I won’t miss Australia. Like Hawaii, almost everything I like about the island is just offshore. In the case of this vast expanse of sand, heat, and dust, that means the Great Barrier Reef. Even so, I doubt I’ll come back unless someone again pays me to travel here. I hear New Zealand is another story, but I’ll have to see about that later.

I know very little about the sciences in general and geography and navigation in particular. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that air travel would be more efficient and enjoyable if all airlines took advantage of such gaps and warps in the space-time continuum.

I’m going to savor one of my four bonus hours meditating on an El Farolito burrito. I’ll then review all the notes I made on the plane to see whether or not I can figure out what happened to the missing time.

I wonder how this sort of blunder can happen in a modern fortune cookie factory?

What a great piece!

After the scrumptious meal, I walked down the street with a golden garlic glow. Naomi didn’t share my high opinion of the fare; she confessed that all the garlic she’d consumed “made her breath hurt.” I felt sad that she couldn’t share in the delights of excess. Oh well, I suppose excess in general and excessive garlic in particular are acquired tastes.

I’m not too intimidated by my new machine, though, in that those inscrutable engineers at Nikon apparently expect their creation to be used by people even stupider than me. For example, here are a few of the warnings contained in the operating manual.

Do not walk while looking through viewfinder
Walking while looking through the camera’s viewfinder or color LCD monitor could result in a fall or other injury.

When using the viewfinder
When operating the mode dial with your eye to the viewfinder, care should be taken not to put your finger in your eye accidentally.

Do not place camera strap around neck
Placing the camera strap around your neck could result in strangulation.

Eventually.

The actual technique is irrelevant. For me, the concept itself is of the greatest interest. I think it would be wonderful if I could go to a museum and, instead of paying ten dollars to walk through the door, spend a couple of dollars to see only the pieces of interest. The marketing people would love it: statistics galore! The popular artists would also like such a policy; the viewing reports would provide numerical proof of their public appeal. Of course, the less commercially viable artists would probably be pushed even further into the background; who wants to risk their money discovering someone?

Since this is the millennium of marketing and statistics, I imagine I’ll be seeing lots of pay-per-view art. And, thanks to Enrico’s tip about looking over people’s shoulders, I’ll be viewing most of it for free.

The bottle itself is quite lovely. The glass is full of tiny bubbles, as if it were blown by hand. To complete the impression of craftsmanship, all the text on the bottle is painted on the glass; the hand-numbered seal is the only piece of paper in sight.

Later, after taking the first few sips, I even forgot that the bottle, its painted label, its recently broken seal, and the blue agave concoction inside probably came from some factory in New Jersey. I delight in the temporary suspension of disbelief.

After a while, I became curious about the small, ornate text on the back of the bottle. I tried to read the fine print, but it appeared to be in Spanish. I assumed it was some romantic story about how noble workers transformed the mighty cacti into this finely-crafted and perfectly distilled bottle of tequila, but I was wrong.

Anna volunteered to translate the text for me, and that turned out to be a big mistake. She said the copy on the back of the bottle was a legal disclaimer that more or less said, “drinking this product may cause blindness.”

I was confused; I panicked. I wondered if I had some sort of weird medical condition, one of those bad brain things that attacks in the middle of the night. In the rush of adrenaline, I wondered if I was experiencing a total lunar eclipse, even though I knew that I was sleeping in a windowless room. I reached for the lamp, missed, and sent a large glass of water crashing on the floor.

That’s when I opened my eyes. I can’t believe I forgot to open my eyes when I awoke; that’s never happened before. It’s like Martin Mull said, “None is so blind as he who cannot see.”