Parliament prorogued

Yes, yes, yes, it's terrible to set a precedent that you can suspend Parliament just to avoid a confidence vote. But to be fair to the Governor-General, it's not an easy position she was put into and this was the least interventionist, most (I hesitate to use this word in this context, because it implies a bias I very much doubt exists) conservative thing to do.

But what happened happened. Now the coalition should play with the cards it's got. Use this time to flesh out how they would govern, what policies they would enact. It would be great if they announced a cabinet and put together a concrete budget proposal. Whatever is done will be criticised by the other side, of course, that is the nature of politics. But it would seize the initiative, put the Conservatives on the defensive, and go a long way to convince more people that this is something that can work.

The majority didn't want Harper to be Prime Minister. Now let's make it happen.

Holy phoque!

First of all, all this is clearly and indisputably the fault of the Conservatives, if not Harper personally. Yes, of course it was the ending of the $1.95 per vote subsidy that galvanised the opposition, and that is why they triggered all this. Anyone with a brain can see that. However, that move itself is tremendously partisan and epitomises the attitude Harper has towards governing and politics. It was a deliberate attempt to choke the opposition parties and while they would certainly have survived in the long term, in the immediate future it practically promised to turn Canada into a one-party state.

But that wasn't the only thing; it was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. This has been building up ever since Harper took office and displayed his bullying, arrogant style of governing. The Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc simply got sick of this constant assault: defining everything a confidence motion to humiliate the Liberals, for instance, saying they liked the Taliban more than the soldiers, accusing one of their MPs for being against anti-terror legislation because he was related to someone related to the Air India bombing. I could go on.

The parliamentary system aside, it cannot be disputed that the entire point of calling anything a democracy is that it should represent the popular will. If you have a clear majority of the seats, and more to the point, 62% of the popular vote, that seems to be popular will right there. And specifically with regard to the parliamentary system, an indisputable rule is that you only get to form the government while you have the confidence of the House of Commons. When you lose it, when a majority are against you, you lose that right. By either standard, Harper cannot legitimately remain Prime Minister.

What can the Governor-General do? With the precedent of the King-Byng affair, Harper's asking to prorogate in order to avoid a confidence vote should lead to her turning to Stéphane Dion to form the government, especially when there's a formally signed deal in place with a promise of stability for at least 18 months. It still remains to be seen if it will work, but it's reasonable to assume that it can hold up. The Liberals and the NDP are broadly similar, after all. What is clear from the polls that have been made is that public opinion is evenly divided and inconclusive, and therefore, the consideration of constitutional law, as well as the precedent her actions would set, should be the sole guide in this situation. There is no overwhelming popular push either way.

Of course, it can be argued that people voting NDP and Bloc did not vote for Stéphane Dion to be Prime Minister, and did not vote for a Liberal government. They also did not consciously vote with a Liberal-NDP coalition in mind. But they did vote for their respective parties, which gives those parties a mandate by which they can legitimately seek power. You can argue that people don't actually vote for parties but for MPs, but just try telling that to the Liberal no-longer-MPs for whom Stéphane Dion being leader was a major problem in the last election. The Bloc in general is also centre-left and by some measures even to the left of the Liberals, although of course this isn't specific to their party and more a representation of the political inclinations of Québec. All in all, though, while it is valid to say there's no mandate for the Liberal-NDP coalition, there is a clear mandate against Harper. If 62% of the voters vote against you as the incumbent Prime Minister, I don't know what else you can call that. The legitimacy is suspect on both sides, but the democratic mandate is with the Liberals/NDP.

People voting for the Liberals would definitely expect that their vote was for a Liberal government. People voting for the NDP probably don't have that same expectation but are hoping that their party can wield some power nevertheless. I doubt there are a whole lot of Dippers who object to the coalition; I personally wish they'd thought of this two years ago. While it isn't provably false that NDP voters didn't vote for a coalition, it certainly isn't true either. The same could probably be said of many Bloc Québécois voters.

