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Made it to New Zealand safely. It was a LONG pair of flights. I have no idea how Singapore Air plans to handle their upcoming 19-hour nonstops, unless it’s all business seating. Being in coach for this trip was pretty tough.

Dylan, Terry, Louis and Abe are making me feel quite at home. Once they go out, I’ll check out that coriolis effect.

(My New Zealand pix via Flickr)

I’m 6 hours away from starting my 15-day trip to New Zealand. Many thanks to Signature Destinations for setting up my tour. Additional thanks to Dylan Horrocks for giving me a place to stay near Auckland for my first night.

I have a ton of batteries for the iPod’s power backup. I’ve got semi-trashy airplane reading (20 hours in the air today, with 3 hours sitting in LA). I bought a 256mb SD card for the digital camera, so I’ve got capacity for about 750 pix (I promise not to put ALL of them into a slideshow).

In the words of Biz Markie, I need a haircut. Other than that, I’m pretty much ready to go.

I live a life of blessings.

Rage is better than despair.

Now that I’ve downloaded the PC version of iTunes and compiled my MP3 library, I’m really happy to learn that I have FOURTEEN DAYS’ worth of music sitting on my desktop machine.

What’s particularly frightening about that is that I have an equally large stash of music sitting on my laptop.

My buddy in Teheran, “H. Utanazad,” has a new column in The Iranian, where Shakespeare, Confucius and Socrates meet to discuss weightier matters than hay fever. Check it out.

Okay, it’s not like most of my readers care about ADME/T (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolization, Excretion, Toxicology). If it weren’t part of the purview of my magazine, I wouldn’t either. That said, this is a sorta funny article.

Back from Atlanta, the second city on the IAL tour (third, if you count Nyack, NY on 11.4), the last of my business travel for the year! I took a few too many press junkets this year (and even missed out on one to Puerto Rico in August, due to strep throat). All that remains for 2003 travel is a two-week jaunt to Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud . . .

Given the fact that Tupac still seems to release new albums every few months, we shouldn’t be that surprised that scientists are still finding new Inca cities.

(Trust me: there’s a terrible pun in there, for the wilfully obscure.)

Among other things, there’s the ability to find just about any mangled quote that’s half-stuck in my head. Watching the lunar eclipse tonight, I kept trying to recall that great moment from The Invisible Man, when Claude Rains busts it one night in the countryside. A little Googling got me the exact quotation, which I’ve always liked:

“Even the moon is scared of me! Scared to death!”

Of course, that also gets me thinking about Ed Begley, Jr.’s parody of Rains in Amazon Women on the Moon, which is probably another way the Internet and I seem to parallel each other…

Here’s an article on the profusion of conservative ideas in today’s media. The writer cites a couple of major sources for this trend: Fox News, the Internet (and the Blogosphere or, as I like to call it, the Bloggerdome), and conservative-slanted books.

I’m not going to take an ideological stance on this one, since I’ve spent my last few years unsuccessfully trying to reconcile a lot of my conflicting political viewpoints (and then there’s the attempted reconciliation of my philosophic and mystic bents). However, I will observe that this trend is similar to something that occurred around a decade ago in the music industry and, in both instances, technology was the root.

The author of the article seems to be saying: Conservative America is growing, but the real point is that its very existence and immensity is finally being acknowledged. As new outlets come into play (particularly the collective mental “processing power” of bloggers and other Internet users), we’re finding that a lot of people prefer to get their spin from non-mainstream sources (which, of course, “mainstream-izes” these new sources).

This trend reminds me of what happened when SoundScan was implemented in music retail outlets. See, for the longest time, the “Tops of the Charts” were determined through a pseudo-scientific method that relied heavily on informal polling. So certain musicians were given more heft as chart-toppers than they should have received. With the advent of SoundScan, which compiled sales info through bar-code scanning, a seismic shift occurred: Garth Brooks turned out to be the biggest seller in America.

Until more accurate sales records existed, the country music scene in America was pretty much relegated to underground status, weird as that seems. It was perceived as the province of rednecks and other southerners. With SoundScan, we learned:

a) this genre had broader geographic appeal in America than anyone thought, and

b) there are a lot more rednecks and other southerners buying CDs than anyone thought.

Similarly, SoundScan revealed that hip hop was a much bigger market than previously thought, and that sales were heavier in white suburban areas than in some black urban regions.

My point is, the market (or the population) was always there, but without the technology, its size was criminally underestimated. Of course, this led the major labels to focus almost exclusively on the demographics that were thus revealed, which naturally brought about a stagnation and self-parodization of those music styles, but hey. We’ll see what happens with conservatism in America.

Kudos to Arts & Letters Daily for linking to this City Journal article.