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On a Plane - On the Ground

2009-11-12 · letter vlog · Hank, a guest · 3:48 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Personal life (also: Economics) · mode: Personal update · tags: on location, guest or collab, self promotion

Vlogging from planes and airports two days before his tour starts, Hank jokes about airport news, a gerbil smell and Octomom, shows his childhood toy at Natalie Tran's prompt, argues the real class divide is who can afford to fly, and talks with a touring sound engineer.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Cutting between plane and ground; something smells like gerbils

  • ★★ Hank vlogs while travelling, cutting repeatedly between being on a plane and on the ground in airports. (playful) — 00:00:00

00:00:28 — News in airports (quadriplegics may own guns); the view from the window; source of the gerbil smell; back home

  • ★ Hank says you can't get away from the news in an airport, one of the fundamental laws of travelling. (playful) — 00:00:28
  • ★★ Hank relays a news item he watched in the airport: it is apparently okay for quadriplegics to own guns. (playful, hedged) — 00:00:28
  • ★ Hank loves looking at the view out of the plane window, though it makes him a bit nauseous. — 00:00:28

00:01:14 — Favourite childhood toy (Natalie Tran's prompt): Dexter the stuffed ferret; Octomom headline; complaint about first class begins

  • ★★ Answering a prompt from Natalie (Community Channel), Hank shows his favourite childhood toy, Dexter, a stuffed ferret he slept with every day from age six to fifteen. — 00:01:14

00:01:44 — Real class inequality is who can fly at all; plane neighbour, a Blues Traveler sound engineer, on touring; flying from Missoula to Seattle

  • ★★★ Hank rejects calling first class a crass example of classism; the real class divide is that the rich can fly to see family and do business while people without money cannot, an opportunity he has. — 00:01:44 · economic inequality
  • ★★ a guest: His plane neighbour, a sound engineer for Blues Traveler, tours about five months a year; it is fun at first, then tapers into wanting to go home. — 00:01:44
  • ★★ Hank expects his own tour to go about the same way. (playful, hedged) — 00:01:44 · Tour de Hank
  • ★★ Hank marvels that he sits down in Missoula and stands up in Seattle after going about 300 mph through the sky, yet he manages to hate flying. (playful) — 00:01:44 · Missoula, Montana

00:02:29 — Hating something as amazing as flight; clips from the trip: Seattle from the air, a landing, a man with a snake on his head

  • ★ Hank shows clips from the trip: downtown Seattle from the air, a landing, and a man with a snake on his head. — 00:02:29

00:03:04 — San Francisco in two days; tour graphic one last time, still no Seattle news

  • ★★ Hank tells San Francisco he will see them in two days and shows the tour graphic one last time, still without news for Seattle. — 00:03:04 · Tour de Hank

Humor (significant)

  • Hank cuts back and forth between plane and ground until he loses track of what he is doing. — 00:00:00

    “I'm in an airport. What am I doing? I think I'm making a video.”

  • News says quadriplegics may own guns; Hank defends owning what you can't use. — 00:00:28

    “lots of grandmas have internet connections they can't use them but they have them”

  • Hank works out where the gerbil smell on the plane comes from. — 00:00:28

    “the parents behind me are using the the smell of cedar to overwhelm the smell of baby poop it's not working anymore”

  • A passenger reads a story about Octomom losing 145 pounds. — 00:01:14

    “yeah, she lost 145 pounds when she gave birth to eight children.”

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

People: Nadya Suleman · Natalie Tran

Projects: Tour de Hank

Works: Hello Seattle

Groups: Blues Traveler

Concepts: economic inequality

Places: Missoula, Montana · San Francisco · Seattle

Later videos replying to this one