To round off, just a few points about this whole anti-Bloc Québécois line of attack:

- It is rather hypocritical when we know Harper was willing to enter a similar kind of deal with the Bloc against a Liberal minority. It's even worse when we learn Stockwell Day was willing to go a step further and actually include them in a coalition.

- "Québec doesn't matter"; "the Bloc doesn't matter", or worse, "the Bloc are evil seperatists and hate Canada" is a dangerous game to play when you're trying to champion national unity. If anything, this demonisation of the only fans the seperatist flames which had died down to embers over the last few years.

- Further to the previous point, in the last few elections the Bloc and even the Parti Québécois have toned down sovereignty and seperatism in favour of nationalism, and many voters voted for them on that basis; that sovereignty for Québec was something put aside and it was now primarily advancing the interests of Québec in the federation. It's not very smart to keep reminding them to be seperatist, because they just might take up that suggestion again. As far as national unity goes, the Conservative tactics of demonisation and marginalisation are counter-productive.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November

...the day we woke up from the nightmare.

Even as Obama explicitly attacked cynicism, I want to be cynical about a guy who voted for wiretapping, who will not bring universal healthcare to the country in which it is most glaringly absent, who hasn't shown any inclination to fight the corporate power which grips the United States and the corporatocracy, the extension of that corporate power, which grips, exploits and destroys so much of the world.

He ran on "change", but I wonder how much he really can change, and how much he really is willing to change.

But when they finally projected the victory, and when CNN showed the crowd cheering in Grant Park, I simply could not stop myself from smiling.

"President Obama" has a good sound to it, and I fervently hope it will be a presidency which fulfils the hope and, more importantly, is not ended prematurely by a gun-fondling madman.

So I went to JBJ's funeral...

Just for the record, since I highly doubt it'll be covered very accurately by the Singapore media:

There was a good-sized crowd on hand to witness the funeral, a small crowd but big enough to overflow the cathedral's capacity. Like about maybe three hundred others I ended up under a temporary shelter outside, straining to view the proceedings on a television screen.

It was not anything extraordinary, but then, what exactly were we expecting? It was a dignified and touching funeral. His sons spoke at length, hymns were sung and condolences were read. The crowd followed behind his coffin to the gates of the cathedral, some got on buses to head to the crematorium while others went on their way.

A massive outpouring of grief this was not. JBJ was an old man and his death can hardly be counted as a shock. The people were not there to wail and moan over the passing of a great man, they seemed more intent on witnessing the event and in their attendance, paying tribute to him.

The reason he was such an important and iconic figure was what he represented. Not just opposition to an overwhelming, arrogant and authoritarian government, but he represented conscience, heart, courage, soul, and humanity. He dreamed of a better society, a better country, and a better world, and while by the end of his life he must have known that his fight was futile, he fought on anyway.

He stood up for the ones who Singapore society seems so intent on ignoring in the pursuit of materialism and world rankings, the "exiles among them", the underclass whose existence doesn't seem to intrude onto the consciousness of most people here. He stood up for decency and compassion to a hard-nosed, heavy-handed regime which saw no need for it.

He was a good man fighting for a good cause. May he rest in peace.

Get a bucket and start bailing!

Any expenditure looks small next to that $700 billion. You could have seventy Large Hadron Colliders, for instance, that's seventy of the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment ever conducted. And no doubt everyone's already going crazy calculating how much of stuff you could have and what else you could do with US$700 billion.

Should the bailout go ahead? Like (apparently) most people my gut instinct is not to like it. Shifting the burden of the wild excesses of free-market capitalism and financial industry players run amok onto working taxpayers just isn't right, and remember, this isn't really nationalisation and no one is even talking about maybe creating some kind of public bank(s) or insurance firms. If it actually were the kind of accomplishing-social-goals nationalisation of failing private enterprises that some of the Republican legislators seem to think it is, then I might be inclined to like the idea. But it isn't, it's basically just tossing a shitload of money into a hole, to save capitalism from itself.

And that's the reality; if you don't bail out Wall Street, then the financial system could well collapse and then we'd really start to see the real effects echo throughout the more corporeal bits of the economy - foreclosures will have been just the beginning - and the world might head into a depression for real. And as much as the left wingers sigh and try to restrain themselves from jumping on tables and yelling "We told you so!", that would be terrible and no one really wants that to happen.

