I gave him a 2 carton box as a "gag gift" first

Pop quiz: what's the most rational way to dispose of unfinished Atlas soup of the day? Counter-intuitively, the answer isn't "out the window" (spit take, I know). It's "flush down toilet" (but if you said "out the window", we really have no quarrel. ("Carefully put the top on the container and put it in the trash", on the other hand -- I've been watching you.))

Guess where I am!

The Doha International Airport Premium Lounge as Branding and Social Networking

If you ask a woman on the street about the Doha International Airport Premium Lounge, she'd probably say: "Oh, that's just full of businessmen who are interested in being productive and making their flights". Wrong!

This common attitude is all based purely on the Lounge's BRAND, you idiots! People in there are actually just relaxing and socializing while their laptops charge. Oh, you idiots think they have have unlimited Milanos because they're the most nutritious snack?

Business Lounge / Waterfall crossbranding experiment

Every building in Hyderabad looks either like a run-down 1980s-style condo (whose construction has just finished), or a 50 (100?) year-old lean-to covered with advertisements for mobile phones. Arriving at 4am was cool because I got to see all the municipal workers releasing the stray dogs into the city that they had earlier collected from across the country (seriously, what is with all the stray dogs.)

Everyone at the hotel was standoffishly obsequious -- one of their favorite moves was to ask "May I enter?". Of course you can enter! a) how else is my tea / DVD player going to get into the room, and b) do you really think that I'm being so anti-social as to walk away from the door like this without implicitly inviting you in? I guess they think it's a form of pampering, but really it just makes the whole situation even more alienating. I felt similarly uncomfortable when they forced me (in mock mortification) to expand at length on the at-bottom-irreducible reason I wanted to send the lambchops back (after about 45 minutes of interrogation, I muttered something that the waiter summarized as "Ah! Fatty and not much meat?")

My kindle broke just as a Jim Cramer conspiracy theory reached it's climax (obviously). Now the screen's all dark and line-y and the "famous authors" screensaver only fades partially. So now I can't make Emily Bronte's disgusting fucking face go away when I want to read something:

Fortunately, when I purchased the device, I negotiated a deal with Amazon, whereby, if it broke, I would have the option to purchase another at full price.

I spent some time cataloging and organizing the personal productivity blogs I read -- converting them from a per-sub-category grouping (Personal Finance, "Lifehacking", GTD Systems, Email Workflow Optimization, Google Reader Strategies & Tactics) to a grouping by quality (best blogs in the "A" folder, second best in the "B" folder, &c) and then back again.

This kept me occupied for a few hours, until, kindle-less, I lit a Dunhill and forced myself to pop in the Battlestar Galactica pilot / miniseries DVD.

Battlestar Galactica is terrible, or, alternatively, if you like plotlines in which central characters' (who obviously can't die this early in the series!) lives depend on whether they're saved before a countdown reaches zero, quite consistent. I actually found the pilot reasonably engaging -- the Ender's Game-style premise (earth barely wins the first war against space bad guys and then the second war starts), the idea of a (as it turns out incompetent) man-made artificial intelligence attacking us, the peculiar political power vacuum situation caused by 99% of civilization getting killed, etc.

After the show got picked up however, they went into "lets milk this motherfucker" mode and started giving you constant updates about all these terrible characters instead of advancing the fucking plot. I get it -- every character is "the best we've got" despite his personal problems! Here is the plot of one episode:

• The "Starbuck" character (edgy female pilot -- the best we've got) is asked to train some new pilots.
  
• The pilots are pretty bad, but probably okay for beginners.
  
• "Get out of here guys, you'll never be pilots!"
  
• It is revealed that earlier Starbuck unintentionally contributed to the death of her boyfriend by letting him pass flight school when he really wasn't ready. Maybe this is why she's being so hard on the recruits!
  
• Commander Adama: Starbuck! Stop letting your personal life interfere with your work! Let Zac go -- it wasn't your fault! (You're the best instructor I've got!)
  
• "Okay guys, you're back in training!"
  
• (Cylons attack, Starbuck is shot down, ticking timer until she runs out of Oxygen -- audience on edge of seat re: whether she'll die!)
  

And so forth, right down to the last meme (the last meme, of course, being the idea of the spaceship's captain meticulously working on a model ocean-ship in his spare time). But obviously I ended up watching the whole first season, and then, when I ran out of disks, reading episode summaries on wikipedia (and, occasionally the Battlestar wiki). Why? Because I wanted to find out what was going to happen, and which humans were Cylons!

Let this be a lesson to you Young Writers: it's much easier to make the audience want to find out what happens next or how some mystery gets resolved than it is to make them want to find out what a character will say next or how he feels about something, etc. (In another episode, Adama gives his son his father's good luck charm lighter right before the son is about to fly on a crucial mission and the son promises to bring it back -- AHHH MY EYES!)

Once I ran out of BSG content with which to vortex, I had that same nightmare two nights in a row and flew back to NYC. (It was the one where I'm responsible for the music at a party filled with cute poor hipster girls. I can barely keep up if I manually control my iPod the whole time, but they keep saying "just put on a playlist with some ambient hip-hop!").

Fortunately, I found the perfect present for Ilan right in the Qatar airlines duty free shop: