Waiting for the plane to leave at midnight. I’m charging my phone using one of the cleaner’s sockets. Had mickey d’s, but they had ran out of quarter pounders and Big and Tasties. Would you believe that?
Category: En route
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The race is on!
Route Marker: Leave New York and go to Incheon, South Korea. You have $150 for this leg of the race.
See you on the other side!
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Writing wirelessly
After three years with my trusty Nokia 4 TDMA phone, I’m trying out the 6820, the one with the
built in qwerty keyboard. It takes a little getting used to – the keys are really tiny, so you have to use the middle of your thumbs to hit them, but I can get much more throughput than the tap three times SMS. Let’s see how this will work on the road. Seven days to my personal Amazing Race. -
About that Speech
Normally, I try not to get too political on Triscribe. (I’ll leave the political correspondence to SSW). I would like to think of myself (and I think most Americans would) as being both conservative and progressive (the “in” version of liberal). It’s not a contradiction — it’s a reflection of how the political parties have polarized themselves in such a way that the libertarian “middle class” of political actors are shrinking and are shut out (but are now part of that coveted 4% of the electorate that are swing votes).
Bill Clinton in defending the economic “middle class” made several really good points in his Monday speech. By even the yardstick of Republican values, W really has performed poorly. Fiscal conservative? Blown away the surplus and put us back 10 years. International isolationist? We just knocked over 2 countries, and managed to annoy a dozen others. Libertarianism? How about the Patriot Act and CAPPS II? I’m not yet convinced about Kerry, but he’s better at being a Democrat than Bush is at being a Republican.
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Chasing the Sun
I’m running after the fleeting twilight on my way to Seattle. It’s been like this for the last four hours: us extending the sunset at 35,000 feet. We passed by a thundercloud somewhere over the Pennsylvanian countryside. Seeing the real thing face to face is so much more dramatic than what is seen in the movies or perhaps the Twilight Zone.
For the next 3 hours afterwards, the characteristic rich orange hues dominated the sky. You could easily see what Ronald Reagan found so appealing in his sunset funeral.
Now the darkness dominates as we duck into a dozen clouds. Yet as the sky dims, the ground lights up with its own orange glow of street slights. Near, you can make out the details of the ground; far, the lights become a string of light, then whisps of orange filaments.