To summarise: rock, hard place.

Sounds of the Yamanote Line

Newly added to the "OMG I can't believe there's a website for this but I'm so happy there is" file, is this website with recordings of the music played as trains stop along Tokyo's Yamanote Line.

Update: And this one is even better.

How To Drain Lake Michigan

The first bit of a long short story I wrote over the first half of 2005.

---

It is both contextually and logically obvious that Douglas Adams had Heathrow in mind when he wrote that airports are ugly, some are very ugly, and some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.

Both customer and security demands have necessitated the matching up of baggage with passengers and their itinerary, making lost luggage a relatively rare occurence, even with the increase in hubbing as the great majority of passengers passing through major commercial aviation hubs like Heathrow or O'Hare are in fact on their way to somewhere else. Barcodes, multiple checks and the like have all made lost lugguage offices a lot less busy than they used to be. But all these advances, checks and techniques serve to make it all the more fustrating when it does happen to you.

For Kelly, something as fustratingly dumb as a typo somewhere down the line and the visual similarity of the letters "P" and "O" to busy baggage handlers and the mindless computer system had caused her luggage to be in the process of making its way to a small town in Western Australia near Port Headland by the name of Pardoo (PRD) instead of being offloaded at Chicago O'Hare Airport (ORD) like it was supposed to be.

At the moment she was staring, alone and in despair, at the baggage claim belt, her bag was being sent round in circles within the O'Hare luggage conveyor belt system as the computers tried in vain to find flight UA1104 to Pardoo, then eventually gave up and sent it onto the most distant destination convenient at the time, which was UA881 to Tokyo, in a fit of electronic malevolence.

Three days in Chicago, or in any city you are a tourist in for that matter, with only one change of underwear, is a frightful prospect to almost anyone who was raised and trained in the hygenic standards the majority of the developed world is used to. She filled out the form and the woman at the left luggage office said she'd do her best. Then, at length, for the United terminal at O'Hare is quite a long walk to the street, Kelly made her way into Chicago.

The rainbow-coloured neon lights in the underpass between the United terminal and the rest of O'Hare Airport are fascinating, but generally people who traverse that passageway are not in a mood to be fascinated. Airports, even when a concerted effort has been put into their not being ugly, seem to dampen the spirits of many people, especially jaded travellers or those going places for business. It's not quite Dante's Inferno, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here", but it still, it is pretty close. And this goes for all airports. Even in Singapore Changi Airport, which is consistently named the best in the world and is also consistently mispronounced, you are bound to find at least some travellers in a state of despair for various reasons, whether they have missed their connection, are lost and cannot understand any of the signs, are simply emotionally numbing themselves for the long flight ahead, or have been caught by Customs with two kilos of cocaine in their asscrack.

People invariably complain about air travel. There is no known reason for it, but almost everyone has their own story of aviation horror. Why people complain particularly about airplanes and airports when annoyances similar to those encountered in the process of travelling at four-fifths the speed of sound in a pressurised metal tube 9 kilometers above sea level can be encountered elsewhere in greater abundance is not known either, and no scientific study has ever been conducted on it because no scientist is that stupid. Everyone agrees that air travel sucks, but even though clearly the growth of commerical aviation has much, much more good than bad, no one seems to be interested in finding out why everyone thinks like that.

So we find Kelly with her toiletries, one change of clothes, one change of underwear, and a wallet, in a taxi making its way by the Kennedy Expressway to downtown Chicago. I would like to just skip ahead as if this journey only took a couple of minutes, but the reality is that the traffic was, in the words of Simon Cowell, absolutely awful. It took about an hour, and from the way the cab driver abruptly began swearing, it was clear that they'd missed the intended exit.

Kelly, sensing an opportunity to squeeze in some sight-seeing, asked the cab driver, "Is it going to be way off if you go up Michigan Avenue?"

"Well actually yeah, m'am. Your hotel's on Michigan Avenue anyway."

