kinuta

Mine was the flight from Bangkok to Tokyo that took three days to complete. I was due to fly out of Bangkok on the now, thankfully, defunct Air Siam. After a couple of hours delay we took off but about two hours into the flight we suddenly returned to Bangkok with engine trouble. We disembarked and sat around for a few hours before the ' staff ' bundled us onto a bus and put us in a hotel for the night. The next morning we took off again but after only fifteen minutes further engine trouble caused us to return to Bangok for a second time. After another lenghthy wait we got underway again and headed for our first stop- Hong Kong. About an hour before reaching HK the pilot informed us that a typhoon had closed HK airport and we were rerouted to Taipei. We got off and spent several hours in the transit lounge . The all clear came towards evening and we finally landed in a very blustery HK. Narita airport (Toyko) was now closed for the night so we stayed in a HK hotel. The next morning we finally took off and managed to reach Narita in the afternoon without any further problems. Total time, three days.

Bitterly cold.

I don't listen to much rock but ' Get Behind Me Satan' by White Stripes is a great album and the best non jazz effort I heard in 2005.

DIVX compatible dvd player. 'The Murder Room ' PD James.

Only one with Naomi Watts... I still think Watts' performance in Mulholland Drive is one of the tops in the past 25 years. I agree, she was superb in Mulholland Drive.

Another fine actor leaves us. Right from the first time I saw him in ' Presumed Innocent' I've always thought him a real class act and one of my main reasons for following 'The West Wing '. A shame indeed.

I had cartons full of old cassettes. The best ones I burned to audio cdr-rw on a cd recorder then burned them on my pc, reusing the audio cdr-rw. Rather time consuming but managed to salvage some good stuff.

George will never be forgotten by British football fans, he was very special.

Me neither. The individual cds can be found though.

Are you sure it's a rat, and not a mouse ? Mousetraps should work for the latter, professional help for the former. Before we moved to our new place a couple of years ago we lived in a broken down old timber frame apartment and had an unwelcome visitor one day in the shape of a mouse ( not a rat ). It managed to get into the living room and we eventually cornered and killed it but not before several exhausting hours trying to trap it. It was one of the hottest days of midsummer , my wife and I were stripped down to our knickers devising a system of tunnels and funnels to get the varmint into a garbage bag. Our efforts finally paid off and I had the unpleasant job of finishing off the mouse with a baseball bat.

Congratulations to Harold Pinter. I've been an admirer of his for a long time.

Not in Tokyo Lon (thank goodness)

Big Heat is a great noir tour de force and a must have in any classic film collection.

Were you effected by the recent flooding ? I'm next door in Setagaya ku.

That's very true. I seldom if ever go to places like Roppongi and Azabu and know noone who lives there. The uptown islands of wealth and style are very different from where I live.

I don't know anyone in Tokyo, friend, work related, family who has a dishwasher or who knows anyone who has one. They have always seemed a bit decadent to me.

So Junior Mints really do exist. I thought they had been dreamed up by Jerry Seinfeld. What is ' pan seared ' ? I've heard this expression used many times but am not sure what it means. Seems to be a newish term. I can never recall hearing anyone say ' pan seared' until a few years ago.

I just heard the sad news that British comedy great Ronnie Barker has died. He was very funny.

Just give up man. I throw them in cardboard boxes and stash them under the bed. It's the only place left. At work I've got them piled under the desk, on the shelves in the toilet,in the shoe cupboard, everywhere.

Patrick McGilligan -Alfred Hitchcock A Life In Darkness And Light

The first two parts of John Ford's cavalry trilogy, ' Fort Apache' and ' She Wore A Yellow Ribbon'. 'Fort Apache' has been released here as a $4.50 version and I naturally snatched it off the shelf. the picture quality is not so good but far better than the VHS. 'She Wore A Yellow Ribbon' is a Korean version and surprisingly the picture quality is very good with clear colour separation and quite crisp detail. Seems this is the one to go for, rather than the US version which garnered very poor reviews. Along with 'Rio Grande', which I got a few weeks ago, this now completes the cavalry trilogy. My personal favourite is ' Rio Grande'. The photography and interplay between John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara is quite wonderful.

Among his many fine films one that I always liked was ' Somebody Up There Likes Me' with the young Paul Newman. The blueprint for all other rags to riches boxer makes good sagas including ,of course, ' Rocky'.

Great ! Walloonphobia -fear of The Walloons ( what ?). Cathisophobia-fear of sitting. Who makes these up, Seinfeld ?

http://www.kcrw.com/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl Click for an interview with Frank Miller. Enter ' Frank Miller' in the search box. Sin City was a great film, one of the best this year.

Almost all the department stores here have bright yellow lines painted around the edges of each step on the escalators, accompanied by a constantly repeated announcement warning us simpletons not to step out of the yellow lines ( regardless of the fact that it is impossible without inventing extra dimensional physics or wotnot ) as ' it is dangerous '. Every morning when I have a shave I turn up the water temperature to the highest setting and a voice announces( in Japanese) that ' extremely hot water will run'. Drives me mad but I don't know how to disable the thing