Taking off...

Tomorrow I depart for the wilds of Hong Kong for a few days of meetings, spending 50 hours in airports and on planes for 24 hours worth of getting yelled at over three days. We're staying at the Meridian Cyberport, which sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel.

The last trip I had an hour of time for getting photographs and such, but I am reminded of a few tidbits that I forgot to share:

1. The trains from Hong Kong to China proper are run and secured by the Chinese Army, I think. With all the military types standing around on the train platform, it makes you feel as if you've stepped into a WWII-era movie, or perhaps Children of Men, except the uniforms are more WWII than contemporary high-tech.

2. On the train, fairly young ladies in matronly dresses and aprons will go up and down the aisles offering corn on the cob and soup and probably a bucket of steamed squid to snack on. The only time I've seen a Chinese person eat corn on the cob was at Leonard's barbecue several months ago, and he picked up the cob with his fork on one end and his knife on the other as if they were a pair of chopsticks. Nobody on the train got corn, or anything else, as I recall.

3. In the Hong Kong train station (prior to crossing through the communist portal where things visibly changed), I bought a Sprite that had menthol or something in it so that when you drank it if created a cooling sensation in your mouth. This probably only works when you're forced to drink Sprite served at 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

4. I also got a couple of bags of crispy mint M&M's in various shades of green. Mint M&M's are fantastic to begin with, but only offered around here at Christmas time, which is probably a good thing. It was also Christmas in Hong Kong when I got 'em, but the packaging looked as if you could get them any time you really wanted.

I figured out how to fiddle with the shutter speed on the camera as to take okay pictures with the available light shortly after leaving Hong Kong, so I'll probably be able to take some worth sharing this time around.

I'll post and comment as I can while I'm there, but I'm leaving the normal cell phone at home, so if anyone needs to reach me they should drop me an email.

The way the brain works...

The intro to yesterday's the show with zefrank done by a guy who bore a resemblance to Brandon Hardesty, the guy who does movie reenactments featuring himself as everybody. I was curious to see if he'd done any more, and it appears that he's up to number 17. If you haven't checked him out in a while (or ever), it's probably time for a revisitation.

Headache alert: He's somehow gotten his YouTube page to look like a bad MySpace page.