"I just wanted to see the, you know, Magnificent Mile and all," said Kelly.

The taxi driver gave a little snort, as if to say that it was overrated and better seen on foot, but oh well it's your money, which is what he was, in fact, trying to communicate, and complied anyway.

Michigan Avenue from a car is overrated, as a matter of fact. The best way to see a road, if you wanted to see it, is to walk along it. You'll better appreciate the nice bit near Buckingham Fountain and the Art Institute, and there's nice bas relief carvings on the Michigan Avenue Bridge which you can't inspect closely from a taxi. Also, a Chinese joint near the bridge which serves Chinese food like you'll find everywhere in the Western world, which is basically everything covered in sweet and sour sauce. It's weirder considering that the people who run these joints are, in fact, Chinese immigrants and should know how Chinese food is supposed to be, but apart from the expensive places and one place in Merritt, British Columbia, which does a great Sichuan Sauce Beef, they all serve basically the same sweet and sour shit.

Another observation Kelly made as the cab made its way past Michigan Avenue's junctions with Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario streets was that one section of the downtown had its streets named after the Great Lakes. She momentarily wondered why Lake Michigan was the only lake which didn't have one named after it before realising how stupid she was being.

It was a good thing Illinois was a relatively liberal state and voted Kerry in 2004, or the Le Meridien might have been burnt to the ground by an angry anti-French mob, causing her reservation to be lost. Illinois is also the state which elected Barack Obama, who, after becoming the fifth black Senator in history and the only black Senator at present, immediately was trumpeted by the media as the future of the Democratic Party and then quickly forgotten by the exact same media. But it all worked out and Kelly dropped her pitifully small carry-on bag in the room and went out into Chicago's late afternoon.

Kelly decided to confine herself to the downtown loop. A Turkish man sold her a hotdog outside Water Tower Place and she stood around eating it for a while. It was early for dinner, but also late for sightseeing since at this time in the day everything touristy was closing or was about to. She found a place called Flat Sammies and had a flat sammie - apparently, the Chicago word for a big-ass sandwich. So that was dinner, and it was still only seven. She had no idea where to go for some Chicago nightlife, and didn't feel like spending a few hours drinking too much and being squashed on all sides by sweaty strangers while having her eardrums attacked by thumping bass speakers, so she decided to get drunk in the hotel bar, thus minimising the distance for which she would be staggering around as an open invitation for a mugging.

The hotel lobby was full of people. Given the fact that a lot of them were dressed in exactly the same ridiculous way, it was probably one of those conventions where fans of Star Trek or anime or something got together just so they could feel like they weren't totally alone in being much too obsessed with their object of fandom. She took her seat at the bar, ordered a scotch rocks, and could hear a group of the attendees hotly debating the relative merits of Rasengan and Chidori.

Japanese food. She would have Japanese food for dinner tomorrow.

Her neighbour was a young man, about her own age, in a business suit. He had unbuttoned his jacket and was fiddling with a tape recorder. He hadn't noticed Kelly because he was pointing the recorder at the group. This went on for about five minutes, with Kelly getting less and less sure about her inital assumption that Rasengan was some kind of Japanese beef dish all the while, because from the conversation it apparently was able to break swords or something. Eventually the man sighed and packed away the tape recorder, turning his attention to his drink. He smiled at Kelly.

"Hi there," her neighbour said, "I'm Russell."

"Kelly," Kelly said. They shook hands.

"Are you with..." he said, motioning at the convention outside.

"No. I'm just staying here. I'm from St. Louis."

"Well, I'm a convention refugee." he said.

It was a bad joke, but Kelly laughed along anyway. He was nice, kind of cute, and the scotch was asserting itself.

"Actually, I'm a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and I'm covering these guys as part of the culture section... We're doing a piece on subcultures and I got the Anime beat," said Russell. "It's actually quite a good assignment. It's cool, quirky, and very, very weird, sometimes all at the same time."

Kelly nodded.

"I feel sorry for my colleague Leslie," continued Russell, "she got the Wiccans and people who think they're vampires." He handed her his business card. Kelly pocketed it.

