An obsessive fixation for cheap decorations

(By the way, happy birthday, skylerbunny and Marissa Picard!)

Airport luggage carousel: remember them? And the most mysterious thing about them: how the same couple bags can go around and around and around endlessly even as the crowd of passengers dwindles to nothing, and go unclaimed. We spent a lot of time noting one odd-colored shell-type suitcase with the Dutch version of ``East-West-Home's Best'' on it. It got to be a friend among all those other identical-looking bags that weren't ours that all had the identical luggage strap wrapped around. But our own particular bags? Where were they?

( We spent parts of the day not-asleep, although not necessarily doing things.  )

The hotel had free-to-guest Internet, with a quite reasonable just-agree-to-the-terms-of-service-once-every-24-hours scheme and so we were able to catch up on all our necessary Internet stuff before going to bed. And we went back to sleep.

Trivia: The United States Treasury provided fifteen thousand tons of silver to make electromagnet windings for the Oak Ridge facility during World War II. (Making them of the normal copper would have used too much of the more needed metal.) Source: How the World Was One: Beyond The Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: Flat Earth: The History Of An Infamous Idea, Christine Garwood. It's much more about zetetic astronomy than anything else I had expected, and I had no idea Alfred Wallace had, sadly, set foot in the crazy. (I do appreciate the egression-style starts, though, where it's not clear how much of this is hoax or gimmick.)