What made you smile today?

life.

Oh yeah, AND the Red Sox.

I took some photos last weekend at our local "apple fest", just for fun (because is the same every year).
One of the saxophone players of the band playing at that time on the stand run fater me when I left (and Mrs Walter looked at the numerous art stalls), and asked me of I could send him those photos.

Today I got an engagement: photos for their website, their brochure and the coming cd's.

yeah, even a leaky kitchen ceiling couldn't dampen my mood this morning...

Congrats to the Red Sox and to the Cubbies.

E.G. just forwarded an email I'd sent him -- in 1994! It featured some homemade ascii art. :-)

Walter, a new career for you...

Yesterday, I witnessed a story that I thought existed only in bad novels.

It happened on a flight from Munich to Philadelphia. I had an aisle seat in the last row. To the left of me, in the two seats across the aisle, sat a slim, long-haired, blond German woman in her mid 30s, and a more voluptuous, black-haired American, maybe late 20s or early 30s. (She had the window seat on the left, he the aisle seat on the right.)

As soon as the two sat down, they started talking. "Hi, I'm so-and-so, I'm going to X." "Nice to meet you, so-and-so, I'm such-and-such, and I'm going to Y". "Dein Englisch ist sehr gut!" "Thank you, but your German is excellent as well!". Your standard neighbor-to-neighbor conversation.

But it didn't stay standard for long. The plane had barely taken off when conversing turned into flirting, then heavy flirting, then intense flirting. (So intense even a flirting-insensitive nerd like me could tell.) Three hours into the flight, they exchanged contact data on airline napkins. Four hours, and they started finding reasons for touching each other. The first kiss must have happened after about five hours.

Six hours into the flight, she rested her head in his lap as if sleeping, a dark-blue nylon airline blanket around it. At this point I deliberately tried not to look anymore and concentrate on the movie instead. But in my lateral view I couldn't help noticing the slight rhythmic movement of her head. Nor could I help noticing the small, happy sigh he eventually gave, after which she she sat up again, discretely spreading the blanket over his whole lap.

Half an hour later, my self-discipline lapsed for a moment, and I did look again. Now the blanket was in her lap, gently pulsing, his left hand underneath it. Her right leg was dangling from his left one.

The remaining two hours of the flight, they spent napping in each other's arms, giving each other neck rubs, and playfully haggling like an old couple. They left the plane arm-in-arm before they split near immigration, where the "US citizens" line separates from the "Visitors" line. The last glimpse I caught of them was when I saw him at the baggage claim, alone, exchanging small-talk with an elderly lady. I assume her waiting line was longer than ours, and that she caught up with him at the baggage claim, but I didn't stay near him to see. I figured I had already witnessed more than I was supposed to anyway.

I said in the beginning that I didn't think this happens outside of bad novels. I still don't think you'd ever see something like this in a movie. Clean movies would avoid the plot because there clearly was sex involved. Dirty movies, by contrast, would avoid it because they thrive on the naughtiness factor of sex. And there was absolutely nothing naughty about this couple. They were just insanely in love at first sight.

In all honesty, I envied them for their happiness -- but they made me smile a lot, too.

I could get up earlier this morning.

Thomas - that is a crazy story. I wonder how often that kind of thing happens. And then how often anyone notices when it does!

i fly a lot and it NEVER happens!!!

My son drove his car today. Things are getting better.

dag, Thomas wrote that far better than a National Enquirer reporter could have done.

you should have sold tickets for the show Thomas

i bet thomas will be posting on YOUTUBE ! :wink:

ps. my guess is the two were just trying to disprove that there are persistent "hard feelings" between germans and americans !

The American writer James Michener wrote many long, heavily researched, and, did I mention, long novels: Hawaii, and The Source, amongst them. But he also, quite late, wrote a book called The Drifters. It included a bunch of young characters kind of, um, drifting through North Africa and perhaps Israel. I forget the plot, but it included a scene much like Thomas describes. I could never figure out why Michener published that book.

I was wondering about this too, and think that both happens very rarely. It was important, at least in this case, that they were sitting in the last row. There you don't have people sitting behind you who might otherwise look, and you do sit right in front of a wall that gives you a minimal amount of privacy. I don't think you can realistically have oral or manual sex in any row but the last one. And even that doesn't work on every plane. You have to be on a plane with two columns, not three, between the window and the aisle. That means no sex on jumbo jets.

As to how many people notice, I believe I was the only one on the plane in a position to observe them without consciously trying or rudely staring. So the share of customers who noticed was less than one percent. The couple was very discreet in doing what it did.


Or maybe you just never notice?


Thanks -- but what's the reference to the National Enquirer? Is Dag writing for it?

perhaps thomas should have brushed up on his knowledge of philadelphia during the flight rather than ... :wink:

I guess it happens more often than people think...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNIxKdqBRYQ

went to get the newspaper this morning, found a cat sitting at the bottom of the steps.

no collar, white and light grey, very clean.

i go "pss-pss-pss-pss-pss", so the cat comes up.
i administer some scritchin' on the back of the neck.
it responded by doing some figure-8's between my ankles.

so i let in for a bowl of milk, and sent it on it's way...

i beg your pardon, but i believe i would notice if someone next to me was groping me.