what ho!

"Joliet? Why the hell are you going to Joliet? I thought you were going to Chicago? Where's Joliet?"

"It's some sort of, um, suburb, I think." I waved a hand, weakly. "Of Chicago, I mean. We fly into Chicago."

"Midway airport." One of my friends shook his head with disapproval and pinched his lips firmly together. There were not, he seemed to be saying, Good Things to come of flying into Midway airport. Funny. One of my coworkers had done the same thing earlier.

"Isn't there some sort of prison in Joliet?"

"Oooh. Blues Brothers."

"Huh."

I called my mother later.

"Joliet?" she said, blankly. "Why is your work sending you to Joliet? What's in Joliet? If you were going to Chicago, you could visit your great-aunt Kanae."

I groped through the questions and picked the wrong one to answer. "There's a prison there," I offered.

Small silence on the phone while my mother digested the information.

"Blues Brothers," I ventured hopefully. Ignore the fact that my mother hasn't understood an American Pop Culture reference since the original debut of bellbottoms.

Like my coworker, Mom was deeply disappointed. "I don't think your work should be sending you to prison. It doesn't seem nice."

So yes, I spent Monday through Wednesday in Joliet, with a brief one-day stop in Chicago proper. Two hours time difference. The last time I suffered jetlag that bad, I was flying back from Mauritius with a hostile air crew and a cranky boyfriend.

...which reminds me a funny thing that happened in Heathrow airport on the way back from Mauritius.

We were standing around the luggage carousel, waiting for our bags to make the mobius loop. A pair of security personnel came wandering down the big hall with a pair of dogs. One of them was a big German Shepherd type, thrilled at the whole idea of revolving carousels; he attempted to hump each one he passed, nose a-twitching.

He, the dog, was a British-born case of enthusiastic brawn, little brain, and bonhomie in the finest Wodehousian tradition. One rather gathered the impression that his training had passed in somewhat of a blur. Training may have been thorough, but it hadn't been in any way jolly, don't you know. Certainly there'd been a lot of rather tip-top sniffing of bags and canine asses, and once good old Bungo had gotten a whiff of something that had inspired something really rocking in the way of chicken-laying-the-egg impersonations, but when all was said and done, all one had really gotten out of the whole rummy thing was that riding carousels was something of a bang, and that one occasionally got some scrummy doggy treats for landing on a bag that didn't look quite pukka, what?

His handler struggled with the lead, dragged behind every hearty, lusty leap that stranded the shaggy lover half-on, half-off a suitcase. The dog passed us with wagging tail and eyes shiny with the splendiferousness of it all: what ho, I say, what? I mean to say, what? What?

Meanwhile, his colleague, some sort of spaniel-y creature, trotted about the floor with the depressed mien of an accountant convinced his mother-in-law's connections would shortly land him a promotion to the humorless halls of the British Internal Revenue Service, when all he'd really wanted out of life was to become king of the ice cream truck drivers. He gloomed his way around several travellers and approached us, and the expression of abject misery he directed at me after sniffing my shoe was enough to bring tears of pity to the sympathetic eye.

A few feet away, he paused to cock a leg and express his opinion of his career and his mother-in-law, both. His handler, a blond-haired woman, gave a wail at the yellow pool. "Not again!"

The dog stared at his spreading pond of urine and sighed.

Fuzzy-headed with exhaustion and the prospect of an eleven-hour flight ahead of us, the Guy and I wagged our heads.

"I thought they were supposed to bark when they found drugs?"

There's an interesting battle going on in the courts, which I'm not going to detail fully here since I don't want to get sued. No, it's not related to me whatsoever, but it is related to a person who appears to have gone a little lawsuit-mad.

The story broke in April, and was updated just recently with a fourth docket suing, among others, Google. Why? Apparently, for making available via search information available on the Internet relating to the original case. More information here.

Not that I cram my opinions down anybody's throat. But hey. Just guess which way my sympathies lean.