Denver to Frankfurt

Sometimes I wonder about the benefits of polite societal norms. Wouldn't it be more beneficial to our species as a whole if a mother were allowed simply to eat her offspring if it proved to be defective? This is the sort of thought that crosses my mind each time our cabin is jolted awake by the blood-curdling scream of everyone's favorite little tousle-haired brat who had looked positively cute before the flight but has begun to look increasingly like nothing more than a missed opportunity for an abortion as the flight wears on. He is the kind of child who will most likely grow up to be an insurance salesman or the kind of smirking governmental employee that makes people wait in lines. Or a drunk. You know, one of those loud obnoxious drunks that yells profanities at the top of their lungs. That is definitely in this boy's future. His parents keep trying futilely to stifle his shrieks but they can't quite realize that they were simply puppets, the first victims of a life-long sadist. I think it should be a custom of ours that everyone gets to spit on anyone who causes lost sleep on a plane as they line up to go. By the end of the line, everyone would be content that they'd gotten their revenge, and the perpetrator would be covered in mucous.

I am proud of the fact that I now know exactly what eight kilograms feels like. Both of my carry on bags, one of which was provided by Lufthansa, weigh exactly eight kilograms. I know this because they are not allowed to weigh any more than this. Apparently, the manual that came with the overhead bins states that they cannot hold more than eight kilograms per bag, the trouble is that the Germans took the time to read the manual and now force their customers to compute complex addition and subtraction problems with the contents of their baggage. My 18 kilogram backpack was certainly not up to code.

That's fairly boring though, I'm returning to my fellow passengers. Sometimes I wonder if people are ever actively aware of their actions. The woman in front of us is presumably a Lufthansa flight attendant flying standby (since every working flight attendant keeps stopping and joking loudly in German with her). She is wearing a frilly brown blouse and Calvin Klein designer reading glasses with Lufthansa-yellow highlights and she's generally an enjoyable passenger—I was able to catch glimpses of a newspaper over her shoulder during the first part of the flight—but the Airbus A340-600 has some interesting design quirks that don't quite lend themselves to her mannerisms. For instance, there is a fold-down cup holder attached to every headrest and, naturally, we have placed our cups of water in these cup holders. But since they are attached to the seats, they, of course, move along with the seat. This would be alright, normally, because seats don't really move that much. But my pony-tailed neighbor has the peculiar habit of crash-landing on every sit-down. Rather than lowering herself into the seat like someone with motor control, she touches down at thirty miles per hour as if she were still a girl bounding into her father's lap, breathing in his scent of German beer and schnitzel and farts. Consequently, my water has now been virtually emptied onto my lap, which is actually fine—it offers a bit of respite from the stifling temperature in this cabin. My father, much more sensitive to heat than I, summed it up well when he announced that he was either going to have to take his socks off or remove his penis from his pants. I hate difficult decisions.

On the whole, however, Lufthansa has managed to find hundreds of little ways to continue providing good service while their competition reduces customers to scrounging lice out of each other's hair. For example, before I ate dinner (which I did not have to pay extra for, by the way) I was given a piping hot moist towelette in order to cleanse my hands and sleep-filled eyes. I am not seated in first or business class. Nor did I have to bribe the flight attendants to get them to provide me this service. Everyone gets a moist towelette. This is after two drink services and some pretzels. Then we get dinner and, Lo! Silverware? Made out of metal?!? Wow. It truly is the little things . . . though not even Lufthansa can justify serving edible parts of the chicken. The rest of the meal was lovely and followed by two more drink services. And, what's this? People are ordering liquor and not being charged for it? How can this be? And look at all the staff! There's actually a senior flight attendant in charge of the airplane, and, no, he's not busy doing other things. His sole purpose is actually management. Wow. How efficient these Germans are.

Not to interrupt myself, but I wonder if anyone else finds it slightly disturbing how Steve Carell is continuously checking out the ass-ets of the actresses that co-star with him in Dan in Real Life, considering they are portraying his character's daughters. If you're looking for incredibly unrealistic scripting and the enjoyment of watching Juliette Binoche stoop to what she calls a film about American culture "complete with football and pancakes and aerobics," but what is really about no longer giving good enough head to land actual acting roles, then look no further than this film. They say Binoche is a good character actor and she manages to portray the single American female struggling to win the love of an overbearing father's impossibly flat daughters (or something, I actually decided I'd rather read a history book than finish the film) quite well by giving the role a bit of meta-acting. It's as if they told her, "Stop being so believable. Instead, why don't you pretend like you're Bonnie Hunt for this role." Sheer brilliance.

They follow that up with Juno which I still haven't seen because it's now way past my bed time and I'm pretty tired . . . although the first five minutes are spot on.

More to follow. Promise.
P.S. These are our baby shoes. Not sure if you've seen them before, but they travel with us . . . sort of like a gnome. Here they are in Frankfurt overlooking part of the airport. Not the most lovely of views, but what can you expect for the price of a day room? (Actually, with the price of this day room, I was expecting a butler.)

Dusting Off

I have been known to set exceptionally unrealistic goals. Daily blogging is one of the most unrealistic of those goals. This is best demonstrated by the fact that the last post on this blog was on April 1, 2007—over a year ago. But I've decided that my goal was too specific. I was convinced that I either had to blog every day or never blog at all . . . and that is what led me to forget this little place for more than a year. In reality, my goal should be to blog, that is to write, whenever I feel like it and as often as possible. And so, I am writing this first post of 2008 from the Sheraton Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany where I just finished sleeping off a nine hour flight and where I'm getting ready to board an even longer flight for Johannesburg, South Africa. Oh, and I'm going to dispense with the second person narration for the time being. How annoying was that?

April Foolings

Every year on the first day of April, all of the organizations who, every other day of the year, consider it their sworn duty to organize and share (mostly) accurate information with the rest of us, become totally unreliable for 24 hours. The April Fool's Day prank has been a standard of the Internet since its creation and this year is no exception . . .



I was first fooled early in the morning, while signing into my Gmail account. The sidebar announced that Gmail Paper was the newest service from Google. Simply select the messages you want printed, and Google will print and ship as many as you like right to your door . . . by the time I caught on, it was too late. The damage to Google's reputation had already been done. Their rather creative prank continued with this:



But the day was only beginning. Moments later, reading through Grist's daily witty (yet provocative) environmental e-mail update, I was startled by another story so original, it just might have been the truth:



Luckily I clicked through to the link and was greeted with another April Fool's Day message. Otherwise I might have ended up like these people.

Next, I visited Nature.com, to take a look at the recent happenings in science. I was prepared this time for a fooling given the general nature of scientists. Instead, I found this. Nature reported that if the ocean's temperature rises over the next centuries, the Earth will begin to spin faster, shaving off upwards of a dozen milliseconds from the day. That story may not be a prank, but as Nature pointed out, they had used a similar story as a prank a few years ago. On April Fool's Day, 2003, they reported "Day Lost to Current Trade Winds." The prank story continues:

Astronomers modelling minuscule changes in the Earth's orbital wobble have concluded that today should be 2 April, not 1 April, they announced this week at the Royal Astrological Society meeting in Milton Keynes, UK.

Chiste Inocente and Prima Mentira, both at the Centre for Spin Studies at the University of Barcelona, have modelled the effects of climate on our planet's rotation. Their work shows that a tiny increase in the trade winds is pushing the planet into a faster spin. Over the last century, this has shortened the length of the day by an average of 3.67 seconds daily, they say.

As the original author of that story, Nicola Jones, commented, "I'm astonished we got anywhere close to the truth, I just made that up." Who knows, maybe we'll even see a Gmail Paper soon . . .