Braving the Batu Cave I’ve mentioned already that Mike booked this entire trip for the six of us. He is literally answering his phone as “Brower Travel Services” at this point. Well, for Kuala Lumpur, which was a fill-in stop between our adjustment days in Singapore and hitting one of our main event stops in Bangkok, he just booked us to see the Petronas Towers, which are literally steps away from our Mandarin Oriental Hotel…
Bangkok Bound Tomorrow we fly from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok. That means we are going from a Muslim state to a Buddhist state (Thailand is 94% Buddhist). Our stay at the Mandarin Oriental here has been very pleasant. The facilities are very nice and the service is excellent. These people know who they serve and as I look up at the ceiling of our room I see another sign of that. There is a small…
Come In Rangoon I don’t remember where I first heard the expression, but like many good jokes, there are two guys sitting at a bar when a large-breasted woman walks in and draws their attention. The joke ends with a man with his hands on the woman’s breasts pretending to twist the dials of an old radio transmitter, saying, “Come in Rangoon…”. In some ways there are few places in American culture other than perhaps…
Singapore Sling We’ve arrived in Singapore after a long set of flights half way around the world. We are sixteen hours ahead of our hilltop (it is 8:30am Thursday here and 4:30pm Wednesday at home). Time zones here in Asia are even more unusual than my favorite weirdo time zone state of Arizona. Take a look at an Asian time zone map and you’ll realize it has more to do with geopolitical groupings than east/west…
Boning Up On Asia At this moment I am somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on a JAL flight from LAX to Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Since I had only ever flown into Narita Airport in Tokyo, and that was last about 17 years ago when Kim and I went over for a half-business, half-leisure trip that took us to Tokyo and Kyoto, I assumed that Haneda was the new airport for the city. I was…
NOTE TO READERS – GOD WILLING, I AM IN THE PROCESS OF CROSSING THE INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE HEADING TO SINGAPORE, SO BEFORE YOU START GETTING MY MUSINGS FROM THE ASIAN CONTINENT, I AM POSTING THIS APPROPRIATELY TITLED STORY ABOUT MY EV TRUCK, WHICH I AM LEAVING BEHIND TO REST FOR THREE WEEKS. BRACE YOURSELVES FOR MY IMPENDING TRAVELOGUE. Range Anxiety I’m confused about my EV truck and probably other things. I got into EVs seven…
Super Duper We just watched Super Bowl LVIII. That means the first Super Bowl was in 1967 and it was between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. It was a rout in favor of the powerful Packers of the NFL, whereas the Chiefs were from the expansion team AFL. It’s all about the NFL these days and there are five teams (Patriots, Steelers, Cowboys, Broncos, and 49ers) with more than the six…
Body Image We went to go see the movie Argylle on Sunday. It was Kim’s choice and falls somewhere in that genre of action and/or spy thriller movies that have campy comedy as a significant undercurrent. The gist of the plot is that a female author of spy novels, a woman who is a homebody who is basically non-athletic or even adventuresome, gets caught up in an espionage plot by virtue of the world supposedly…
The World at Large As we prepare for our big SE Asia trip a week from now, I have a lot on my mind. The range of topics that are swirling in my mind little pea brain that suffers from too little capacity and too much thought turnover and too much caring about shit is vast. I’m not sure where to begin, so I will just stumble forward. We have had Buddy now for seven…
Limping to the Finish Line This morning, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin held his longest press conference of his three year tenure in the job. The position of Secretary of Defense is always an important cabinet position, usually the second or third most important among the cabinet. In fact, the official presidential line of succession flows from the Veep to the Speaker of the House, to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate (strangely enough,…