News That Stays News

SQ 529 April 9, 2013

Almost the entire plane to Singapore were young men, alone.  They didn’t have smart phones.  And so they looked around the Chennai airport with a bored attentiveness, trying to find in their surroundings something to while away the minutes.  I read the first chapter of ‘From Russia With Love’ (I don’t want to hear it), and was again impressed that Ian Fleming really loved to describe clothes and gardens and beautiful things, and seems as though he might have been rather put out that he had to write spy novels in order to get paid to do so.  On the plane, I read three newspapers.  The Wall Street Journal Asia is garbage, its articles often devolving into ‘this company is in country X.  I was able to contact their spokesperson and read their website/press releases and was therefore able to fill out the rest of my column inches with words about it’.  The financial times was a lot better, though it was still rather dodgy.  Nothing, to me, felt like the odd professor’s column in the Hindu.  Nicholas Nassim Taleb is right that to be cured of newspapers one should probably just read old ones.  I am more convinced that I should make a point of getting books when I get home, as a sort of Methadone to my online Heroin.

The flight from Singapore was empty.  The inflight entertainment taught me the days of the week in Russian, showed me a russian romantic comedy (hard-driven woman meets holy idiot, discovers that if only she would shut up and do what she’s told she’d be happy), and let me watch a really funny movie called ‘Atomic Ivan,’ which I’ll be damned if I can imagine quite how to get hold of with English subtitles in the states.  I landed, the drug dogs sniffed me, and I walked out the door.  I had then had twice as many cups of orange juice as hours of sleep in the past two day.  As the marines in starcraft say ‘jacked up and good to go.’  A silvery toyota rolled up.  “Want a ride?”