And Sigur Ros sped up sounds sort of like Justin Bieber.

17:45 to go, Johor Bahru: seatbelt sign off. Bust out my half-finished copy of The Rational Optimist.

15:15, Thailand: take a break from reading. Matt Ridley was a terrible bank manager, but he's a brilliant science writer. Good to see he's decided to stick to his doctrine of specialization and trade.

15:14: leaf through inflight duty-free catalog. What on earth is a Lancome Duo Virtuose Precious Cells and why does it sound like something pilfered from a Genentech lab?

13:40, northern Laos: finish The Rational Optimist. What now? Walk around a bit.

13:39: The guy four seats in front of me looks exactly like Weird Al Yankovic. Or maybe Slash.

13:38: Gruen Nation. The ABC's MP4 video downloads work great on iGadgets; feel momentarily guilty that I'm no longer paying my eight cents a day.

13:37: Where does Todd Sampson get his tee-shirts?

13:15, Laos-China border: John Hewson is a really good sport. Can we get him on TV more often?

12:15, northern China deserts: stare out window. Try to watch Treme. It's by David Simon, therefore it must be good.

12:00: give up on Treme. Overtaken by sleep.

10:30, Lake Baikal: wake up. Slept through Mongolia. Not sure I missed anything.

09:15, Siberia: looks like we're headed straight north off the top of the map. I knew I shoulda taken that left toin at Vladivoishtok.

09:00: bust out camera, take some photos of rainbow clouds. Double rainbow clouds. What do they mean?

08:30 to go, Severnaya Zemlya: The enormous bloke in front of me in an Australian Bodybuilding Championships tee-shirt is listening to the Glee soundtrack. Yeah. Don't stop believin'.

08:00, Arctic Ocean: "feet wet", as they say - or as they would say if this were a Tom Clancy novel. But Tom Clancy novels don't have stewardesses serving chocolate cake. (Or do they? I've never read Without Remorse; maybe it's in there.)

7:30: the little plane on the flight status screen has just flown off the top of the map. This doesn't look like Narnia.

7:25: first sight of Arctic icecap. NOW it looks like Narnia. "always-winter-but-never-Christmas" Narnia, but still.

7:00, 38,000 feet above the Arctic ice: It's just gone 9:30am in NYC. Need to stay awake or risk world-class jet lag. One thing making it easier: through a quirk of timing (taking off mid-morning, flying through the 24-hour-sunlight zone above the Arctic Circle, and landing late afternoon), the sun never goes down for the whole 18-hour flight.

6:30: picturesque broken pack ice out the window.

6:00, 87 degrees north: the most northerly screening ever of Yes We Canberra. NEW WORLD RECORD.

More after the jump...

5:00, little knobby bit at the top left of Greenland: It is a desert out there. Utterly lifeless brown hills, with glaciers dotting the valleys, and little eroded canyons where rivers might have flowed tens of thousands of years ago. It is surreal. And clear as a bell. The pix are spectacular.

4:55: "Would you like a snack?" "Sure, I'll have, um... Damn it, I can't see a thing. Are those chips? I guess those are chips." The difference between a blinding Arctic summer landscape and a darkened airplane interior does not do wonders for your night vision. (1/2000 @ f4 to 20" @f1.4 sez camera: how many stops?)

4:30, Baffin Bay: feet wet again; put down the camera and fire up last night's PM, because I am a nerd. It's 2am in Sydney now, so we might have a new Prime Minister. Or the same Prime Minister. Or a hung parliament, and no Prime Minister at all. It's Schrodinger's Election.

3:15, Hudson Bay: overcast on the Bay; blinding white clouds from horizon to horizon, so photos are out. Plants vs Zombies time.

2:45, far northern Quebec: enough zombies. Still overcast outside. Been in the air for fifteen-and-a-bit hours, and received a radiation dose roughly equal to a chest x-ray (there's one for all you fear-of-flying types).

