[NOTE: I thought this was a Dreamliner already, but subsequently found that the Dreamliner hasn’t been launched yet …]
Up at 04.00 (albeit with an hour’s grace because of the clocks going back at midnight) in Seattle for the trip out to Sea-Tac. The repile in me protested, but the taxi-driver had the BBC World Service on when I climbed in – and so I got to hear the spoof conversation between a fraudulent President Sarkozy and a very real Sarah Palin. Helped ease me into the day.
On arriving in Los Angeles, I found the relevant terminal and not long afterwards boarded a 777 for Tokyo’s Narita airport,. My Argentinian seat-mate and I were alternately amused and spooked by peridoic announcements from the cockpit that the brakes weren’t working – and then that the avionics weren’t either. At which point the pilot demostrated just how digital modern airliners are by rebooting the plane, “just as you would your laptop,” he gaily advised. They shut everything off for a while – and then turned things on again. Happily the systems worked, at least for long enough to get us across the Pacific, though significantly delayed.
(An interesting example of synchonicity and serendipity was that my new friend’s girlfriend works on climate change in Argentina.)
Had forgotten that crossing the date line meant that I would lose a day. As I chewed on the fact, I couldn’t help but notice that a fair few folk at Narita were wearing the face-masks that Asians so like – and which I find slightly spooky. On the airport limousine (glorified name for a bus) in to the hotel in the Ginza district of Tokyo, several of my fellow passengers were sneezing or snorting fairly vigorously.
As for me, as I finish off a mass of work for Volans and SustainAbility in my hotel room, and begin to wind up myself up for a series of sessions with Nissan and other companies, my fingers are pretty much all crossed that we get the right result in the US elections today — and that Sarah Palin can go back to her family and to making mincemeat out of large Alaskan wildlife, rather than practicing the same skills on the US economy and reputation in the world.
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