Some times I run these morning music “programmes” off a certain playlist or choose an artist, maybe even a Genius list based on some song that is in rotation in my own gray box, so to speak.

This morning, however, the black box – the iPod that now has a permanent address in the glove compartment in the car and holds the whole 7,500 songs in the collection – did its own magic. And this is what came out – judge by yourself if there’s a Schrödinger’s DJ in the box:

Bohemian Rhapsody / Queen*
Blockbuster / The Sweet
Kom og hold mig / Halberg Larsen
Like the way I do / Melissa Etheridge
Good as it gets / Beth Hart

* I was left with just one question this morning in the car: how does my 18-year old daughter – who I gave a lift to school – walk around and know stuff so she can calmly say “I know!” when I start telling about the amazing, at least for the time, amount of overdubs and recording tracks used? Dear, you never stop to amaze me

Picture based on photo courtesy of jiva on Flickr

OK, maiden voyage. In terms of blogging a review about it, at least. (My travel credentials: Twenty years of travelling fifty days a year equals something like 3 years of travel and the first year I used Tripit (which I cannot recommend enough! I even pay for Pro!), I flew 88,000 km.)

”On The Road Again” as Katie Melua sings it: Lansing, Michigan being the ultimate destination, the trip there was CPH – EWR – DTW. (Please do not ask how many airports I know as three-letter abbreviations. The answer, if I dared to make the count, would make me sound like a complete travel nerd…)

First leg, first flight review:  CPH – EWR, courtesy of Continental (there’s a 2,300 USD ticket involved, of course – more on that later).

In my eyes, it must be said, Continental draws a “Fail” on the first bit – online check-in services and information to passengers. As I’ve have sneak peaked and contrasted this to Lufthansa in a recent post, I’ll skip over the details here, except that “good” seats such as emergency exit rows in Economy had an extra USD 99 price tag on them. No, thank you very much, ticket was expensive enough already (See, I said more to come? And there will be…)

Continental’s flights across the Atlantic are done on Boing 757s. This is, I understand, the smallest commercial plane capable of the distance and, occasionally I understand, doesn’t quite make it.. Not, I haste to say, that they fall out of the sky – but 4 to 5 per cent of transatlantic flights apparently have to make a fuel stop along the way. No such annoyances on the flight today which was rather smooth and got in early after the flight deck negotiating us out of a forty minutes holding pattern that would have ruined the flight crew’s efforts so far to get us in ahead of time. Thumbs up on that effort!

Seatwise, I had a mix of luck and curses. The slimline coach seats did offer a decent, if not luxurious, amount of space for my legs. The entertainment system box under the seat in front of me did not help – but having it there was a rookie-type mistake of me and will remind me to check seating on seatguru.com. Not that the not-checkin online procedure offered me much choice – 27C as I recall was the only non-99USD aisle seat available…

Co-passenger-wise, I confess to thinking “Bleep, no!” when a lady with a toddler landed on 27A. Turned out to be fine – a) the wee lad was no nuisance at all, and b) even when he sat on 27B, his legs did in no way interfere with my long legs using the space in front of that seat. Just about the only “empty” middle seat, methinks!

Meal? So-so. The lasagna fulfilled its nutritional purpose. A glass of red wine would have gone down well with it – but at 7 USD a glass? No go – not on that ticket price. I did, courteously, inform a cabin crew member that she had the misfortune of being the first one in twenty years of crossing the Atlantic to charge me for wine. She seemed genuinely surprised as United (merger effect as my ticket was a CO one) “had charged since Sept 11.” Err – roll that by me again. I do not hope that United took advantage of a catastrophe to introduce a completely non-security related money making scheme…

The entertainment system seemed ok with individual screens and selections – I can’t say more as I actually worked and read most of the way over.

Conclusion: I got there

The 757 did the job but is not the best plane to cross the Atlantic in. The smallness of it just makes it feel very constricted for an 8+ hour stint. But, I guess, better than no flight being available due to a larger plane not being booked enough to make it economically viable.