2:40: exploring corners of my iTunes library that haven't seen sunlight in years. I'm the piano player / down at Eddie's bar / and Rachel, she's the waitress / who wants to be a star...

2:35: speaking of things that haven't seen sunlight in years, can we open the shades yet? It's like we've got a planeload of vampires.

2:30: OH LAAAWWWDD I'M A POOR MAN / WITH ALL THE RICHES AAAIII CAN HOOOLLDD.....

2:20: Hey, maybe all the radiation will give me superpowers. RRAARRGGHH. HULK SMASH. HULK STILL NOT FOUND / WHAT HULK LOOKING FOR

2:05: Why are Mr. Mister carrying a laser down the road that they must travel? And are we talking a little pocket laser pointer, or one of those big industrial-grade lasers?

1:45: Hey, they've got "Classic Comedy" on the inflight entertainment. But since when has Newhart been classic comedy?

1:44: Apparently it was never classic. And it was never comedy, either.

0:45, over Montreal: Wahey, you don't have to complete the I94-W any more if you're on a visa waiver. Thanks, CBP.

0:40, upstate NY: please return your seatback to an upright position and open the shades AAGGHH TOO BRIGHT IT BURNS IT BURNS also it's still overcast out there, I thought NY was supposed to be fine and sunny?

0:00, Newark: "Welcome to Newark, ladies and gentlemen; I've just been informed that our stand is still being occupied, and it should be free in about half an hour. So there'll be a half hour delay."

Land of the free, and the home of the AAARRGGHHH.

Ed note: your humble correspondent is on holidays right now. Expect more photos and less meaningful commentary.

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Well, the Australian election this weekend was an absolute clusterfuck (if you'll pardon my French). We have no Prime Minister. The government will basically be run by the three independents, all of whom quit the (conservative) National Party because it wasn't conservative enough. (Which, incidentally, means they'll probably caucus with the Liberal/National coalition and give the Prime Ministership to Tony Abbott. Freshman Green rep Adam Bandt in Melbourne will definitely caucus with Labor, but that'll only give Labor 74 seats - two short of a majority.)

A minty- fresh Morgan poll suggests that if the election had to be re-run, the Greens and Independents would each lose a couple of points, and the votes would flow back to the Labor and Liberal parties. Rob Oakeshott - one of the kingmakers - is proposing exactly that, but he holds his seat by a vast margin, so I doubt he's worried about a couple of percentage points' swing.

If minority government turns out to be as dysfunctional as it usually is, and we have to go to a double-dissolution election sometime before the three-year electoral cycle, expect voters to flee the minor parties like a bad smell.

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In other news...

From the people who brought you How To Cook A F*cking Steak (warning, sweary) comes How To Make A Pizza, Fundamentalist Macaroni and Cheese, and How to Barbecue a Turkey The Super Easy Way (step 1: shoot the turkey)

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For kids starting college this year (meaning they were born in 1992), Czechoslovakia has never existed and John McEnroe has never played professional tennis. I feel old.

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The best words to use in Hangman. "Jazz". "Faff". "Hajj". "Vex". "Fuzzy". "Quizzing". "Bubbliest". "Zigzagging". "Grogginess".

And JRE keeps you entertained all weekend with one of the greatest moments of the Aussie election campaign.

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To mark Singapore's 45th birthday, here's an interview from 2006 with David Marshall, Singapore's first Chief Minister. Why, no, he didn't draw a three million dollar salary after he stepped down.

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ABBA backwards (eM nO ecnahC A ekaT is weirdly awesome). No Satanic messages, though, which is frankly a bit of a disappointment.

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The governor of Wyoming has threatened to sell off parts of Grand Teton National Park to fund the state's education budget. I reckon some enterprising investor should buy it and turn it into a REIT.

How about the GrAnd Teton - Trees And Conservation Alliance REIT? GATTACA-REIT is now taking subscriptions, minimum investment $1 million, institutional investors only, please form an orderly queue.

