Since I’m away from home, today’s Special Edition Caturday features non-Pandora cats, specifically Mom’s backyard-bred Persians, which sadly are kept in cages in the back of the house:
Third World Connectivity
Much to my dismay, broadband internet access at my family’s home has been down ever since Typhoon Milenyo, and PLDT DSL has been dragging its feet on getting things back up and running again. All we have at home right now is painfully slow dial-up access, charged by the minute, on my mom’s computer, a crotchety old Toshiba Satellite prone to “fainting spells” where the screen randomly blacks out until the little “laptop-closed” sensor nub is jiggled. This is pretty much equal to not having any access, and restoration of home broadband is looking like a pretty remote prospect for the duration of my visit, so I must instead leech whatever wireless I can get in my travels. Comments and trackbacks will have to stay off for a bit longer, thanks to the wonders of third world connectivity.
The morning after my arrival I went to a dentist to get a couple of small fillings, and it looks like I’m going to need my wisdom teeth out soon. My schedule doesn’t really allow that, but I could get an operculectomy as a stopgap measure. Either way, it sounds like great fun!
Went to a Simbang Gabi (actually more of a Simbang Umaga) at 6am this morning with relatives, followed by a massive breakfast buffet of all manner of wonderfully greasy Filipino breakfast viands: tapa, tocino, tuyo, danggit, and more. Tonight I met up with a mixed group of college and grade school friends, who have managed to mix up with each other in throes of romance and matrimony.
(Now I am in a quandary as to how to tag this post. Do these mundane postings from a trip home for the holidays still count as “travel,” or do they fall more under the “journal” category? Certainly it counts as a “philippines” entry as well. I guess I’ll go with “travel” since I’m still away from my routine and in another country.)
The Long Trip to Manila
Washington DC National Airport (DCA)
Manning the United Airlines check-in desk, a Ms. V. Hawkins. She is remarkably standoffish and catty towards me, especially when I tell her that I am connecting in Hong Kong to an airline with no ticketing agreement with United. I would like my bags checked forward to my Cebu Pacific flight, so that I can avoid the ordeal of baggage reclamation, immigration, and re-check-in. She does not give me a pleasant face on hearing this.
“Oh, we don’t have a ticketing agreement with them. What airline is this? Cathay Pacific? Oh, Zeboo Pacific? How do you spell that? C-E-B-U? Okay, yes, I know how to spell ‘Pacific,’ thank you. No, I won’t be able to to do it. What’s that? Oh, your brother at O’Hare was able to have it checked through? Well, no, we have no ticketing agreement with them. No, we don’t have a baggage agreement with them either. Six hour layover? Well, I definitely can’t check this through, you know. No, no. Can’t be done. What? Oh, very well, I will ask about this.” <Two minute consultation with supervisor, followed by tapping away at check-in desk computer, followed by sudden onset of pleasant demeanor.> “OK, here is your boarding pass, sir. Your bags have been checked all the way through to Manila. You need only check in at the Cebu Pacific transfer desk. Thank you for flying United.”
Amy and I then order a last breakfast at T.G.I.Fridays before it comes time for me to go. The waiter brings us our omelettes and coffee and says, deadpan, “Now be careful, because these plates are very cold.” The plates are, of course, very hot. We chuckle. This is exactly the kind of non sequitur humor that gets a very big tip from me. (I did leave him 25%.)
United Flight 605 to Chicago O’Hare (ORD)
My seatmate is a chatty management consultant from Burlingame, CA. “So what are you doing in Chicago?” he asks.
“Actually, I’m transferring to a flight to Hong Kong.”
“Ah, so what are you doing in Hong Kong?”
“Well, from there I’m transferring to a plane to Manila. Christmas with the family.”
“Wow. I bet the first thing you do when you get there is pop a San Mig or two.”
“I dunno, maybe Guinness has me spoiled, but I find San Mig a bit too hoppy and bitter for my taste. Anyway, first thing I have to do the morning after I arrive is, would you believe, a dentist appointment. You wouldn’t believe how cheap a cleaning is there.” (I’m not kidding about this, it’s like $20.)
“Cool, kind of celebrity plastic surgeries in Argentina.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, while you’re transferring terminals at O’Hare, keep an eye out for the freaky curvy rainbow wall tunnel with the flashy neon ceiling installation.”
“Dude.”
United Flight 892 to Hong Kong International Airport (HKG)
After leaving the gate, there is a 1.5 hour tarmac delay while FAA clears a backlog of international northbound flights. The pilot makes a crack over the PA system, something like, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ve dealt with IRS bureaucrats, then you know what it’s like to deal with FAA ones.” The joke mostly flies over the heads of passengers: Hong Kong-bound Chinese immigrants.
