GREETINGS FROM THE BIG APPLE: Nina and I made it safely into New York on Saturday, and then drove down to New Jersey to visit my parents for the weekend. We're now back in the Big Apple, to visit Nina's mom, who is not in the best of health at the moment.

The flight in from California, on American, was actually rather pleasant, thanks to the combination of the in-flight movie (Spider-Man, dude!) and an hour or so long infomercial on one of the in-flight audio channels for a box-set of late period Miles Davis recordings for Warner Brothers. I had forgotten just how good that stuff was--Miles was a bit like Tina Turner in the sense of taking fairly pedestrian sounding 80s synths and drum machines and making the music his own: the very definition of transcending the material.

The unpleasant part was coming and going: I don't think I've seen a filthier American airport than Oakland's--what a trash-spewn dump. Our plane arrived in New York a half-hour early Saturday night (yay!) and then sat on the tarmac for an hour (boo!) because of a plane already in our gate with mechanical problems.

I picked up a copy of Cigar Aficionado at the Oakland airport (surprisingly, the PC-mavens of Jerry Brown's town haven't banned it yet), and read lots of stuff I had already read in the blogosphere: air travel stinks, Wireless Internet rock, and Scott Ritter has gotten very weird lately.

Advantage: Blogosphere!