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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   three movies and a sick skinny Scot
Sunday, April 8 2018

location: room 121, Ibis Hotel, Budapest Airport, Hungary

We'd gone to sleep absurdly early last night, so I was up and awake by the time the alarm on Gretchen's phone went off (at around 6:00am). We had a long day ahead of us, since we'd be flying westward six timezones. We made quick work of packing up our room and checking out. There was a breakfast on offer, but it wasn't particularly vegan-friendly. I had a robot make me a cup of coffee, which I drank during the walk across the parking lot to the airport. The morning was brisk in that way that draws attention to a need for a haircut.
There was no line at all at security, and Gretchen was loving this so much that I was worried it might result in heightened scrutiny. AS it was, there was so little for them to do that they were swabbing our bags for traces of explosive materials (we didn't happen to be carrying any).
There was a money changing place right there next to our gate, so Gretchen turned what she thought were her remaining Hungarian forints back into American dollars. Unfortunately, she only changed about half of what we had on us; there were still a few big bills in one of her side pockets. [REDACTED]
Our trick of getting two non-adjacent seats in the same row worked yet again, and so we had an extra seat to expand into during the flight to Heathrow. I mostly read articles in the New Yorker for this relatively short flight in a plane later described by Gretchen as a "bucket of bolts."

This time in Heathrow, we knew the drill. There the bus ride from the concourse where we landed to the concourse where we would be departing, and at that second concourse we had to go through a complete security screen all over again. Happily, this time things were happening quickly, and the only glitch was that the woman doing the screening noticed that one of my 100mL bottles of vodka was leaking. (I'd bought special bottles for this purpose on eBay, but they'd been proving difficult to seal.) But all that happened from that was that the screening woman offered to get me another bag to put them in. It made me feel like such an undeserving recipient of white privilege.
Once through security, we were still far enough away from our actual gate that we were directed to a train, which must've taken us at least a quarter of a mile.
Our plan for securing an extra seat finally broke down as we took our seats in the jumbo jet that would carry us across the Atlantic. There was a thin middle-aged Scottish woman in the middle seat between the one for Gretchen and the one for me. She actually wouldn't've been there were it not for some screw up with the flight she was supposed to have been on, which forced her to take the next flight, our flight. I quickly offered to swap my seat for hers so she could be by the window and I'd be in the middle.
My plan for this flight was to maximize the entertainment coming from screen provided on the back of the seat in front of me. There was no AC power, so my laptop wouldn't be able to entertain me for the whole flight. Furthermore, the plane had movies on tap that I wanted to see. I started out with some light material: an episode of the show Motherboard about advances in prosthetics. Then I began watching a film called The Disaster Artist, a dramatization of the making of The Room, which has something of a reputation of being the worst movie ever made. In The Disaster Artist, we're introduced to the Tommy Wiseau, whom we first meet in an acting class. He's weird, vaguely gothy, charismatic, inexplicably wealthy, and he has a difficult-to-place East-European accent. It's an entertaining film just because Wiseau is such a weirdo and because the nuances of The Room are replicated so meticulously. As the credits are rolling at the end of the film, we're shown a series of scenes from The Room paired with recreations done for The Disaster Artist, and their fidelity is uncanny. Many of these recreations were not actually used in The Disaster Artist.
Next I watched Downsizing, whose clever premise is: what would happen in a world where people could be shrunk to five inchese tall and live out the rest of their lives with greatly reduced physical needs? The film starts promising, with a solid explanation for what the impact of such shrinkage would be for one's personal finances. Then we're treated to procedure itself. Here one has to give credit to the attention to detail: clearly, a person being so radically downsized is going to need all of his hair shaved off and all the fillings removed from his teeth. Of course, it's hard to think of everything. For example, one detail they ignored was what becomes of a human voice when the voicebox is shrunk to a tiny fraction of its original size? Surely the pitch of the voice would increase by many octaves. But such a complication would've gotten in the way of telling the story. Still, for all the clever setup, Downsizing dragged for its final hour or so. The drama at the end related to global warming seemed hasty and tacked-on. I would've preferred more exploration of the dynamics between the shrunken world and the world of the unshrunken.
Earlier in the flight, Gretchen had been watching Dunkirk, which she'd begun on the flight out to London back in March. She'd found it unexpectedly compelling cinema, so I thought I'd give it a try. It didn't disappoint. It wasn't just the gorgeous luminance of the visuals or the usnettling grimness of the soundtrack, unspooling continously like a colossal sea monster beneath the whole production. (I wish my headphones had been better and there had been less airplane noise.) It's two hours of constant anxiety and relentless, meaninglessly random death, sometimes remembered with a posthumous lie. [REDACTED]
Meanwhile the thin Scottish woman in the window seat kept having to get up to go to the bathroom. At one point she needed to get out while Gretchen and I still had the remains of our special vegan meals on the fold-out tables in front of us. I'd never seen someone get out when so completely trapped before, but it is possible. You have to move the trays full of food into the aisle, and raise the tables. It helped that the woman was so thin that she could scoot around my knees without my having to leave my seat. Evidently the woman was actually genuinely sick because she spent several hours of the flight lying on a fold-out jump seat near the bathrooms in the back.
As our plane approached New York, I was watching some of a teevee show entitled People of Earth, a comedy in which aliens arrive in Beacon, NY (not far from home) and proceed to take human form and interact with humans in various ways. It was entertaining enough for airplane watching, but it's unlikely I'll be downloading the show with Bittorrent.
Re-entering the United States was about as easy as these things get. Though we'd been in the back of the plane, we managed to hurry around most of the crowd and avoid much waiting in line. And there was no customs ordeal whatsoever with our baggage (none of which we'd checked).
Best of all, Charles, the guy who'd held our car while we were on the Danube showed up immediately.
Unfortunately, it seemed the springtime we'd been experiencing in Europe was absent from the eastern seaboard. There was an unseasonable chill to the air, and the plantlife I saw didn't show much sign of hope.
I took over driving duties a little before we got to the Tappan Zee Bridge. Approaching that from the south presents a spectacular sight; parts of the old steel cantilever bridge remain, cowering helplessly beneath the nearby towers of the two new cable-stayed bridges. Interesting, the adjacent towers of the two bridges nearly touch at the top. But they don't, and are separate all the way down to their foundation.
As we approached home, we saw heavy snow on the distant Catskills. Climbing Dug Hill Road, there were the remains of recent snows visible there. This meant that there would also be snow near the front door of our house, one of the final places for snow to persist in the central Hudson Valley.
After our two week absence (which long for us in recent years), our dogs were delighted to see us. Our housesitters seemed to have kept things together and enjoyed themselves during their stay. The heat was running so hot that I had to shed some clothes, and we would take note that they'd not only eaten a lot of our perishable food but had been like locusts with out canned and jarred food as well. But they did a good job, so it was worth it.
Still, there was only so much I could take of R's spacey, ungrounded way of talking. I found conversing with him exhausting, though this might've been partially due to the fact that 5:00pm was equivalent to 11:00pm in the place we'd been this morning, and we'd been up since 6:00am in that timezone.
Z had arranged to cook us dinner when we got back, and she proceeded to make a meal of pasta with red sauce and breaded eggplant. She obviously had no idea that Gretchen does not eat eggplant and never will. But that was fine; a meal of pasta and red sauce is always a welcomed thing for Gretchen.


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