Word: lapping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...warm and humid June day a few weeks before Hong Kong's old Kai Tak Airport closed in 1998. I'd filed a feature for a British newspaper about the spanking new airport at Chek Lap Kok and had an afternoon free. Normally I would have gone shopping for presents, but was spared that dreadful ordeal as I'd heard about a crazed band of plane spotters who gathered at Kai Tak to watch the planes land...
...With Kai Tak gone, many Hong Kong residents are understandably proud of its replacement, Chek Lap Kok (its drab proper name is the Hong Kong International Airport). It is undoubtedly a well-designed, efficient, world-class facility. Inside it is everything Kai Tak wasn't?spacious, airy and, with an inventive use of natural light, a little too bright for some when the morning sun catches those check-in desks. But it's also like so many international airports nowadays: somewhat soulless and homogenized. You could be in Schipol or Singapore. One reason Kai Tak is still held in such...
...busy airport right in the middle of town and loved by all," says Armstrong. "Chek Lap Kok is like any other airport?straight in approach, and boring. It simply doesn't generate the same fun, excitement or mystery that the old airport did. Long live...
...Chek Lap Kok is] too far away and is just a standard international airport," says Nevin Lim, a freelance tour guide in Hong Kong who gave up his hobby of plane spotting when Kai Tak closed. "It takes the fun out of flying. Kai Tak was so exciting because the planes flew so close to the city. There was always a possibility that there might be a problem of some sort. Of course, no one wanted anything to go wrong, but it was this element of danger that made Kai Tak so exhilarating...
...thus it was that Jefferson had the glorious honor of composing, on a little lap desk he had designed, some of the most famous phrases in history while sitting alone in a second-floor room of a home on Market Street in Philadelphia just a block from Franklin's house. "When in the course of human events ..." he famously began. Significantly, what followed was an attack not on the British government (i.e., the ministers) but on the British state incarnate (i.e., the King). "To attack the King was," as historian Pauline Maier notes, "a constitutional form...