Despite what appears to be a space which is reserved for a person with some kind of physical disability, in reality it is merely a metaphor for the various societal woes which beset the citizenry and therefore is open to wide and (sometimes) poetic interpretation.

Today (and yesterday, and tomorrow since it is not quite finished) I opened a new bank account. In order to do so, I affixed my scrawling and somewhat easy-to-copy signature to at least fifty documents - none of which I read.

Many of you who have experienced the Great Airports of the World - Heathrow, JFK, Dubai, and Belgrade's own Nikola Tesla - will know already what I am talking about. This is a subject, in fact, which is so well known to frequent fliers as to be superfluous to set to pixels. It is a level of luxury which we have come to expect, but it is not for the uninitiated...

Nearly exactly a year ago, at the tipping point between early- and mid-December, I forgot to go Christmas shopping. There must have been something good on TV.

Every year, faced with the prospect of engaging in pitched battle with my fellow shoppers throughout the month of December, I seem to make the resolution to do all the shopping in July, thus freeing myself from active duty and sparing myself more bloodshed.

In many ways, we are at the height of our cleverness at 4 a.m. So many brilliant ideas occur to us at four in the morning but as a rule they are gone by the time the alarm goes off a few hours later.

Not so today.

While my body and mind are still responding to Chinese time cues, making me think four a.m. is a darn good time to get up and start the day, I happen to be awake and aware of the pre-down cleverness which most of us sleep through.

For the next several days, I will be ensconced behind the Great Firewall of China and untouchable by Facebook, Google, YouTube, and 2,700 other websites which the People's Censor has deemed to be unbrowseable.

Iran, Vietnam, and North Korea are also on the list of blockers, but I think it is just me-too-ism.

!!!