"So I take it you're here to see Chicago?"

"Oh yeah, just looking around." said Kelly.

* * *

The lengths to which salmon go to in order to fuck are ridiculous, and also incredibly stupid. An entire species which lives practically its entire life in the ocean, yet needs to swim up rivers thousands of kilometers from its habitual home just to spawn is clearly a tad insane. Humans intent on reproduction don't have it off in maternity wards. The stupidity thing for salmon comes in because the rivers in which they fuck have an amazing tendency to be fucked up by humans, who happily dump toxic chemicals, sewage, and industrial waste into the water. So the survival of the species doesn't just depend on where they live, it also depends on areas which are really prone to destruction.

Kelly did not think of this as the chef shouted something in Japanese and placed a platter of sashimi before her and Russell. It turned out that he was also the regular food columnist and was paid to get free meals at pricey restaurants.

With a crack she broke the fused-together chopsticks in half and popped a piece of salmon, garnished with some vinegar-related substance, into her mouth. The chef beamed at her as she chewed it and nodded in an ingratiating fashion to convey that it was very, very good, it was like an orgy in her mouth, oh my God you are a fantastic chef and should be given a Nobel Prize or something. It is not possible to do otherwise when sitting at the sushi bar, because the chef has a very sharp knife.

Dinner proceeded in a reasonably enjoyable fashion. They talked, they shared stories, they experienced sudden bouts of apprehension before broaching a new topic or revealing an opinion on one of the many debatable topics which exist for a bunch of egomaniacs to earn money screaming on American talk radio stations about. In three words, they shared conversation.

Things were now winding down and it was at the point that Kelly was considering if she would like to engage in the same kind of behaviour the salmon she had eaten jump waterfalls and swim thousands of miles for. At least the human prelude to sex is a lot less arduous. Russell called for the bill, presented his credit card, or more accurately, his newspaper's credit card, though as long as he kept the column coming the editor overlooked the somewhat extravagant dining charges, and then scrawled his signature on the bill.

There is a certain, unspoken cue at this point in a restaurant meal where everyone stands up and leaves the table simultaenously. It happened.

"I'll drive you back to your hotel?" Russell offered.

"Sure." said Kelly.

"Hold on, I need to use the bathroom first." said Russell. Kelly had a sudden flash of fear that this was some kind of ruse by which Russell was going to extricate himself from their newly-formed relationship by climbing out a window and jumping into Lake Michigan, but her rational mind kicked in and told her to stop being so silly.

Urinals truly are amazing things and it is therefore sad that approximately half the population of the world will have no opportunity to truly appreciate them. They don't take up as much space as cubicles, are more convenient, largely eliminate the aiming problem, and if you place urinal cakes in them - true marvels of technology which, counter-intuitively, release nice smells when they are peed on - they make the whole toilet smell lovely. Urinals promote convenience, hygiene, and in tandem with urinal cakes, a pleasant environment. They greatly improve things in general. With all this considered, it is thus ironic that it is therefore impossible for the urinal to have been invented by anyone other than a woman.

Russell, in his state of excitement that he might be within a few minutes of a night of wild sex, stood in front of a urinal willing his bladder to hurry the fuck up. He was paranoid that someone was right now talking up Kelly and that he would emerge from the bathroom to find Kelly leaving with Brad Pitt or something.

Their mutual paranoia was sated as Russell emerged from the bathroom and they walked out onto the streetlamp-illuminated pavement together. Russell opened the car door for Kelly and got in himself.

It was a short drive to the hotel, the lobby of which was filled with the dispersing costumed crowd attending the second day of the convention. They dodged past a Death God, a fat guy eating potato chips, a dominatrix, the Fourth Hokage, and nearly smashed into Gundam Deathscythe as they pushed ahead through the crowd, angling for the lift lobby. Russell reminded himself not to look. There is stuff going on at an Anime convention that will kill a boner instantly.

The lift door closed and an uncomfortable silence, the type which hangs when two people who both want to have sex with each other but don't want the other to know are alone together in an enclosed space. Almost mechanically, they walked together to room 406. Kelly fumbled for the key.

