yes I say, putting up a finger as she passes but she’s looking over at Grandma. She keeps walking. ‘Newspaper? Newspaper?’ Yes I say again, but she’s occupied with the sensory-overloading task of handing someone else a newspaper. ‘Newspaper? Newspaper?’ She's two rows up now. YES! She turns around and stares at me like I just stuck my nose in her ear. She sticks a USA Today in my hand and continues up the aisle.

The sports section has Thursday’s box scores. The back page gives Friday’s weather forecast. Today is Sunday.

Apparently the royalty at Continental-United are really banking on that loyalist campaign.

The sudokus are clean in my Hemispheres. By the time the crew begins beverage service I’ve already given up on the one labeled ‘hard’ and moved on to one of the mediums. When they come back to collect our plastic cups I’ve already decided to see if the other medium is any easier. Along with the crushed cups and overturned juice boxes there are a few empty beer cans on the cart. The woman next to me is struggling to doze off under her blanket. It’s 12:30pm.

Time to check the movies on offer.

On my previous flight I watched The Last King of Scotland, the story of a young Scottish doctor who goes on a medical mission to a small Ugandan village and ends up one of dictator Idi Amin’s inner circle – until the heavy-handed new leader finds out what this young doctor has been doing with his favorite wife. The movie is listed under comedy. There was absolutely nothing funny about Idi Amin.

Another comedy selection is titled If You Are the One, Part II. I think we can assume how Part I went.

I decide to watch The Reader, which opens with Ralph Fiennes in a lush Berlin apartment in 1995. It is morning. A naked woman walks into the room. I too was in Berlin in 1995, and I can tell you that it was nothing like this. But I manage to suspend my disbelief and keep watching.

The rest of the movie features a different woman, who keeps showing up naked, most often right along with her young boyfriend. And though it is quite well done it dawns on me this might not be something those around me want to see or should be seeing.

I glance around. Virtually everyone is sleeping.

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon.

After a long moment leaning against the emergency exit door, staring through the window out over the Hudson Bay, I sit back down and start perusing the pages of my Hemispheres. This proves an experience deserving of its own post, coming soon.

After I go take a bath with a few Japanese men.

Air Travel - Wonder & Woe

Last week I flew from Newark, New Jersey to Tokyo’s Narita Airport. (If this were a facebook status update I’d simply say ‘EWR-NRT’, assuming such snark has not yet become passé.) It had been a while since I’d flown –six weeks almost – so it took no time for the incongruous wonders of air travel, like the burn of a jalapeno, to rip into my senses once again.

Of course, the physics alone are mind-boggling. I’m sure Orville and Wilbur never imagined an eight-million-pound plane, loaded with another eight million pounds of people, luggage and processed dinner omelets, could make it over a sand dune let alone the Pacific Ocean. Legalized extortion (commonly known as the fuel surcharge) notwithstanding, that we can in twenty-four hours get from any semi-major city in the world to any other semi-major city not currently steeped in rioting and/or armed conflict is nothing less than an everyday miracle (until we figure out those wormhole things). Yet people will still complain about the dinner omelets.

However many times I’ve flown, the experience still makes me giddy. Feeling the lunge and thrust of a plane leaving the ground; looking down on land and water lying six miles beneath my squished nose; being able to doze off while hurtling through the atmosphere in a metal tube held together with bolts no thicker than my thumb; human accomplishments in aviation are indeed a wonder to behold.

Which makes the prevailing thought processes driving the whole air travel culture that much more incongruous.

‘This is a bicycle,’ I said as I laid my tandem, disassembled and all bungeed up tight in a bicycle bag, on the conveyor belt/ scale thing at the check-in counter. (I have no idea how those two can be combined.) ‘It’s kind of fragile,’ I told the woman.

‘Do you want me to put a fragile sticker on it?’ she asked, oblivious or maybe just used to the fact that her red neck scarf had a ridiculously huge bow in it.

‘Yes, please do.’ It had made the trip to Thailand fine, wrapped in foam inside a heavy cardboard box. But that box and all the foam were now in a dumpster in Chanthaburi somewhere, and I was a bit apprehensive about the protective qualities of my thin nylon sack. ‘Yes, a fragile sticker thing would be great.’

‘Okay, please sign this for me.’ The woman slid a small rectangular form across the counter at me.

‘What’s this?’

‘It means we are not responsible if we break your bicycle. Please sign at the bottom.’

Whoa. ‘Wait a minute, why wouldn’t you be responsible?’

‘Because you are saying it is fragile.’

I'm no psychology major…wait, yes I am. And I’m sure we covered logic in there somewhere.

‘Well yes, of course. I am telling you it’s fragile so you don’t break it.’

‘You are saying it is fragile because it is not packed properly. So if it breaks you can not hold the airline responsible. That is why we need you to sign that.’

So I tell them it’s fragile so they don’t break it, and my reward is signing a little form that says it is okay if they break it. These airlines must have lawyers working for them or something.

‘What if I don’t sign this?’

‘Then I take that fragile sticker off,’ said the woman, disregarding the red pterodactyl attacking her throat.

‘So then if my bicycle is damaged I can hold you responsible?’ (I made it a point to say you.)

‘No, the airline (she made it a point to say airline) would not be responsible.’

‘Why not? If you break my bicycle…’

‘Because without a sticker we don't know that it is fragile.’

I ended up signing the form.

