Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Notes from the flight to Las Vegas (via email)
Since I have five hours on the flight out to Las Vegas, I thought I would live-blog my flight from US Airways Flight 99, seat 22D. Of course, this won't post until we're wheels down, but I'm hoping that you will nevertheless feel as though you're along for the ride.
I'm actually typing this out on my Blackberry so that it will post when we land instead of the next time I sync my laptop, so please forgive the typos and other sins of thumb-typing.
I'm digging through the 3802 emails in my Inbox while I wait for the beverage service libations to come around. My five-spot is at the ready. My thirst, which is deep, will be slaked.
Digging through emails for industry analysts, I note that it is "Digestive
Disease Week": DDW is the largest meeting of the year for gastrointestinal professionals. The meeting, which is being held in Chicago this year, will feature clinical symposia on a broad range of GI topics. The hot technology will be Given Imaging's "PillCam" technology, the applications for which I would think are obvious even to our readership. My understanding is that it is considered extremely unprofessional to use the words "fart" or "technicolor yawn" during DDW's scientific sessions, but for all I know I'm misinformed.
On the way to the lavatory, I noticed a woman in an aisle seat reading Freakonomics. Naturally, I stopped all traffic in the aisle to talk to her about it. It's a long flight, and there's no reason not to be neighborly.
At the lavatory cluster, the line draws down to just me and a woman. She points to one of the lavatories and says "that guy's been in there a while - I don't think I want to use that one." Agreed. You don't want to use an airplane lavatory after it has been occupied for too long. Let somebody else, er, wipe the slate clean.
Watching the Dennis Quaid future classic, "In Good Company." Drinking a Heineken. Eating the giant bag of peanuts that I bought at the airport.
The movie isn't bad as romantic comedies go, apart from its deeply inaccurate and contemptuous portrayal of corporate America. But that's par for the course from Hollywood.
The flight attendants on this plane enforce seatbelts very diligently, even though the ride is smooth as silk. Is that a US Airways thing, or do they know something I don't?
I've resumed chewing through emails.
Wandered down the aisle to talk to my friend. He was doing emails.
Wandered back to my seat, and on the way got in a conversation with the Freakonomics woman about Christopher Hitchens (I'm starting his Letters to a Young Contrarian. She reports that she loves his writing because he is "so clear." Indeed. All friendly-like, I say that I also like to see him on television because he is so eloquent. She reports that she doesn't have a television. She has money to fly to Vegas and buy hardcover books and she doesn't own a television? What kind of freak-o are we talking to here? I high-tail it back to 22D, hoping for another beverages service.
Hitchens, writing in July 2001, addressed the soul of every blogger writing then and now, or at least every blogger who is not an utter waste of bandwidth:
It's too much to expect to live in an age that is actually
propitious for dissent. And most people, most of the time, prefer to seek approval or security. Nor should this surprise us (and nor, incidentally, are those desires contemptible in themselves). Nonetheless,there are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge that debt or not.
Perhaps Hitchens is deluded with self-importance to identify humanity's debt to the contrarian, but I don't think so. He wrote these words before September 11, and therefore before his break with the left. Indeed, he had just testified against the canonization of Mother Theresa, and was still reveling in his struggle with Henry Kissinger over that man's place in history. It would be but two months later that al Qaeda's war would inspire Hitchens again to the contrary position, this time against the intellectual left's "herd of independent minds." Hitchens is one of few established progressive intellectuals to have broken from the herd, and in such role has more eloquently furnished the arguments for resisting Islamo-Arab fascism than most of the hawks on the right who have actually planned, directed and fought the war. In this capacity he is a contrarian without being a dissenter, for while he is opposing conventional wisdom, he is supporting the government. In July 2001, Hitchens was struggling to define a difference between contrarians and dissenters. A few months later, the difference would be much more evident.
We're being welcomed to Las Vegas. That's it for now.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed May 18, 11:18:00 PM:
impressive work on the blackberry. BTW - don't wait for the beverage service.......er, just go to the galley, man!
- Crusader
