The Plane Flight

21 April, 2008
Los Angeles Terminal
About 10:45 pm local time

We've been traveling for about 14 hours, now, and are not quite halfway to our destination. Our flight QF 108 stops at LAX for a crew change and plane servicing for not quite two hours, so we have about an hour before we re-board.

Our travels have been pleasant thus far. We arrived at JFK about 45 minutes ahead of schedule, and were whisked through an expedited group check-in arranged by a very nice fellow at the QANTAS desk. I lost my extra toothpaste to the good folks at TSA -- it was a last-minute decision I made to take the extra tube from my office, with the intention of transferring it to my checked bags, but I forgot. No big deal.

The students this year have already shown me up. I have always taken a bit of pride in my ability to pack light, but several of them are carrying much less than I am. Of course I can make the excuse that since I am more or less running things (with all due respect to my able junior colleague), I have to carry extra stuff -- but the truth is that I felt the need to just pack a little more. Some of it is the old guy stuff that I need these days, but I'm carrying a lot of photographic equipment that is adding weight. I'm tired of digital, and I've pulled the old 35mm Canon AE-1 out of mothballs and will load it in Sydney for some serious work once I get there. So, the bags are fully loaded.

This is a personal newsflash for my nephew Davis. The Wiggles are sitting next to me here in the waiting area of the airport. Some Australian mothers with children in tow came up for autographs; I spoke with them for a moment about their good work, and some of my students took some pictures -- so I guess one of my personal missions has already been accomplished.
We're back on the plane now, about 9.5 hours left on the flight. As far as my body is concerned, it's around 9:30 am, well past the time I'd be getting up. My in-flight entertainment system is not working properly, so all I can do is to jump into the middle of movies, and I'd rather write in the journal instead.

At that stage of the flight when we are waiting at LAX, word often spreads about any special passengers we have on board, so we all learned pretty quickly that we were flying not only about the Wiggles but also of the rapper Fifty Cent (fiftycent? Fiftycent? FiftyCent?). I wonder if they might perform together?

Okay, that's sort of a joke. And for the benefit of folks my age and older ... Fifty Cent is a rapper, as I said. The Wiggles have children's TV show that is similar to Barney and Friends -- I make that comparison for two related reasons: 1) it is the show that my sons insisted on watching when they were very small; and therefore 2) it is most likely the show that my students watched when they were toddlers, as my students are my older son's age or a little older. For my generation: think of Barney with Dr. Dre (I guess?)

I only learned about the Wiggles a few weeks ago while visiting my wife's brother and his family, helping to welcome their latest addition, daughter Evelyn. Her older brother is the nephew I wrote about above. He is completely mesmerized by the Wiggles show, dancing and moving right along with it. My brother-in-law watches along with him, and reports that the show contains humor for the children as well as for the parents.
The Wiggles began as a rock band called the Cockroaches, and enjoyed some success. Their leader left the band to pursue a degree in early child development, and slowly, with the help of some others in the band, reinvented itself into the Wiggles.

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It's much later in the flight now; we are just 4.5 hours out of Sydney. The organization UNICEF has an interesting way of fund-raising on these international flights. The headphones that the crew distributes comes with a small envelope into which you are invited to put the loose change from the country you've departed. The pitch is this: you won't need that change and you won't get rid of it, so you may as well give it to them.
Now I have a special place in my heart for UNICEF. For many years, I have used data published in the annual State of the World's Children in my statistics course, and have thus read about and seen some heartbreaking stories and what they do to help. When I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006 and underwent the surgery, it was certainly tempting to feel sorry for myself and wallow in self-pity. I kept one of those annuals with me at all times then- the one that focussed on child labor. And every time that I started feeling that life was so unfair to do this to me, all I had to do was to find a photo of a child engaged in some dangerous and/or degrading job. Shame cures a lot.

We've had a bit of a bumpy flight, not horrible, but more than I'm used to on these flights. Of course, this is only my 12th time across the Pacific, so I hardly qualify as an expert. But it was bouncing around enough to make me feel a bit queasy -- I hope it wasn't the salmon.

Truly, QANTAS does know how to treat its customers well. The meals are excellent, the entertainment system is rich enough to keep you busy for most of the flight -- even when its not working properly. If you wish, you can stay informed about the progress of the flight: position, flight speed, altitude, temp outside the cabin (roughly -40F), time to destination, and lots more. In addition to the three meals, you get a snack bag mid-flight, and they just woke us up a little bit ago with juice and fresh fruit.

The students appear to be handling the flight well: a few minor complaints that boil down to the universal one: this flight is too darned long! (Maybe they should move Australia closer.

I watched I am Legend earlier in the flight. I enjoy watching Will Smith; he always seems to be enjoying his work so much. The story follows the Richard Matheson book more or less -- I read the book many years ago, and therefore may not recall everything exactly, but I think the intelligent but vampiristic humans in the book were more like the ones seen in The Omega Man, an earlier movie based on the same book. I'm pretty sure that the circumstances at the end end of movie differ a lot from the book as well.

I also watched The Kite Runner, a movie set in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the USA. It tells the story of two boys: one the Pashtun son of a professor, the other the Hazarra son of a household servant. The boys are friends, and fly kites together in competition. The competition consists of two-person teams of kite fliers attacking the strings of the other fliers with the goal of cutting their strings. The winner gets to keep the kite of the loser, provided he can run and find it -- this was one of the duties of the Hazarra boy, hence the title of the movie. It is an incredibly sad and moving story, taking us from the Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion to the era of the Taliban.

Australian television showed a series a few years ago called Bush Mechanics, and they had three episodes for viewing on the plane. Every episode of the half-hour show features four Aboriginal men from the Warlpiri language group north of Alice Springs, and some adventure they have that somehow involves a car they must keep alive. In one episode, they must drive from their village to another over 700km away in order to perform a concert for some children. The car breaks an engine mount, and its roof caves in from weight of the instruments, and the men must figure out how to overcome these problems. In another episode, they have to stop a radiator leak, make brake shoes out of mulga wood, and repair a flat tire with spinifex grass. Interspersed throughout are stories from elders about their dealings with cars 'way back when, and little vignettes about problems people have encountered with their cars and the bushcraft they used to solve it. A neat weird little show. I had seen two of the three episodes they showed of the flight, but one of them was new to me.