Miscellaneous & an overuse of quotation marks

Seaweed salad in a sushi restaurant that plays things like "The Girl From Ipanema" on the loudspeakers, and witnessing Mass for Indian immigrants with Bollywood-tinged chanting in a historic Parisian cathedral, and what, really, is "authentic?"

Reading (the same lines five times, in disbelief) in The Economist about the Chinese controlling the weather for the Beijing Olympics, and what, really, is impossible? And what's still "sacred?"


In a way, plane travel is a form of time travel. In that you don't have to traverse all the land/sea in between to get from point a to point b; you're skipping all the in-between time and places that for most of history you would've been forced to experience.


just because