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The Confined Nomad is trying to eat his way through the cuisine of every country in the UN, in alphabetical order - without leaving New York's city limits. He's up to China and going strong. (He had trouble with Chad, though - anyone know a good Chadian restaurant somewhere in the five boroughs?)

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And JRE keeps you entertained all weekend with Jane Austen's Fight Club.

Here's a piece of Australian political history - the TV interview that cost John Hewson the 1993 election. The Liberals promised to introduce a goods and services tax on everything except food, and this was the result.

Watch as Hewson's campaign implodes on one simple question: "if I buy a birthday cake from a shop, and GST is in place, will I pay more or less for that birthday cake?"

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Here's the sales brochure for the world's first supercomputer: the CRAY-1.

The CRAY-1 stood astride the world in 1976. It cost north of five million dollars, but look what you got for your money! The monolithic machine came with eight megabytes of memory, three hundred(!) megabytes of disk, and a processor so fast it could perform eighty million multiplications every single second!

...which means it's got less computing power than your snazzy new iPhone 4. But the iPhone doesn't double as a couch.

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"Several of you told me that I was 'going to die' if I drank 13 beers while running the San Francisco Half Marathon. I did not die. ... I puked three times, blacked out for miles 11 and 12, and needed five hours to finish. This is my story."

Disclaimer: JRE does not endorse drinking beer while running marathons. (You might spill some.)

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One thought about the whole UAE/Saudi Blackberry-blocking scandal: as far as I can tell, iPhones with a VPN (like, say, WiTopia's service) are still kosher. Erm, halal.

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And JRE keeps you entertained all weekend with the greatest catch ever (although Alex Jesaulenko and Santonio Holmes and most notably Gary Moorcroft might disagree). Via Deadspin and Daring Fireball:

It's slightly less than a week until the kickoff of the world's first Youth Olympic Games, and the overpowering mood in Singapore is that NOBODY CARES. Maybe I'm jaded. Maybe the host nation has spectacularly dropped the publicity ball. But it's hard to shake the impression that nobody, nobody gives a toss.

And that comes despite the fact that this is probably Singapore's best chance ever to land their first Olympic gold medal, with a full contingent of 70 athletes competing across 26 events. Singapore's first appearance on the Olympic podium only came in 2008, when their womens' doubles table-tennis team walked away with the silver medal - which promptly sparked a charged debate about Singapore's identity, because all three team members were born in China and became Singaporean citizens through the Foreign Sports Talent Scheme.

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UPDATE: I wuz wrong! An observant reader pointed out that the Beijing silver medal was Singapore's second taste of Olympic glory, not its first. Singapore won its first medal at Rome in 1960, when Tan Howe Liang won silver in the men's lightweight weightlifting (and gold at the 1958 Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, where he set a world record in the clean and jerk). Credit where credit is due.

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Sydney at this stage of the 2000 Olympics countdown was an absolute madhouse. The papers were going nuts. People were excited. People were complaining about the transport mayhem. But in Singapore, there's not been much in the papers (two articles today). People aren't excited. There's no transport mayhem (the Grand Prix will cause more traffic problems than the Youth Olympics).

And unlike Sydney, there're no dry mockumentaries making fun of the whole thing. Back in 2000, Australia gave the world The Games, which ruthlessly satirised the bureaucracy behind the Olympics, achieved fame for broadcasting John Howard's apology to the Stolen Generations, attempted to include ballroom dancing in the Olympics, smuggled Scottish skeet-shooters into the country disguised as Bulgarian wrestlers, and introduced the 94-metre running track to the Australian lexicon:

Imagine the equivalent for Singapore 2010:

INT. DAY

JOHN CLARKE

We're stuffed. It's one week to showtime. We've got three hundred thousand tickets to sell. How many have we sold? One hundred thousand - and that's only because those clowns in the Education Ministry took down eighty thousand. We are stuffed, Bryan, what are we?

BRYAN DAWE

We're stuffed.

JOHN CLARKE

Exactly, Bryan, we are stuffed, we are stuffed like a Christmas chook.

Because satire works best when it's got a grain of truth.