I’m at the Vienna International Airport lounge, which unlike the lounge at the Beijing Capital Airport offers free internet access.\u00c2\u00a0 The flight itself was a nine-hour transfer from smog to fog.\u00c2\u00a0 I sat next to an Austrian retiree who knows Chinese friends from his former job with the Austrian railways and had a hard time stopping once he got going about the delights of Chinese cuisine.\u00c2\u00a0 Even so, I managed three films: Spiderman 3 (I identified, except for the constant attacks, scripted romance and not having gossamer shooting out my wrists), Georgia Rules (I thought it interesting to have a Mormon setting but doubt the simplistic portrayal does them justice), and Hot Fuzz (yes, I’d seen it on the flight from Korea to Singapore, but I still laughed just as hard – it’s not for all tastes, but it yanks my chain well).\u00c2\u00a0 We landed with a bump and a bounce that set the plane atwitter with commentary, and it was indeed eerie to fly through clouds for half an hour and in the space of a few seconds see the runway appear, notice the elevated vertical speed, bump, bounce, go through that moment of “uhhh” and then, softly, thud back onto the runway.\u00c2\u00a0 It reminds a traveler of the constant grace accompanying me, and of the absurdity of\u00c2\u00a0hurling a big metal construction at a long slab of concrete at high speeds and expecting neither to suffer damage.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
I was going to close the China reports with another toilet humor sing-along, this time the best-known title of the musical Chess, but that piece has more lyrics than Waterloo and I couldn’t finish it.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe later.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe never.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m at the Vienna International Airport lounge, which unlike the lounge at the Beijing Capital Airport offers free internet access.\u00c2\u00a0 The flight itself was a nine-hour transfer from smog to fog.\u00c2\u00a0 I sat next to an Austrian retiree who knows Chinese friends from his former job with the Austrian railways and had a hard time stopping once he got going about the delights of Chinese cuisine.\u00c2\u00a0 Even so, I managed three films: Spiderman 3 (I identified, except for the constant attacks, scripted romance and not having gossamer shooting out my wrists), Georgia Rules (I thought it interesting to have a Mormon setting but doubt the simplistic portrayal does them justice), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}