Scribbled in a notebook, backed up to the web.

Wisconsin

International travel now requires people to check into an airport up to 3 hours in advance of their departure. But the International House of Pancakes in Janesville was closed at 5 a.m. Maybe they should change their name to the Domestic House of Pancakes?

The Dane County Regional airport in Madison, Wisconsin has wonderful wildlife in the morning - birds of many types and mosquitoes that are easily confused with birds. Birds of prey.

Always tip the authentically smiling faces serving coffee at the Madison airport. They may be the only smiling faces that you see all day.

Chicago, Illinois (O'Hare International)

A woman wields her squeegee in an S patter on the glass, mutually oblivious to the bustle around her - people trying to get where they are going. And she gets where she is going one S at a time.

McDonalds in O'Hare doesn't serve breakfast at 10:10 a.m. A blessing.

An apparent family of Indians runs a Dunkin Donuts franchise in O'Hare like a greased wheel with a heavy accent.

A note left to the Latina girl occupying valuable internet kiosk real estate thanks her for the demonstration of her lime green 'EWA'(?) panties and asks her to wear a thong next time she occupies two seats. Signed by John Q Public with 3 kisses.

The young lady going to Haiti from Kentucky sitting next to me, after some discussion, saw fit to write down some passages from the Bible for me. But she'll need them more than I where she is going.

Miami International

Could they make this airport any more spaced out between connections? Going from one end of the airport to another in 30 minutes with a backpack was reminiscent of humps 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, with various obstacles ranging from crying children to lost grandparents.

Trinidad and Tobago

The only thing more dangerous than a new idea is the gauntlet of intellectually dull and rusty knives that a bureaucracy demands of it. Get your tetanus shots.

Supporting any political party seems detrimental to democracy. Democracy is about the governed making choices about how they are governed - not picking a flavor.

I live in a world where people happily argue about who can implement a bad solution better. This is unconscionable.

It's a wonder we don't explode. When you start putting on weight, your appetite increases and at some point you don't exercise as much. It's a highway to critical mass. We should marvel that human beings are so elastic that explosions rarely occur.

If I have cheesecake and you don't know about it, neither one of us has a problem. But when you want cheesecake and you don't have any - and I have cheesecake and I tell you how it tastes - you want cheesecake more. The internet is a conduit for people to show and tell each other about their cheesecake. And that's what the internet means for the developing world. But if they are smart, the developing world teases back.

It's what you work against that makes you stronger. At least until you come to terms with it. Then it makes you relatively weaker.

Hope for the best. Pray for the worst.

Necessity might be the mother of reinvention but reinvention is the mother of necessity. Every reinvention becomes necessary to change, eventually. Economic theories, scientific theories, philosophical resolutions - and even formalized religion at times - get reinvented by the necessity created at their very birth. Every revolution carries with it the seeds of its own destruction, but that creation creates something new. Organized by entropy.

If you peel an orange, it's still an orange. If you peel an onion, it's still an onion. At some point in peeling, though, something ceases to be what it was and becomes something new. It's just up to us to see the difference. Thus peeling an orange and peeling an onion have different cultural subtexts.