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<< Previous: Kanji SITE nearing relaunch July 21, 2001NY Trip Retroblog: Sunday July 8thNY Trip Retroblog: Sunday July 8th Homeward bound Up early, showered, said bye to Jane, who wasn't coming to the airport with us, sped south to the airport. Check-in was a similarly humourless affair, as at La Guardia the day before, and there were no exit row seats to be had, either. Ah well. Time for a quick breakfast, then off to the international terminal. Walked past a Martin Luther King tribute exhibition; someone had removed the "h" from "his", so that one of the display cases was labelled "Martin Luther King is Life and Family". I guess it would have been funnier if it had been a Jesse Jackson exhibit. Nothing of interest in the bookshop; I had a Time, an Economist and a couple of papers to get through, anyway, so I wasn't too bothered. One worrying new trend, however, is the emergence of the "religious business ethics" genre. Rob and I had a good chuckle at "God is my CEO - Following God's principles in a bottom-line world". Farewells at the gate, then time to settle down and wait for boarding. Take-off was delayed a couple of times, including one ten-minute session while we waited at the side of the runway to burn off excess fuel, as we were overweight for take-off. Obviously I'd rather wait ten minutes than die in a screaming ball of fire on CNN, but all the same - you just have to hope that you're not going to run out of gas over Hokkaido. Whoever wrote Delta's inflight instructions for movie-viewing ettiquette deserves to be shot. "Please lower your blinds to prevent glare from becoming on the screens; we hope you enjoy." From becoming *what* on the screens? Or is it meant to be some kind of germanic past tense? "Das glare hat auf der screen becomst." Cringe. I hope I enjoy, too. I couldn't be bothered to watch Finding Forrester on the eyestrain-inducing 12-inch monitor halfway down the cabin. What? No personal TVs in the back of every seat? Pah. "Mind you, I always have trouble reaching the controls" (makes grabbing motion over own left shoulder; canned laughter). BA and Virgin, with these inflight entertainment systems you are truly spoiling us. I did watch Goldeneye, though, as I was curious to see if it was still as bad as I remembered. Yup - pretty much. Although this time round I definitely enjoyed it a lot more. Alan Cumming, Sean Bean, Judy Dench, Desmond Llywellyn and Robbie Coltrane: "Walther PPK 7.65. Only 3 men I know of use that weapon - and I believe I've killed two of them." Heh. Excellent series of gags in the scene with Q, too: the BT phonebox airbag and Q's sandwich ("Don't touch that - It's my lunch!") It was a very heavily edited version, though, denying me the pleasure of seeing Famke Janssen attempting to cvush her adwersaries betveen her thighs - damn. I also watched Heartbreakers, which could so easily have been appalling. Instead it was very watchable; Gene Hackman in particular had me in stitches. Hack cough cough. Good grief what a long flight, though. Touched down at Narita after something like fourteen hours; straight through immigration (not everybody realises that if you have resident status in Japan, even on a foreign passport, you can use the much faster "Japanese citizens" counters) and jump on the first express back to Shinjuku. Home. Stayed up till about 11pm and then collapsed. Mercifully, no jetlag the next day - none at all, actually. My tactic of just staying up and making it a very long day indeed seems to have paid off again. One school of thought says that you should set your watch to your destination's time zone when you board the plane, and then go to sleep pretty much straightaway if it's nighttime at your destination. I, on the other hand, set my watch to destination time and then just stay awake. I never try to convince my body that it should be sleeping when it knows better. Stay awake even if it means you have a 37-hour day rather than the usual 24; that way, by the time you finally reach your destination and allow yourself to go to bed at a sensible hour, local time, you *will* be tired enough to sleep, even though a confused part of you reckons it's 10am. Works for me. Posted by chris at July 21, 2001 02:57 PM | Permalink |
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