80 Days, Then Around the World

Apologies, friends, I started this post for Oscar Night and neglected to publish until today.

“Around the World in 80 Days” won Best Picture of 1956 (David Niven, Cantinflas) and probably the Worst Picture of 2004 (Jackie Chan, Steve Coogan). Well I can't judge, I've not seen either. But the fictional chronicle written by l'auteur Francais Jules Verne has serendipitously been showing up in our life recently (I haven't read the book either).

It started with my recent bored foray into Mac Widgets for a way to count the days down to our Baby Boy's court date. I found this nice countdown calendar. After entering pertinent data, the countdown informed me that we had exactly 60 days to wait. Humph? Then I wondered how many days we would be waiting total from the day we were assigned a court date for April 21st. Let's see: February (28) plus March (31) plus April (21) equals... 80 days. Double humph and whoa: wasn't there some book or tv show about going around the world in 80 days?

Then our dear friend coincidentally published this cautionary tale.

I may adventure to read this book someday, but fear I may be infuriated or bored by a DWMs Turn-of-the-Century stereotypes of race and gender: It was all very well for an Englishman like Mr. Fogg to make the tour of the world with a carpet-bag; a lady could not be expected to travel comfortably under such conditions. I wonder if Verne ever met Mary Kingsley or Gertrude Bell. Or if he even ventured to any of the places he wrote about.

Well many things can be accomplished in 80 days. For us, it's waiting, but that doesn't preclude us from multitasking those 80 days... and THEN going almost all the way around the world to bring home our son.