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Whacking Permalink Archive 14-3-03 I don't fly well. When I was a kid I got airsick a lot, but the being-in-an-airplane part didn't scare me per se. Flying was just..well...boring, but nothing worse than that. Hell, the left engine on a plane I was on from Mount Isa exploded, and even that didn't bother me. But as I got older, flying started to scare the shit out of me. My two holidays to Japan in '99 and 00' had spectacularly horrid flights in both directions: imagine sitting thru 5 straight hours of terror-inducing Clear Air Turbulence. In 1990, my flight back from Hong Kong hit an air pocket and the plane dropped hundreds of feet in a split second - the fella rising from his seat in front of us smashed his head on the roof. Turbulence is not fucking fun. And even when you get a break from it, you just know there's more coming. There's nothing I can do to relax on planes. They won't let you get wasted before you get on. I can't take my own bottle of vodka. I can't read because I get nauseous so easily. I can never hear the movie or music properly thru those shitty little earphones. And I'm trapped in that shitty economy-class seating: can't recline the seat far enough to sleep, you can't go for a walk to relax, there's the deafening drone of the engines, that ghastly sickly-sweet smell of the interior of the plane, the endless discomfort, the parched throat from the dry air. Each hour seems like a day. Hell, I found myself going to the toilet as often as possible just to be able to move around. Flying to me is simply an eternal agony of physically restricitve, tiring, nausea-inducing, terrifying hell in what feels like a flying coffin. There are few things as sweet to me as the moment you feel the wheels touch the runway. The thought is always the same - hey, I didn't die. There's no point hiding it. Flying just scares me to death nowdays. The flight to Japan was only just over 9 hours, the flight to LA next month will be almost 14 (and it's an hour longer on the way back. Just the thought of it is starting to give me the heebie-jeebies. I've heard the Sydney-LA trip tends to be very smooth, but somehow I doubt it. Can anyone offer their own experiences? I'm not a drug person, but I think I'm gonna be asking for some nice little pills from the doctor before I get on that bloody plane. If anyone can offer some comforting thoughts/advice/reassuring statistics, now would be a great time to send them. (And if there's any
kind-hearted billionaires reading this, the gift of an upgrade to business-class
seating will win you a friend for life.) Just caught up with the DVD of John Frankenheimer's 1965 WW2 flick The Train, and a darn fine effort it was. Burt Lancaster stars as a French resistance soldier trying to stop a Nazi train full of stolen french art treasures from making it to Germany. Starts off rather
scrappily, with erratic pacing & direction. And the sound is terrible.
Once the train is on it's journey though, it's a cracker of a film. Heartily
recommended. Tim Blair exposes
Margot's
shameless distortions in her commentary of John Howard's appearance
at the National Press Club. |
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