Not that I am being lazy, but I think that you should read The Datsun and the Shoe Tree, a “Florid Affairs” column by Thomas L Freetrademan.

I was changing planes at the new airport in Jakarta the other day, on the way to Stockholm from Vladivostok. Three young Bangladeshi boys sat in the passenger lounge, watching The Power Rangers on satellite TV. Their mother–garbed in the traditional sari–talked to her cousin, a migrant worker who sold German-designed Walkman knockoffs in Hong Kong, on a shiny new Samsung cell phone. Sitting to one side of them was a young Chinese émigré on his way to Toronto to work for a software company, and on the other a business-suited Rastafarian making a connection to Bratislava. Meanwhile, a couple of Tuareg tribesmen sat cross-legged in front of the ticket counter, cooking yams over a flaming mound of ticket stubs.

What’s my point? I don’t actually have one–but opening my columns with strings of clichéd cultural juxtapositions really cuts down my workload. . .

Brilliant stuff from Freetrademan. He concludes with

Anyway, the world out there is changing fast. We have to change with it–whether we are ready or not. But imagine the world as it could be if we finally tore down those walls. We could have a computer in every home, an Internet connection in every classroom, a Big Mac in every stomach, tortured metaphors in every paragraph–and a brilliant, free-trading, celebrity foreign affairs columnist in every newspaper.

Reading the commentaries on Tom Friedman is definitely more entertaining and edifying than reading Tom himself.