Ontario, Calif. (ONT)

"When flying through Ontario in order to save $15 by avoiding LAX, be aware of the following: Once baggage is checked, you join a throng of frustrated cheapskates waiting to drop their luggage at the bomb scanner. You then graduate to a longer escalator line, which leads to an M.C. Escher maze through security. Finally in the concourse, enjoy the low ceilings, buzzing fluorescent lights, and $10 burritos."

The only reason I can understand why Ontario even exists is that it must have been funded by a congressional earmark. The place is a ghost town. Flying in and out during "business" hours, there was virtually no one there. Half the gates were shut down as were most of the service facilities. We never waited on line for anything because there were never enough people there to form a decent line nor was there all that much open to even line up for.

Narita. I used to hate flying to and from Japan. But with the addition of new terminal and new concourses and rail lines that come right into the airport (so it took twenty years), it's a vastly improved experience.

Sea-Tac. An already great airport made better with the terminal expansion and new transit concourse, deftly altered mid-construction because of security changes after 9/11. And, finally, a light rail link to the city will be finished in two years.

. . . that isn't about 30 minutes from the downtown core?

If you factor in the convenience of an airport in terms of how close it is to the metro area it's intended to service, then you have to consider Denver as pretty lousy, considering it's about 30 minutes from Denver

I've flown in and out of Denver for the last three years in January. It is no more difficult to get there than any other airport I've been to servicing a major city, and easier than most (O'Hare? JFK?). Honolulu and LAX are the only ones I've been to that are really in the city, and that's not necessarily a good thing (besides the fact that LAX sucks as much as JFK).

I think what we're seeing here domestically is that the airports getting the praise, San Francisco being the exception, are in smaller cities and not really international airports.

. . . middle America's heart. But as Celine Dion makes anyone with a scintilla of taste physically ill, does she really want to risk it? I mean, the dreadful Christine McVie penned Fleetwood Mac song used by her husband was bad enough. Furthermore, Celine Dion isn't an American. Won't the right have fun with that?

The movie is the shortest to date for the third longest book of the series to date. And how can any movie less than two hours long sprawl in any fashion?

Hard to solve this problem without functioning railways

Patrick Smith tends not to mention this, but at least one reader comment always does: you can't run a transportation system uniquely on airplanes and highways and hope to achieve high volume of passengers carried, a low degree of congestion, and best fuel efficiency. -- Justin Bur

I just returned from a trip to Japan. We flew UA from Seattle to San Francisco to catch our Nagoya (Centair - aka Chubu International) bound flight. No problems here (other than the 6AM departure from Sea-Tac). The UA B777 to Japan from SFO was a typical trans Pacific cattle car in economy. (The only comfortable economy class seating I ever experienced between Seattle and Japan was Thai Airline's first route back in the early '80s.)

The beauty about any trip to Japan, and something I always marvel at and envy, is what happens after one lands at Narita, New Kansai and now Centair.

While it took them some twenty years to get a direct express rail link between Tokyo and Narita, they were a necessity with New Kansai and Chubu because both airports are on artificial islands. (The train between New Kansai and Osaka is particularly cool for rail buffs being a deep purple and looking like something out of Buck Rodgers.)

After a quick passage through immigration and customs, we met the family, and had about twenty minutes to kill before our Nagoya bound train left the airport (which is easily the nicest one I have ever been in). Once on the train, we were "home" in less than an hour - the train taking about 45 minutes to our station from the airport. If I'm not mistaken, BART is the closest thing we have to this in the States, and it's just a glorified subway line - no reserved seating, no luggage racks.

The return trans Pacific flight was fine, but the connecting flight between SFO and Sea-Tac, on a Monday morning, was delayed more than an hour. This was after inexplicably passing out of immigrations and customs into a non-secure corridor, and then having to go through screening again (after being told by the always helpful and well-trained TSA to line-up in the wrong place). WTF?

God we suck at transportation.

The expression "multinational" is an inaccurate characterization of large conglomerates since the late 20th century, and went out of currency about 20 years ago. The correct phrase to describe companies that do business around the world is transnational.

Our daughter got the boot from a day care for biting. Once we got the back story (they did not tell us who the victim(s) had been - protect the innocent, not being tried as an adult kinds of precautions), it didn't seem quite the trauma it was at the time.

We happened to meet the parents of the boy who had apparently been our daughter's primary victim, and we decided it wasn't such a bad thing. The father's something of an asshole. Our daughter wasn't being aggressive, just prescient.