And, as a final approach bonus, I just caught a nice glimpse over the left wing of the Statue of Liberty in sunshine.

Three mornings this week where I saw the sunrise framed in a plane window – departures 06:30, 06:45 and 7:00, respectively. Add the time needed to appear ahead of departure – not a favourite week for a night owl. Ugh.

I’d concur that sunrises above clouds are a pretty thing. Nevertheless, it  called for musical goodies to stay reasonably alert on the motorway this morning.

Bonus quiz: Honour goes to those who can name the link between the first and the last song on the list (there’s a hint in the post title… and now I may have made it way too easy).

A.C.D.C. / Joan Jett
All Or Nothing At All / Diana Krall
Bring Me Some Water / Melissa Etheridge
Black Betty / Ram Jam
Peppermint Twist / The Sweet

Photo courtesy of chrismetcalf on Flickr

The above mail (edited a bit to take out personal and specific flight related info) ticked in recently for a soon-to-happen flight I was going on. Looking through it, it contains everything you need to get ready in one handy collection: Flight details, booking reference, links to online check-in for all the Lufthansa flights in the itinerary (tip: do that – save yourself the queues in the airport!), weather, links to airport information … Nice!

Allow me to contrast that a wee bit:

Not too long ago, I went on a trip to the US of A, flying Continental/United. The online check-in process only went so long – I could reserve a seat but not check in or get a boarding pass – for that, I had to go to the airport and physically get one in a kiosk or at a check-in counter.

Yep, I know that USA is “notorious” for safety check, controls, etc – not that I am debating that  - but my hometurf airline, SAS, does offer Internet check-in with home-printed boarding cards via sas.dk so it can be done.

Next, I had to hunt high and low for information on what time I needed to be at the airport to do the check-in. Getting that knowledge involved a bit of subtraction – the list on the Continental website does not include all departure airports for Continental flights, so I had to scroll waaaaay down on a page to find out that CPH was not listed and then find the line that said “Processing Times for Airports Outside the United States. For most cities/regions outside the U.S., the approximate airport processing time is three hours.”

That meant being there at 06:00! I did think “At Copenhagen Airport? Monday morning? No way that is required!” but, being a good sport, I was there at the allotted time. Had to wait 15 minutes for Continental to be ready – I’d guess that they don’t like getting up early, either – and after spending 5 minutes getting through the Priority lane (thanks, Eurobonus Silver card) and 4-5 minutes getting through Security, I had plenty of time for getting breakfast…

Main point here is: Continental, in this case, lets you hunt high and low for information and do a poor job of adapting it to local conditions. So do many other airlines. Makes me wonder about the experience for those travellers who fly once every 5 years or are on their first major flights ever. Dear airlines: You can do that better – look to Lufthansa’s example!

Looking ahead from this Friday, my travel schedule over the next three weeks include Munich, Warsaw, Stockholm, Ayr, and Istanbul and is put together of nothing less than 13 flight legs. Mostly work – with the long weekend in Istanbul being the sweet exception.

So what better than to have a string of Danish, International and Danish-in-Internationalish songs coming at me from the car speakers on this frosty sunny morning?

Backwards / Lars H.U.G. and Lisa Ekdahl
Alt for nær / News
It’s a Heartache / Bonnie Tyler
Hvorfor er lykken så lunefuld / Sinne Eeg
Lady Marmalade (from Moulin Rouge) / Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil Kim, Maya

Photo by me last time I went through CPH

Another Monday morning, another let’s keep it nice and quiet list of songs.

And bless the inventors of climate control and seat heaters in cars – after a weekend of the coldest February temperature in 26 years, it had “warmed up” to about -9°C this morning.