It’s a 16 hour transpolar flight. Coach seat. Window, beside two people who don’t move much. Older Boeing 747-400 without a personal video monitor. The first six hours are intolerable, then it all suddenly seems to go faster. Someone on the flight crew must really like Lady on the Water and Talladega Nights; each of those movies is shown three times through the course of the ride, as well as some football movie with Mark Wahlberg in it. But he’ll always be Dirk Diggler to me.
Hong Kong International Airport (HKG)
Hooray for the wireless access point with SSID “JALLOUNGE,” which I assume belongs to Japan Airlines. The signal is strong and easily picked up from the Sky Garden Cafe, so I am able to upload photos and answer my email while I dine on spicy shredded pork noodles and Watson’s Water.
Also hooray for the Premium Shower Lounge. For HK$80 (about US$11) you get a luxurious hot private shower, towel and condiments (soap and shampoo) provided — absolutely wonderful after almost a full day in the air. (Remember to pack spare underwear in your carryon.) Signs in the stall tell me to limit my shower to 20 minutes, and not to use the shower as a solid waste toilet. And whatever conditioner is in that shower dispenser, I want it, because my hair has never looked this darn good while long, ever.
Another big hooray for HKG’s free Resting Lounges near Gates 31 and 60 — soft reclining chairs amidst strategically placed marble planters right off the concourse, so that you can rest in a semi-private nook all your own, while sleeping or watching planes pass by. When I wake up, it’s time to board the flight to Manila.
Cebu Pacific Flight 143 to Manila
Bottled Green Tea is not the best drink to serve people flying on a plane. The caffeine keeps them awake, restless, and having to go to the bathroom. As my mom always says, “T=P.”
Sitting beside me are a couple of Assemblies of God missionaries on their way to Asia Pacific Theological Seminary. The wife used to be a lobbyist for the Diabetic Association, so she knows her way around Washington, DC. They say they are taking an express bus up to Baguio tomorrow. I say I will pray very hard for them.
Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Manila (MNL)
The plane lands seven minutes earlier than scheduled. At the baggage claim, the baggage feeder conveyor is not working, so they have two guys standing on the platform, manually hauling bags up from below and straight onto the baggage claim itself. Ah, Philippines.
The arrivals area mills with overseas workers coming home for Christmas. Many hugs and cries of delight. It’s warm out, with a light drizzle. Manila is a city of many sights and sounds and scents, a new one every second.
(But not all those scents are good ones.)
Leaving on a Jet Plane
Well, I’m off to the Philippines to spend Christmas and New Year with the family. The flights go from DCA to ORD to HKG to MNL, the longest leg of the trip being the 16 hour transpolar ORD-HKG trip, and the longest layover being the 6 hour transfer at HKG. All told I’ll be about 28 hours in the air or at airports, most of which I hope to spend either sleeping or peering out the window at the icy landscape below.
Comments and trackbacks will be off sitewide until I recover from jet lag. I do enjoy air travel, and updates en route will be posted here or on Flickr or Twitter depending on availability of wireless internet or a mobile signal.
Eerie Snowmen on my Wrapping Paper
Here’s a roll of holiday wrapping paper I bought at Papyrus for Christmas in 2003. “Lots of presents to wrap,” I thought to myself back then, “better get three big rolls.”
But I had overestimated my wrapping needs, and ended up using only about half of one roll that Christmas. Ever since then, this has been my standard gift wrap for everyone, and so it shall be till it all runs out. I’m down to a roll and a half at this point, but I’ve been getting lazy and just using gift bags, so I may be with these snowmen for several Christmases to come yet.
At first glance the wrapping paper would seem to present to us a fairly idyllic, whimsical winter holiday scene: snowflakes, trees, anthropomorphized snowmen dressed in casual winter wear, doing various things. But there are dark, hidden messages lurking amidst the cozy outdoor setting. Let’s take a closer look:
These snowmen are performing a common winter task: sawing wood. Why are they sawing wood? At this time of year wood is used primarily for making fires. But these are snowmen. Snowmen should be deathly afraid of fires. Suddenly the smiles on their faces take on a more sinister, morbid aspect. Are they preparing for themselves the quickest path to a watery grave? Or are they preparing it for someone else? Maybe this guy…
This snowman sitting in an easy chair would appear to be watching television. But wait. Look again. That’s not a working TV — it’s an empty TV casing, complete with rabbit ears, with the back cut out, and a potted flower placed behind the glass. Get that? This snowman is smiling at a fake, hollowed-out TV with a plant in it. And that plant’s looking pretty healthy for the dead of winter, which means it’s fake too. “Flower” here looks to be a few snow bricks short of an igloo, if you know what I mean. I get the impression that the two Happy Wood Choppers up there are a bit tired of his crazy, idle ways, and might just be planning to cut short his entertainment with an early thaw — perhaps to them, an act of kind mercy.
