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I don’t check my bag at airports, but insist on lugging it with me on the plane. I travel light anyway—one benefit of a) not following fashion, and b) being regarded as a kind of weirdo/eccentric—and upon landing I get out of the airport faster. Sounds very practical, no? but this is just a side-effect of paranoia. I have this fear that my luggage will be lost forever, and I’ll be wandering a foreign country without a change of clothes and my stuffed leopard Guga.

This fear is not unfounded. I once took a connecting flight from Paris to Rome. In Rome I stood at the carousel and waited for my suitcase. I watched the bags go round and round on the conveyor, to be seized and taken away by the other passengers. I saw a lot of bags, I waited, I counted the good-looking guys getting their luggage (the percentage is higher in Italy) and waited. Finally I looked up and I was the only person in the arrivals hall, there was one sad suitcase left turning, and it wasn’t mine.

The airline rep was very reassuring—apparently my suitcase had been spotted sipping a kir in a cafe on Saint Germain—but you know how it is when people are lying to you, and you know they’re lying to you but you want to believe them, and they know you know they’re lying to you, but they don’t know what else to do and they actually start believing in what they’re saying? Yes, like a relationship. It took me several hundred calls to Alitalia to retrieve my suitcase, but four days later it followed me to a town near the Austrian border. This is a happy ending as lost luggage stories go—you should hear Ige’s lost luggage epic/operas—but now I can’t let my suitcase out of my sight.

I remember seeing a CNN feature about a warehouse in Arizona (or another US city) where lost luggage ends up.  There’s a plot for a novel: Imagine what they’ve got in there. Apparently the stuff is sold off, so if you’ve ever lost a suitcase in transit, rest assured that total strangers have pawed over your underwear.

So I have this paranoia. But I also have these episodes of what-the-hellness in which I  figure, What’s the worst that could happen? If it happens, then you have nothing left to be afraid of. Embrace randomness. I took the shuttle to Kowloon station, where they check your baggage even before you get to the airport, and I thought, What the hell?

At NAIA I watched the carousel with mounting dread, certain that my suitcase had vanished without a trace. Or worse, that it was visiting St. Petersburg or Budapest without me.  Then my bag materialized on the conveyor belt and everything was fine. (Of course for the true pessimist, this is an omen that a whammy is about to hit.) Does this mean I’m going to check my bags from now on? No.

Speaking of Italy, the Italian football team narrowly avoided elimination at Euro 2008, scraping past France 2-0.  Luca Toni must’ve had a dozen attempts, but no score. On one hand it’s terrible that the reigning world champions were so close to an exit; on the other hand, we get drama.

“Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat. Their goal is to make sure that the day’s work of a newspaper staff becomes an object of lasting beauty and excellence once it hits the presses. . .The copy editor’s job, to the extent possible under deadline, is to slow down, think things through, do the math and ask the irritating question. His or her main creative outlet, writing clever headlines, is problematic online, because allusive wordplay doesn’t necessarily generate Google hits.” In a Changing World of News, An Elegy for Copy Editors by Lawrence Downes, NYT.  

Thanks to the fabulous Stella for the link. We’re the two newspaper cynics (Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday is my model; if only I could find a hat to fit my giant head)  you see sitting in cafes having large, stiff drinks, bemoaning how everything’s gotten dumber. The world needs more ruthless, hardcore, steel trap-brain editors, it just doesn’t know it yet.

Stan Winston, special effects maestro and one of the main reasons we went to the movies (viz to see something we don’t see in real life), is dead. Winston worked on the designs of the Terminator, Predator, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, Edward Scissorhands, more recently Iron Man, and perhaps most terrifyingly, the queen alien in Aliens with H.R. Giger. View a gallery of Stan Winston’s work.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, originally uploaded by Koosama.

“Let me be blunt: “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is the finest post-Zionist action- hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen. That it is the only one I have ever seen — and why is that? what cultural deficiency or ideological conspiracy has prevented this genre from flourishing? — does not much detract from my judgment.” A.O. Scott in the New York Times.

Have I mentioned that I love Adam Sandler, have seen nearly every one of his movies at least twice, and usually catch them on opening day? I mean the really crude, stupid stuff like Little Nicky and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Love them.

In the early days of globalization, before Amazon and Google, we acquired our books on trips or relied on friends abroad to get them for us. To personally step inside Swindon was to have a bookgasm. Peter Greenaway saw the connection between bookstores and sex and used Swindon (or a bookshop that looked like it) as the location of his pretentious movie The Pillow Book, now remembered mostly for Ewan MacGregor’s naughty bits.

I hadn’t been to HK in years, and as luck would have it my hotel is three blocks from Swindon. From outside the bookshop looks the same, surrounded by retailers on Lock Road. Inside it seems smaller, or maybe it just looms large in the memory. Near the door is a table full of current bestsellers. It’s when you go to the shelves that you see where the years have taken their toll. Most of the books are old, the pages turning brown. These were probably the same books I didn’t buy the last time I was here. And despite having older titles in stock, they did not have a single one of John Le Carre’s Smiley books. Nor did they have John Burdett’s new Bangkok novels. The store itself has a slightly shabby air. It has been beaten by the megastore chains and the Internet, but it continues to exist like a beacon to the brain.

In our younger and more vulnerable days, the nearest outpost of civilization to Manila was Swindon bookstore in Hong Kong, a temple where you could inhale the scent of printer’s ink on new paper and get your brain high. First time I ever went to HK thirteen years ago, Jedi master sent me on a quest.

– To Swindon go you must.

– Where is that exactly?

– The street name I forget, but to that department store near it is.

– Um, Hong Kong is full of department stores.

– Ah! Joan Crawford it is.

– Mommy Dearest? Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?

– Talking about what are you?

– You said Joan Crawford.

– Padawan not listening. Lane Crawford I meant.