Kelly was tingling with excitement, but she told herself, she had to play it cool. Make herself a bit of a challenge for Russell to overcome. Besides, she didn't have any change of underwear. She opened the door, and stepped into the room. Russell's heart thumped through his chest, hoping she would invite him to cross the magic forcefield indicated by the division in the pattern of the carpeting. Struggling to keep her voice confident and alluring at the same time, Kelly said, "That was fantastic. Call me tomorrow if you're free."

"Aww." said Russell, grinning so she would think his disappointed groan was for the purpose of humour, even though it was not.

She smiled and pecked him on the lips. "See you tomorrow, Russ."

Hopefully her luggage, and her clothes, would have been found by then.

* * *

He looked at his ill-gotten loot. Someone had obviously fucked up back in Chicago, but that was none of his concern. Kurosaki Hidetoshi would take it home and hope there was something nice and expensive in it. Usually these were in the form of Japanese products made by Japanese companies which now were in Japan for the first time in their existence. Hidetoshi quickly stashed the bag in his locker and clocked out for lunch.

"KELLY PETERSON" said the luggage tag.

* * *

"There's actually very little that's really original anymore," said Russell, "especially in journalism, where you have to adhere to certain style rules, with the result that every report reads like everyone else's. When you're writing a news item, it's nothing more than the presentation of facts... even when I do, like, restaurant reviews, how many adjectives are there for something which tastes really good?"

Kelly, he was amazed to realise, was only slightly bored with what he was saying as opposed to monumentally bored. This was a promising sign. He was also surprised that she was wearing the same T-shirt and jeans she'd been wearing since they'd first met. Women didn't usually do that - he'd travelled with his sister once and her luggage had outweighed his by a factor of three.

"Sometimes, I long to go to a really shit restaurant just so I can use a different set of adjectives. I guess most bad reviews are kinda founded in that really."

"Except when the music column says U2 is shit," said Kelly, "because that's what they are."

"Oh, yeah," nodded Russell. He made a mental note to go through his CD rack before inviting her over, something he was, at this point, determined to do.

"So did you get the stuff you needed from the convention?" Kelly asked.

"Well, not really. Everyone just treated me like an intruder. I asked all kinds of questions, you know, what does that mean, why does the boy have a robot growing out of his head, how come this guy has orange hair when everyone in his family has brown hair... but nothing. I guess I'm just not supposed to know."

Kelly laughed. "Well, Japan's really weird, so I guess that should explain it all."

Weirdness is, of course, relative. A while ago astronomers discovered a planet, for instance, which is so close to its sun and has an intense greenhouse effect that it routinely rains iron. Even on the planet Earth, things much weirder for commentary than cultural differences between America and Japan are readily available, such as the duck-billed platypus or Celine Dion. Once again, of course, this is also relatively speaking, and neither would be as strange as the planet where it rains iron, though many people do at times wish that Celine Dion would be transported there.

At the time of making that potentially insulting comment, Kelly did not realise that fully one third of all the clothes she owned, as well as a pair of nail clippers which could not be brought on board the airplane because a terrorist might hijack the plane by using them to distract the pilots by offering them manicures, were at the mercy of a crooked Japanese baggage handler. It was just as well that the comment it would have no bearing on her luggage crisis situation whatsoever.

The time difference meant that Hidetoshi was asleep while Kelly was remarking about how weird Japan was compared to what she was used to, but before calling it a night he had thoroughly searched the bag to find nothing worth keeping. Sony, Canon, Nikon, Toshiba, Panasonic, nothing. Not even something done by Finns or Germans. There was absolutely nothing electronic, nothing that remotely resembled treasure, except in the literary sense, but Hidetoshi couldn't read English, much less Kazuo Ishiguro, and despite what many who first hear his name think, his books are translated into Japanese rather than from it.

In the time it took for you to read the last three paragraphs, Russell had invited Kelly into his home.

"Sure." said Kelly.