So what implicitly morbid scenes are on your gift wrappers this Christmas?
Christmas-y Weekend
This weekend was designated a Christmas-y weekend — for Amy and me to do Christmas-y stuff together before I leave for the Philippines. We dropped by the Postal Museum to get stamps at the Stamp Shop (which was closed, so we just ended up getting stamps from the post office vending machine). We viewed paintings from the Halff Collection in An Impressionist Sensibility at the American Art Museum (I especially liked the suggestions of incipient urban-feminism in William McGregor Paxton’s The Morning Paper). Over at Zenith, we checked out Altered States, the paintings of Drew Ernst. We also bought a table and a lamp from a neighbor and got a few extra pasalubong tins of peppermint bark.
After a Third Sunday of Advent worship service (featuring a lovely choral offertory piece, Paul Manz’s E’en So, yours truly among the baritones), we had green curry and drunken noodles at Bua. I bought the last few items on a mile-long list of padala at Ballston Common, and Amy got cocktail sauce and a bag of shrimp at Trader Joe’s. We then went over to the National Gallery to stand near the middle of an extra-long line and get good seats for a free performance by Nordic Voices of classical and modern Norwegian Christmas music (didgeridoo-like twanging voice effects from a new 2006 piece), followed by a quick trip to the 2006 Capitol Christmas Tree, before going home for a hearty dinner of shrimp cocktail, fish fillets, italian toast and brie, and sparkling pomegranate juice. Sadly there was no time to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, which I have yet to see in its entirety. Maybe tomorrow, I guess.
Caturday!
Here’s Pandora, caught in the middle of cleaning her face. (I was trying to get another licky pic, but she’s just too fast.)
The “Recent Content” section above now has a Twitter badge, displaying the latest SMS update posted. There’s a way to have the badge do multiple updates, but I’m not sure I want to take up that much space above the fold — my main weblog content is already bumped down enough as it is. (Update: Well, I went and had it post multiple updates, three to be exact, and just shuffled the “recent content” stuff around till it all fit. The funny part is, the help file above uses the user ID of the guy who posted the example, so it shows his Twitter updates when you use the code as is. I had to dig up my own user ID number by scanning the code of my Twitter page.)
Twitter is such a simple, yet versatile concept: text, IM, email, or post short updates to a tracking page with an associated feed. It’s effectively a weblog — with a limited input capacity, even, and without much that would be considered unique in a weblog service: friend tracking, mobile posting, profiles, feeds, badges, it’s all stuff you can get elsewhere. There aren’t even comments or tags. So what makes this so much more desirable than your average Blogger account, then? Speed and simplicity are certainly factors; Twitter is concise and instant, with minimal steps between command and response. I wouldn’t have thought that one could build a viable content-based business on the concept of brevity, but there you have it. Go Go Gadget Evhead.
Google Earth Flight Tracking Panic Moment
My brother flew out to Manila yesterday for Christmas, so I was tracking his flight using FBOWeb.com’s über-cool flight tracking in Google Earth — that’s FAA flight metadata mapped in 3D onto Google Earth and updated live! It was pretty cool to watch the progress of the flight as it headed along the transpolar route to Asia (though I still wonder why the route was so zigzaggy) when suddenly I saw this and panicked:
Turns out the flight data was simply returning a TIMEOUT because the plane had gone beyond the airspace within which FAA tracking could occur. So no, my brother’s plane did not come crashing down somewhere in the tundra. (I just talked to him on the phone, in fact — he’s in Manila right now.)
Update: Over on Flickr, wrastle123 explains the zigzagging path:
“Just a heads-up, the zig-zagging is a result of multiple data sources providing the original flight positional data. One source is more accurate than the other; that, and the positions come in at slightly different/offset times, giving the overall track a zig-zagging effect.”
The World According To…
After seeing Kottke’s link to the “map of the world according to Reagan,” I remembered linking to a couple of similar parody maps in the past, so I decided to hunt down more. Here’s the list so far:
The World According To…
- Reagan
- Pat Buchanan
- New Yorkers
- Singaporeans
- Garp
- Herodotus
- Eratosthenes and Strabo
- Australians
- Americans (also see The UK According to America)
Have I missed anything? I haven’t found a good “World According to Filipinos” map; maybe I should make one.