The weekend was spent largely outside with the scouts. But that’s another story…

Morgendagens Stjerner / C.V. Jørgensen
Purple Rain / Prince
Jealous Guy / Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music
Autumn Leaves / Paula Cole

Photo by me: Wing mirror view of winter traffic

This issue being a weekend late notwithstanding, I have to admit that the US motorway update for the 20th didn’t happen – in fact, I was back on a Danish motorway that Friday, being picked up early morning in CPH by my daughter, bless her. But even if I got a decent sleep lying across three seats somewhere in the back of SAS’ Airbus 740, I was nowhere near coherent enough to put words together.

So, Monday mornings typically calls for more quiet playlists. No need of shaking the beast of the coming week awake too rapidly – it’ll rear its head all by itself.

Goodbye Stranger / Supertramp
Dreams / (ye, the Fleetwood Mac one but) The Coors
Somethin’ Stupid / Robbie Williams feat. Nicole Kidman
A River Flows In You / Yiruma
Kvinde Min / Gasolin’
Don’t Let It Bring You Down / Annie Lennox
My Love, My Life / ABBA

Photo by me: sunrise over the Hillerød motorway

Nothing, I can hear you say. And, indeed, it is a very lovely, well-composed photo and I absolutely love the colour range in it. But there is something wrong…

The snow is what’s wrong. I mean, it belongs in the picture and even does a great job of being beautiful and wintery and making the picture what it is.

But – we don’t have any. And somehow, that doesn’t seem right to me. OK; having one more of the kind we’ve had the last two years might have people walking about being afraid of the fimbulwinter, it being the third in a row*. On top of the Mayan thing for 2012, that could have been just a little too cataclysmic.

But – just a little bit of proper winter. Please?

Next instalment, if I succeed, may be a US roadshow of music from the state of Michigan. We’ll see…

Kiss / Tom Jones
Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick / Ian Dury & the Blockheads
The Anniversary Waltz / Status Quo
Abacab / Genesis

Photo courtesy of Ben Harding on Flickr

So, a wee bit of hiatus from music listings over Christmas and New Year comes to an end while 2012 gets itself organised and starts. This 2012-thing has, on average, been more rain sodden than sparkling – but at least, there’s sunshine outside the window today to put smiles up and sparkles in eyes.

Heading into the weekend with a little trepidation as I’ll be doing something, I haven’t done since nineteen-mumble-mumble (say, ’86 if you really want to know): DJing. OK, it’ll be in a toe-in-the-water kind of way, no huge crowds or – Bob forbid – paying audiences. But still.

I’m banking on excellent support from DJay for Mac (“…using all your songs from iTunes, ready to rock your next party with unpresedented ease” – oh, I do hope so!) , and as I am also a guest at the party in question, both its Automix and DJay Remote facilities, so I can also be ON the dancefloor. It’ll be fun

Pre-listening on the iTunes playlist that forms the danceable core of my music collection this morning on the motorway came up with this random collection of songs:

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough / Zindy Kuku Boogalooo
Dancing in the Street / Matt Bianco
Neutron Dance / Pointer Sisters
Tainted Love (12″) / Soft Cell – but do I really dare playing the 8:55 min maxi-single version?

Photo courtesy of Pixel Addict on Flickr

Last week, writing here, I was about to rush head first into a party. And a fab party, it was. Left me with sore and tired legs when I had to get up the following morning – at 6:30 due to some major glitz in planning – but that was merely due to more or less living on the dancefloor once the music got going. And going it got!

There just is something about music from the 80s (and 70s actually) that not only corresponds to my age (!) but also makes it very, very well suited to keep people on a dancefloor. And, on Friday, people were kept there – the series of images below were taken roughly 2 hours apart: 6, 8 and 10 hours after the whole thing started with 400 people seated at 8-person tables for food and drink…

…and show a full dancefloor from start to finish. It’s a treat to have colleagues (and so many of them) who truly likes to have a party!

Today’s list, then -

The Wanderer / Donna Summer
Fading Like A Flower / Roxette
Rasputin / Boney M
Roseanna / Toto
Without You / Mariah Carey

Photo - a self-created mix of good old-fashioned LP covers