There is a lot of sex in the media nowadays, and this can partially be attributed to the weakening attention span of the average American, for whom almost every movie and TV show is aimed at. Thus, relationships, in order to be successful, must quickly lead to sex. It is not possible to engage the reader with a slow build-up in a relationship through several months, years even, of friendship and love. Therefore, I do not mean to suggest that Kelly and Russell are complete hedonists, though to keep things believeable, you can attribute the quick progression to Kelly's limited time in Chicago. But suffice to say, that night, after a romantic prelude and some frantic fumbling with a condom, Kelly and Russell failed to save themselves for marriage.

* * *

The water swirled, gushing forth in a raging torrent as it entered the toilet bowl and raced its malodorous cargo into the sewage system of Tokyo.

He watched it, fascinated. He always found toilet flushes fascinating. There were different kinds to see and experience, as well. Hotels had some great variety, some using the kind where the water emptied into this valve at the bottom which sucked up the contents of the bowl while water from the cistern refilled the bowl quietly, without the splashing noise most toilets had. Others had what he had come to decide was "regular" and the most common, and the one he had at home - a gush of water which obscured the contents of the bowl while it pushed it into the sewers.

Kurosaki Hidetoshi also liked airplane toilets. The power and noise of the suction was almost intimidating, yet somehow satisfying. It had a feeling of finality to it, like the inescapable gravity of a black hole, pulling whatever you'd deposited into a singularity or perhaps a parallel universe. In this case, of course, it simply went into a septic tank. But black holes and parallel universes are a lot more exciting to think about than septic tanks.

A tattered blanket of greyish cloud had enveloped Chicago overnight and perceptibly dimmed the brightness of the summer morning, promising some dribbles of rain and a slight respite from the airless, dry heat which the city had been baking under for the past week. The winds for which Chicago was nicknamed had returned that night as well, and it seemed all was back to normal meteorologically.

Upon returning to her hotel, Kelly had been rudely jerked back into reality by the news that a message was waiting for her. It couldn't have been from Russell, since they'd had both social and sexual intercourse just the night before and if he'd had anything he needed to tell her he'd certainly done it over breakfast. Besides, he definitely hadn't come up with an idea for something to do in the 23 minutes it'd taken Kelly to get back to her hotel, since he'd gone to work. There was only one other likely source of the message.

Yes, United Airlines, or more accurately one of its employees, had left a message that they'd traced her lost luggage and would she call their customer service hotline at her convenience. So she called them and got put on hold.

The music made it seem a lot longer than the brief 30 seconds she was actually on hold, though she did derive some satisfaction when the operator's "Hello, United Airlines Customer Service, how can I help you?" cut off the annoying prerecorded spiel that they highly valued your business but were making you wait for another interminable period.

"My name is Kelly Peterson, I'm calling about my lost luggage." she informed the disembodied voice.

"Hold on please..." the underpaid Indian labour said while he frantically waved for the supervisor.

Thankfully, the music did not come on.

Back in Mumbai, the operator and the supervisor were trying to send her call back to the office in Chicago, which was walking distance from where Kelly was calling from. This is the logic of outsourcing and globalisation.

"I'm Kelly Peterson, I'm calling about my lost luggage." she persevered.

Quickly, the customer serivce phone monkey established that the reason the airline had not simply delivered the luggage to Kelly's hotel like they usually did when people lost their luggage was because it had disappeared utterly and completely. Its barcode had been scanned on its way into the wrong airplane and they knew it'd been sent to New Tokyo International Airport, or Narita as everyone insists on calling it, IATA code NRT, ICAO code RJAA - just a spot of aviation pedantry I promise I will not engage in again - and from there it had vanished.

They did not know, of course, about Kurosaki Hidetoshi, or his love for ill-gotten gains. Neither did anyone besides Hidetoshi himself know that Kelly Peterson's luggage, devoid of anything he could've sold clandestinely for a decent amount, was languishing in a corner of his tiny apartment, saved only because his work shifts had not allowed him time to surreptiously dispose of it.

"So what are you telling me?" came Kelly's somewhat distressed voice.

"We'll do our best, ma'am, but I can't make any guarentees. You'll have to sit and wait."