Due to a mysterious plane crash into a Round Valley High School in Eagar, AZ it looks like 500 students may be without a school in the fall. Two people aboard the Cessna died in the fiery crash. Luckily no one was in the two-story school at the moment of impact.
from the NY Times -
A small plane nosedived into a high school in a small eastern Arizona town Friday afternoon and exploded, killing both people aboard, authorities said.
[...]
The Cessna circled the area two or three times before it suddenly crashed into the main building at Round Valley High School in Eagar at about 2 p.m., Apache County sheriff’s Sgt. Richard Guinn said.
As fuel prices have gone up, up up and airlines have lost business, we’ve seen service and friendly air travel experiences go down, down, down. I do miss the days of the seventies and eighties when flying was a pleasure. I know…we can’t live in the past.
The U.S. wants to make some improvements by fall…
from the NY Times -
The Transportation Department signaled on Wednesday that it planned to be more aggressive in forcing airlines to address common traveler frustrations, proposing a wide range of consumer protections. They come on top of earlier rules limiting how much time passengers can sit on planes on the tarmac.
By the end of next year it should be pretty routine. It’s expected 2 out of 3 airline passengers will be treated to head-to-toe scans. So if you are a regular traveler, while it’s a small amount of radiation you will be exposed to, it could be a pretty consistent amount. Should we believe the government when we are told it’s perfectly safe to be exposed to this whole body, low dose radiation? is there a potential for harm for any group of people? What’s the alternative…driving?
from NPR -
“Many people will approach this as, ‘Oh, it must be safe, the government has thought about this and I’ll just submit to it,’” says David Agard, a biochemist and biophysicist at the University of California, San Francisco. “But there really is no threshold of low dose being OK. Any dose of X-rays produces some potential risk.”
Agard and several of his UCSF colleagues recently wrote a letter to John Holdren the president’s science adviser, asking for a more thorough look at the risks of exposing all those airline passengers to X-rays. The other signers are John Sedat, a molecular biologist and the group’s leader; Marc Shuman, a cancer specialist; and Robert Stroud, a biochemist and biophysicist.
“Ionizing radiation such as the X-rays used in these scanners have the potential to induce chromosome damage, and that can lead to cancer,” Agard says.
Flew Frontier this morning. The ticket agent made the first glitch when she said welcome to Midwest and then got tongue-tied and had to correct herself.
Some new boarding preferences were announced, one of which was if you didn’t have any overhead baggage to stow you could board ahead of other passengers. I had seat 1c and took advantage of that rather than boarding last.
My first Frontier disappointment? My Direct TV was not available on this flight. Okay… it’s going to either take some time to get this installed on all flights, or it’s just not going to be available. But I purchased my ticket on the old Frontier far in advance of the switch-over. I brought a movie for my computer but forgot my headphones. Too bad for me.
No cookie on the flight – not that I cared since that was Midwest anyway.
Snacks were Frontier-type to be purchased.
I suppose if you hit the right flight and you are a Frontier fan as I am, you may not notice any changes.
When I was a kid the Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” featuring William Shatner and the poorly cast monster on the wing of the plane freaked me out. I admit I still think about the episode while flying in bad weather. Not with fear, but with a chuckle.
I love the window seat while flying. I often find pleasant views from the window of an airplane.
You can take a look at the New York Times “Joys of the Window Seat” reader submitted photos by clicking HERE.
I’m sure you won’t view anything that will give you a nervous breakdown like poor Mr. Wilson.
When the flights were grounded due to the volcanic ash from the Icelandic volcano I remarked to a coworker, “I guess more people will be traveling by boat,” knowing that it would take them as long to travel by ship (if not longer) as it would take the ash to clear.
The lost art of traveling for pleasure and leisure….we are rushed for time. We have responsibilities to tend to and must get from point A to point B quickly with no time to stop and smell the roses, or the sea breeze, in-between.
from the New York Times -
In the five decades or so since jets became the dominant means of long-haul travel, the world has benefited immeasurably from the speed and convenience of air travel. But as Orson Welles intoned in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.” Indeed, airplanes’ accelerated pace has infected nearly every corner of our lives. Our truncated vacation days and our crammed work schedules are predicated on the assumption that everyone will fly wherever they’re going, that anyone can go great distances and back in a very short period of time.
So we are condemned to keep riding on airplanes. Which is not really traveling. Airplanes are a means of ignoring the spaces in between your point of origin and your destination. By contrast, a surface journey allows you to look out on those spaces — at eye level and on a human scale, not peering down through breaks in the clouds from 35,000 feet above — from the observation car of a rolling train or the deck of a gently bobbing ship.
Is Italy becoming less romantic? Perhaps. But Gianluca Cecchini, the owner of Q’s Bar in Trastevere says it’s becoming “just like England.”
Why is that? Binge drinking. Binge drinking is new to Italy - a new trend. Binge drinking is not romantic. You know what I mean - wine by candlelight with dinner. The Italian government is actually calling this problem in their country a “national emergency.” And the odd thing is, they are putting the blame on tourists.
from the Christian Science Monitor -
The long-cherished tradition of drinking alcohol only as an accompaniment to eating has been severed, with drinking – and getting drunk – now seen as an end itself. The “rhythm of Italian life is changing,” says the director of the Italian Institute for Health, Dr. Emanuele Scafato.
Beverage companies aggressively market ready-mixed drinks and “alco-pops” to teenagers, bombarding them with the message that alcohol consumption is sexy.
And Italians’ attitude to alcohol has been transformed by the increasing numbers of young foreign tourists who descend on the country, particularly in the summer months. Budget flights have put Rome and other Italian cities within easy reach of young British, Irish, and other hard-drinking northern Europeans, not to mention Australians and Americans.
Pay by Phone has already been in use in Miami since 2008 on thousands of parking spots and its use was recently begun in Albuquerque, NM. Next week 700 spots in Washington DC will begin using Pay by Phone.
What is it? A driver signs up ahead of time for an account, finds a Pay by Phone meter, and by cell phone they can specify how much time they will need to park and also receive a text reminder if their time is about to expire. That saves time searching for change, running back out to the meter, and possibly money if they were to let the meter expire and get a ticket.
from MyFoxDC -
“This service will greatly improve the parking experience for many of our residents, because its so simple to use, “said DDOT Director Gabe Klein. “No one likes to carry a lot of change, but almost everyone has a cell phone, and all it takes is one call to pay for a meter.”
Where will the female suicide bomber, trained in Yemen to attack the United States, hide her bomb?
There have been female suicide bombers before in other countries. They didn’t have to conceal the bombs that were strapped to them from TSA agents. They didn’t have to board airplanes and sit in a seat next to other passengers. Where will she hide her bomb? In a shoe? In her underclothes? I think not. I’m thinking she may not travel alone and may travel as a mother. That’s as far, and as much, and as deeply as I want to think about that…
Terrorists are evil – that includes female terrorists.
from Ynet News -
Al-Qaeda is training female suicide bombers in Yemen, including at least two who do not look Arab and carry Western passports, ABC reported.
