Freewheelin' Europe

When the bottom is reached, it will hurt. If there is a bottom in this European bog.

Looks like Bob Dylan was forecasting the European Union's dim economic future with his album 'Freewheelin' (1963) with such tracks as "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" and "Boots of Spanish Leather".

Is reality hollow?

Obviously Reality is a hologram, or, more likely, an illusion - for proof, look no further than at any politician trying to explain their policies.

Thus, a two-dimensional hologram as a 'virtual' boarding agent at the CDG airport in Paris is not out of place and quite appropriate.

Some scientists claim that we and our world are, in actual fact, just a two dimensional hologram projected from a real world light years away.

Obviously all scientists believe in Occam's razor and only propose the simplest solutions to explain the reality and won't use complex explanations - like God, for instance.

Flying wild Alaska

One 'reality' TV series I actually enjoyed watching from the beginning until the end. You may enjoy it, too, even if you are not an aviation geek.

Flying Wild Alaska is following the owner of Era Alaska, Jim Tweto, his lovely family and company's bush-pilots flying single-engine Cessnas around western Alaska. With no drivable roads for hundreds of miles, Era Alaska is the lifeline for the isolated communities along the Bering Sea coastline. Twetos are based on Unalakleet, 750 inhabitants and a small airport right on the seafront facing Russia across Bering. From that point of view they are as much educated in foreign policy as the ex-Governor of Alaska and the potential next US president. What's her face?

Jim Tweto, bushpilot

An Education

Sarah Thornton, the author wronged

Lynn Barber said in June 2009 about ‘An Education’ that tells of her fling with an older man when she was 16:

“Oh, it's a bad moment and it's going to be bad whatever happens”.

Not bad enough, apparently. Recently she wrote in The Telegraph:

“Sarah Thornton is a decorative Canadian with a BA in art history and a PhD in sociology and a seemingly limitless capacity to write pompous nonsense”.

Sarah didn’t like that much and The Telegraph was condemned to pay £65,000 damages to the photogenic author of Seven Days in the Art World.

The Judge sentencing The Telegraph to pay said:

"a reviewer is entitled to be spiteful as long as she is honest"

The difference between honest and not-honest in this case seems to be that Barber forgot the fact that Thornton had interviewed her and said so in her review.

Midnight in men

President Nixon on his life:

“journey to the mountaintop and the despair of life’s deepest valley”.

Are all men in time turning into self-parodies of themselves (look at Murdoch, Reagan, Ted Kennedy, Mao, Hemingway) unless they are lucky to die early enough (JFK, F. Scott Fitzgerald).

There may be exceptions like Eastwood and Philip Roth, but it may just be too early to tell.

The connection is Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.