Wednesday, August 23, 2006

let us fly in peace*

Suspicious smell, bottle of water causes flight to be diverted:
A flight from Atlanta to New York was diverted to Charlotte, North Carolina, last night after a flight attendant found a bottle of water and smelled something suspicious.

Bomb-sniffing dogs checked the plane while authorities interviewed the flight crew and some of the passengers from AirTran Flight 372.

The dogs found nothing hazardous. The passengers were re-screened and they continued their trip after about a three-hour delay.

*plea to airline officials: my abhorrence of delays and being stripped and "patted down" far surpasses any sliver of fear of being blown up while in flight. And oh, terrorists don’t have to kill to win: their tactics are working if we are limiting are personal freedom in fear of them. These restrictions are bordering paranoia.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

things wrong with this cartoon


  1. Why are there only men on the plane?
  2. Since when do men travel with shampoo?

more reading material for my commute

I've learned that an interesting book review doesn’t necessarily translate into the reviewed book being very exciting (e.g., I read a thoroughly entertaining book review of The Professors, but shortly after dragging it home, I discovered that the thick book was hardly worth the effort of carrying to and from the library), yet a good review still ensures that I’ll pick up the book at some point. Reviews of Friendship by Joseph Epstein have been cropping up all over the place, but William Grimes’ review is the first review I read in its entirety (the others were too rambling and boring for my very limited attention span):
The telephone rings at 2 a.m. It’s your best friend, and he has a small favor to ask. Would you mind helping him bury a dead body? Sorry, no time for details at the moment. Just say yes or no.

Mr. Epstein, who describes himself as “a gregarious melancholic, a highly sociable misanthrope, a laughing skeptic,” counts an impressive total of 75 friends.

“Reticence is of the essence in masculine friendship, long has been, and probably ought to continue to be,” he writes.

Monday, August 21, 2006

A million little pieces—plus some

Perhaps it’s because I went into reading it with the knowledge that portions of it were apocryphal that I was able to read A Million Little Pieces without getting angry at the author for misleading me. Some of it must be true, and it seems almost irrelevant that some details are not, and besides, I commend the author on being so bold as to splatter intimate details of his life for the world at large to read and dissect…Even though I am well aware that I can’t completely trust James Frey, oddly, his writing still comes off as remarkably honest. The book is gripping, informative, powerful, and in a way, honest. Would highly recommend to a select audience.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Another Hollywood Conspiracy Perhaps

In Time essay, Where Have All the Cary Grants Gone, Belinda Luscombe puzzles over how “The shift in power between the sexes has nowhere been greater than in romantic comedies.” Where “The men are about as useful as a pitcher of spit, while the women have careers and well-furnished apartments and vast freighters of wisdom.”

Though she acknowledges that, “You don't have to talk to smart single women for long before the subject moves on to the difficulty of finding even a standard-issue male. The more powerful the woman, the more elusive the match,” She can’t understand, “who, settling into the center of the fifth row on a Friday night, Junior Mints and large diet soda in hand, wants to be reminded of real men? Why do we have to keep seeing in movies the people we sneaked out of the house to get away from?”

I think it’s a cheap trick: if enough women watch these chick flicks where powerful women fall for loser men, perhaps women might adapt and gladly put up with Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job and Guys [that] Just Want to Have Fun.