Friday, May 14, 2010

Travelling expertise

Every once in a while, I am jolted to exude a burst of energetic efficiency from my life of otherwise general complacency. It's when I'm confronted with an airport security checkpoint.

All of sudden, I'm a veritable blur of motion: out come laptop, toileteries, shoes and bags; breeze through the metal detector; in go laptop, toileteries, shoes and bags - all this, in probably less than a minute. Whatever I might be in my normal life, I'm not a faffer arounder at the airport. At the airport, I'm military.

So when catching my flight from Chicago this afternoon, I specifically chose the "Expert Traveller" security queue. Of course, the "Expert" designation just means no families with kids, and that you're supposed to generally know what you're doing. It's not like being knighted, it's not meant to get to your head.

So I was particlarly put off when the guy in front of me turned to me in irritation.

"Can you see these other people in the line?!" he exclaimed, "there's no way they're experts. There's no way they should be in this line."

They looked like perfectly normal travelers to me, so I just smiled politely but kept silent. I put on my conversation discouraging face. But he was far from being discouraged.

"I mean, look at them!" he turned to me again. "That woman totally messed up taking off her shoes in time. There's no way she should be allowed in this line. I hate people like that!"

Asswipe, I thought. There's always one of those on each flight I suppose.

So you can imagine, I was particularly gratified when the fellow walked through the metal detector and it went off.

"I'm sorry sir but you're going to have to take your watch off" the TSA guard reminded him politely.

He turned bright red as he walked back to place his watch on the x-ray conveyor.

Walked back to walk through the metal detector, and the thing went off again. I almost laughed out loud.

"I'm sorry sir but I think it might be your sunglasses" the TSA guard told him with the unlimited patience that you must inevitably develop in that job.

And so he had to walk back again, by now creating a backlog of people behind him, face flushed an unhealthy colour of purple. And the airport security queue can be a pretty unforgiving place to bungle.

"Hey move on already!" someone behind me muttered, but loud enough for us all to hear.

Boy, these "expert travellers" sure are a breed of their own.

I know, I know, it's a mighty petty quality to feel such glee from another person's misfortunes. But this one time, I was pretty happy the chap got his face rubbed in it.

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Bellyaching

For the past three days, I've been suffering a distinct pain in my abdomen.

Not the sort of pain that comes from ingesting lettuce inhabited by e.coli. No, I know that kind of pain intimately, and could identify it precisely down to the specific ingredient.

No, the kind of pain I have is of a dull, throbbing sort. A somewhat more nether pain, pulsing in the grey matter that exists between my ribs and my hips.

Caused by a ruptured spleen, maybe. Or an abdominal tumour. Or (and I shudder to say it), just excessive overeating. Chronically excessive overeating.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Is it too much to ask, for quality news?

I have a deep and hankering revulsion for CNN's Rick Sanchez, and although I hate for my blog to be a rancorous one, this time I geniunely feel compelled to spill the beans.

And if I were to put it into context, it's not really Rick that I hate. It's what he repesents. Everything about someone like him decries the downfall of true journalism: using twitter as a valid news source; the conversion of fact into melodrama; and most of all, the sheer recklessness of inaccurate information.

Delta and I watched him on live tv, pointing at the Galapagos Islands on a map and calling it Hawaii. A couple weeks later we watched him pull the dogtrick again, this time confusing Madagascar with the Maldives.

I find it absolutely dispiriting that someone like this, with no concept of geography, would be qualified to deliver the news. To have his own daily show on CNN!

I had almost recovered from these heartaches, and would have been happy to leave bygones as bygones, when he pulled another gaff yesterday by criticising the USCIS for something which turned out to be factually wrong. Again. And this irked me instantly - partly because he's just so frequently wrong, but also mostly because he criticised the USCIS. And you know how I hold them so dearly to my heart.

Maybe I'm just ticked off because every time he comes on, I'm compelled to change the channel (don't want his viewer ratings look any higher, even inadvertently). Which means I have to scrounge around for the remote every afternoon when he comes on, which is pain in its own right.

I regard with great sadness the decline of journalism as an industry. Of course there are still great journalists, driving the forefront of true, investigative reporting. But increasingly, the Amanpours of the world are fewer, and further between. But let's face it - more often than not, we're lumped with the Rick's of the media.

Although frankly, this isn't about Rick, as it is about us. What has our world come to, that we find it acceptable to receive news at such levels of incompetence? What does this say about ourselves? It hurts my head that we have resigned ourselves to this standard of ineptitude.

Monday, May 03, 2010

Sometimes the bridesmaid, sometimes the bride

Every year, Delta and I have participated in the Five Boro Bike Ride. It's an organised 45-mile bike ride around New York City, and some 35,000 folks from all over the country particpate each year. Basically, a good ol' bike fest.

Unfortunately this year, we forgot to register by the deadline, and so couldn't paricipate in our beloved ride. Worse yet, we had no one to blame but our own decrepitude, which is of course an inconvenient position to be in.

We'd just started settling comfortably in a morose sulk, when right then we stumbled upon a fun Global Mosaic project hosted by Lens, the photography blog of the New York Times. It was a challenge to people all over the world, to take a picture of wherever they were in the world, at exactly the same moment: 15.00 hrs GMT on Sunday, May 2.

Irony of ironies, that moment in time was exactly in the middle of the Five Boro Bike Ride in NYC. So Delta and I got to participate in the event after all, if not as bikers then at least as photographers.

You know how it goes. Sometimes the bridesmaid, sometimes the bride.