The captain asked us to turn off all electronic devices, which always seems kind of silly to me. I mean, cell phones I can sort of get, same thing with laptops with wireless internet. If we cross the streams, fiery death. But iPods? Isn't my iPod required by the FCC to accept all external interference and cause none itself? Fiery death, I get it. That got me to thinking- if you DIDN'T turn off your cell phone, or if (heaven forbid) you turned ON your cell phone, or if you actually made a CALL from your cell phone during take off or landing, how would they know? Do they have some sort of cell-phone triangulator that pinpoints the exact seat the offending passenger is sitting in?
In my mind's eye, I make a call during flight. We're 50bajillion feet up, and I turn on my cell phone. All of a sudden, red warning lights start flashing and a loud klaxon sounds. There's an explosion from one of the jet engines and smoke begins pouring out of the cockpit. The passengers are screaming, yellow masks are jangling everywhere. And in the midsts of it all, a big spotlight goes "THIS GUY TURNED ON HIS CELL PHONE." Suddenly everyone's looking at me and wailing "whyyyy? why did you turn on your cell phone???" Finally, as the plane's about to do the fiery death thing all over a small rural town somewhere, the flight attendant, on fire now, of course, like we're all gonna be, crawls up the aisle, clutches my leg, and says "you... shouldn't have... turned it... on...."
Maybe I'll just leave my phone off. That sounds like a hassle.
So I'm sitting in my chair, and I notice that the proper-looking woman in the window seat next to her husband is reading a book on how to use her iPhone. She's eagerly examining the device, which is switched off, and quizzing her husband on all the ports. "Do you know what this one is," she asks? "One of them's a speaker, and one of them's a microphone! And here's where you plug in your headphones!" I am amused. I shouldn't feel superior. I mean, that headphone symbol above the jack is the same color as the plastic its fused to! But it gets better. She plugs in the headphones and puts them on. And then, every once in a while, she turns to her husband and does a wiggle-dance that involves enthusiastically pumping a finger up and down with her whole arm, like some sort of older-proper-white-woman gangsta rapper. Then she'll settle down to an enthusiastic solo boogie in her chair. Almost better than that is the husband's reaction: he calmly continues reading his news paper, with not even a flinch to acknowledge the finger flailing wildly just inches from his nose.
Looking below, I can just barely make out the primordial-earth that's been disguised by human creation. It's really very impressive, what we've done with the face of our planet. There's this lush thick carpet of deciduous trees, dotted with small lakes and rivulets connecting them. The trees gradually give way to marshlands around some of the swampier rivers. But into all of this we've carved, out of the porous exoskeleton that is the natural vegetation, houses and roads and fields and farms and lanes for high tension power lines. I caught myself thinking how similar it all looked to google maps, and then I caught myself thinking that the previous thought didn't exist 5 years ago. Fascinating, really- we can see the entire surface of our planet from our living rooms.
That got me to thinking- what's scary in a world where you can see the entire surface with the click of a mouse? Then I started thinking about birdstrike, which sounds all ominous and scary, but really it's just when a plane sucks a bird into a jet engine. That's pretty much a total bummer, for everyone involved; some poor goose honks its last honk, and then- fiery death. But then my brain made up a malevolent flock of kamikaze crows, a massive swarm hive-mind entity. You think you're high enough, looking out the window, and then one of those dark clouds below starts climbing, and you notice IT'S THEM. Crows begin to fall off as the air thins, the swarm beginning to break up. You think you might be safe, but... Okay, so that's kind of a creepy idea. Then my brain offered more fodder- what if deer started acting like wolves? You're in the forest, or your front yard, or whatever, and you see a buck. It perks up and looks at you. Its tail flicks twice. Then you notice another one off to your left. And before you know it, there's one behind you too. And the one behind you has blood all over its muzzle, and you notice it's standing over the carrion of some less fortunate creature....
As we bank, the inertia of our motion keeps gravity feeling more or less "down," as in, "below my buttocks." I get the strong impression that it is the world that turns beneath, rather than I who turn above. Seeing the dramatic curve of the distant horizon only cements that impression.
