Shalom from Haifa!

I’ve had a full day at IBM, and a friend is about to arrive to take me back to the hotel, so I won’t have time to write much — and connecting up from the hotel has been problematical so far, so I make no promises about later on.

Besides, if you want to know the truth, I’d rather be out in the city than sitting in my hotel room writing about it.

By the way, the three movies I watched on the flight from New York to Tel Aviv were Best in Show, which I really enjoyed and wouldn’t mind seeing again; Charlie’s Angels, which was better than I expected, but rather mindless (actually, that’s a good combination for a movie one’s going to watch on a long transatlantic flight!); and Almost Famous, which I’m afraid I had a hard time concentrating on, since I was watching it during the last two hours before arrival, and I’m sure that most of my brain cells weren’t active by then. I’d like to see it while I’m awake sometime.

While I’m waiting for the car service to show up to take me to SFO so I can fly to Haifa (and then on to Hursley and Paris), a few timely or amusing links:

• The
  PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address [courtesy David Bratman via Rich McAllister]
• Some ideas for a couple of days in Paris, from today’s Murky Nooz

More later from some airport, perhaps….

A preview of the next recession

Much to my surprise, checking in for the flight to Tel Aviv was as quick as checking in for any other international flight — the other times I’ve flown to Israel, I’ve had to hand-carry our checked luggage to the super X-Ray machine before they’d take it — but in both cases, I was changing airlines in London from American to British. This time, the trip is all on TWA, and I guess they handle Tel Aviv luggage often enough that they know how to do it without making me do the schlepping.

Since I had plenty of time to kill before my flight, I decided to circumnavigate the airport and look at the art exhibits. SFO runs a very active museum program, and the exhibits are often very interesting; today, I enjoyed the exhibit of police headgear through the years and around the world and the exhibit of strange collectibles (swizzle sticks, Elvis memorabilia, anything with “Bluebird” on it, to name but three) and interviews with the collectors. Unfortunately, they were in the process of changing over a couple of the exhibits, but it was definitely better than sitting around for an extra hour.

My route took me through the Central Terminal, which was the International Terminal until late last year. Now, it looks like this:

I hope it’s not a preview of things to come if we slip into recession — my driver was telling me that the car service’s business has definitely fallen off in the past few months.

Now, onward to JFK and TLV!