TIA was my home airport for the first 20 years of my life and now that I've been around the US, Europe, and Asia, I still think it's the best airport in the world.

It is the only large airport I've ever visited that doesn't feature the Olympic 1000 yard carry-on drag event. The terminal is in the center of the airport, with the concourses surrounding it and connected by shuttle trains. Parking is above the terminal, so you just walk from your car into an elevator, down to departures, check your bags, take the escalator up one level, get in the train, do a little security theater, and you're there.

It is such a stunningly logical and traveler friendly airport, every other airport looks like it was designed by accident in comparison.

I want to mention Shanghai's airport, also. For one thing, it's the only place I've ever been where an airport security guard took my carry on and weighed it and told me to go back and check it in because it was too heavy. Also, they have the absolute coolest ground transportation in the world, a maglev train. It doesn't take you anywhere beside a podunk subway station in Pudong, but man, it's really neat!

I don't envy music critics. I like to listen to the music that I like, not everything that's out there, so I can imagine being exposed to all the crap that's produced every day would embitter a person. Maybe the search for the new and fresh causes one to forget about the qualities of the tried and true.

If you've ever talked to a player in a symphony orchestra, you'll know how much they hate the beloved standards of classical music. Every f****ing year, it's Beethoven's 5th, Stars and Stripes Forever, 1812 Overture, Rhaphsody in Blue. They love it when they get some weird avant garde piece that has them yodel into the bells of their french horns, anything to break the monotony.

But the beloved standards are still beautiful pieces of music, great even. It's too bad that familiarity has led to contempt, but nobody forced you to get a job playing music or even reviewing music. Everybody thinks it would be so cool to be a musician or get a job in the music industry, but musicians I have talked to, when I ask them what they listen to, they say "nothing." You really can get your fill.

About the Beatles, I'll say this: When I was a boy, in the 70's, I heard Beatles songs all the time and I learned to sing them in school but I did not know there was a band called the Beatles that wrote and recorded them. I was surprised to learn this fact, I just assumed that they were like folk songs, passed down from generation to generation.

I saw Paul McCartney in concert back in 94 or 95 in Colorado. He filled up the football stadium at the University in Boulder, I think there must have been 70,000 people there. After he was done with his solo stuff, about half an hours worth, he did an hour and a half of Beatles. Everyone in the audience, all 70,000, sang along with every song.

The Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones? I always compare the Beatles to George Gershwin and Antonio Carlos Jobim, timeless song writers.

Disclaimer: I work in the plastics industry. Not the bag part of the industry, though.

I get it that plastic bags are damaging to the environment and they serve as a totem of our convenience driven society. That's all well and good and worth pointing out.

But to imply that people in the plastics industry are making money hand over fist, flying in private jets, is just silly. It's a commodity industry with incredible price pressure on suppliers and manufacturers.

I just read that a private equity firm CEO recieved a bonus last year that was 40% larger than the total sales for last year of the 3000 employee company I work for.

Stick to the environmental attacks on plastic, where you have a leg to stand on, and save the class warfare stuff for the guys that are making *real* money.

Yup, it's a fish, too. As a kid growing up in Florida, I had the exact opposite experience when I encountered mahi-mahi for the first time. We knew about dolphin. Along with tarpon, redfish, and snook, it's one of our premier gamefish and, like redfish and snook, is tasty as well. (Even though they are related to herring, you wouldn't want to eat a tarpon. Come to think of it, I don't care much for herring either.)

But yeah, it doesn't take a real stretch to imagine the horror of middle America (or even left coast America, apparently) on encountering Flipper on the menu. Thus, we use the Hawaiian name for the fish.