This is Ping Gong, one of my hosts and my fellow traveler. At breakfast this morning, he explained to me how he became an audiophile. "It was the Cultural Revolution," he said. "We weren't allowed to study, so we played music and talked. I had a big Russian turntable—mono! And one speaker, of course.

The view outside my window. "What river is that?" I asked Ping Gong.

Somehow the gods of travel, who usually enjoy watching me suffer, had one of their rare bouts of whimsey and decided to ruin <I>future</I> journeys by upgrading me to first class.

Mistress Bagheera don't want no human cooties, oh no.

Nothing to look at here, says Huckleberry.

Lots of goodies here worth investigating.

If you were to do a Google image search on my work at <i>Stereophile</i>, you'd see that, basically, my days are simply filled with reading, writing, coordinating, and planning. No two consecutive days, however, are the same.