On the up side, since I was flying an Asian airline, the beer was free. And since this was not a Chinese airline my bicycle made it through okay. Not perfect, but okay. (Note to anyone traveling by bicycle in Thailand: there’s a big cardboard box and lots of foam in a dumpster behind the restaurant by the side of the road where the bus from the airport drops off people going to Chanthaburi, please help yourself.)

On the other hand, the following conversation took place at the check-in counter of one of the American airlines, all of which have the audacity to charge for beer. This was last Fall while checking my family in for our flight from Tokyo to L.A.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, showing my flight info sheet to a woman with a large blue tuna fish can pinned to her hair, noticeably off-center. ‘There’s no meal for the baby.’ I meant it as a subtle, helpful hint.

‘That’s correct,’ she replied. ‘There’s no baby meal.’

It’s obvious when someone is ending a conversation, even in Japanese.

‘Okay, well, we’d like to request a meal for the baby.’ Two meals, really, though I figured I didn’t need to point that out.

‘No, I’m sorry. We don’t offer baby meals.’

‘...He gets a regular meal?’ I knew this couldn’t be the case but neither could the alternative. So I thought.

‘No, there is no baby meal on this flight.’

‘On this flight?’

The woman stared, cock-eyed like a confused puppy so that her tuna can was now sitting on the highest point on her head.

I tried again, without the sarcasm (which was already becoming increasingly difficult). ‘You mean, you have nothing for the baby?’

‘Yes.’ (Which, translated into English, means no.)

‘No food for the entire eleven-hour flight?’

‘Correct.’

‘You’re kidding me, eleven hours and the kid gets no food.’

‘There is no baby meal.’

‘No crackers.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not even a piece of bread?’

‘You can give him some of yours.’ (They probably don’t mean to, but Japanese people can come across as terribly magnanimous at the worst times.)

‘But he gets nothing,’ I said.

‘That is correct.’

(At this point I had to switch to English.) ‘Are you flipping serious?’

No answer.

‘Infants get nothing?’

‘Meals are reserved for people in seats.’

‘...You mean he’s not a person if he isn’t in a seat?’

‘I did not say that.’

‘What do you think he is, a carry-on?’

Silence. Sarcasm is clearly non-existent in Japan.

‘For eleven hours…more than eleven hours, he gets nothing to eat.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry? Don’t be sorry, just do something. He’s a real live person. He needs to eat.’

‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘You can give me back the four hundred dollar fuel surcharge I had to pay for him.’

‘The fuel surcharge applies to all passengers.’

‘And all carry-ons with hair?’

If I ever teach in Japan again I am teaching sarcasm and only sarcasm.

‘Great, so he’s a human being when it means four hundred dollars for you, but when it comes to meals he’s a piece of luggage.’

Blank face. I had to try in Japanese. She still didn’t understand me.

I pointed to my older son. ‘You gave him meals when he was a baby.’

‘United has never given baby meals.’

‘United? What do you mean United? This is Continental!’

‘Sir, I’m sorry, we don’t offer baby meals.’

To be honest, I had plenty of food in my backpack for the kid. My wife always packs enough sandwiches and rice balls and crackers for the five-hour bus ride to Tokyo, the three hours until we are in the air, the entire pan-Pacific flight and lunch the next day in New Jersey. But my wife’s overzealousness provides an airline with neither reason nor excuse not to offer something in exchange for their four hundred dollar shakedown on my sixteen-pound kid.

‘Let me guess, you don’t offer diapers anymore either, do you?’

‘United stopped offering diapers several years ago.’

‘Why do you keep talking about United? United is United, this is Continental!’

‘We follow United’s policy for infants.’

It was my turn to stare cock-eyed. I wanted to ask her if she could make my kid a tuna sandwich.

‘So this is what you are telling me...’ I motioned to the guy at the next check-in window, two hundred fifty pounds easy even without the Louis Vuitton carry-on. ‘My baby pays the same fuel charge as him?’

She glanced over, thought a moment, and turned back to me. ‘Yes. But that man doesn’t get diapers either.’

Okay I made that last part up. But the point remains. For all the advancements in air travel technology – self-check-in, a hundred movies on-demand, special plastic bags for liquids to keep any would-be terrorists from making a bomb – there remains a degree of inconsistency in the application of human intelligence here.

Or maybe the airlines and their lawyers really are smart enough to know just how much they can get away with because we are never going to stop flying.

Until we figure out that wormhole thing.

By the way, Continental and United Airlines are merging, in case you hadn’t heard – or been personally introduced to the circus in progress. This would account for the odd logic the woman with the tuna can was tossing me – though I wish she’d explained why my kid was now legally both a human being and a piece of luggage.

I swore after this encounter with United-Continental’s cherry-picking, profit-driven policy decisions I’d never fly either airline again. Of course I said the same thing about all Chinese airlines not too long ago, for their baggage-handling non-policies. But the reality is that my air travel decisions are savings-driven. Until the day I can afford to fly business class on whatever airline tickles my fancy I’ll have to live with the prevailing air travel culture while I continue staring out the window, marveling at how fast we are going, how beautiful the world looks from six miles up, and how many movies I have at my fingertips.

And hey, the coffee’s free.

Note to the alert reader: Yes I know that while I mentioned at the beginning of this post that last week my senses were reintroduced to the capsicum-like effects of air travel, neither of the above instances occurred last week. This is because I have to go feed and change my carry-on and thus have no time to delve into this latest episode, involving both the bold statements slathered across the pages of the in-flight magazine and the finer print lurking quietly below. This will be covered in an upcoming post – probably the next one as I am not planning to fly for another two weeks, almost.