Good point, 2ndGenerationPilot -- you've got nothing to lose by asking!

I'm another one who likes to hit the ground running in the morning after a transatlantic flight, especially since half the time I have a train trip to my final destination. Last time I flew SF-Newark-Milan, arriving in the morning so I could catch a train and be in Rome that afternoon.

If I see the pilot I try to give them a compliment or ask a question -- most pilots seem to like it when people show some interest in their work.

I'm always more nervous about takeoffs than landings -- especially since in the Bay Area the plane usually immediately goes into the fog deck -- heavy air traffic and zero visibility make me anxious! And flying in and out of OAK and SFO I'm used to landing approaches where you can't see land until about five seconds before you touch down. I've had to reassure more than one anxious seatmate that really, we aren't about to land in the Bay!

I've commented several times that Broadsheet contributors are just as guilty of obsessing about the trials and tribulations of urban professional women as the media they criticize. Not surprising, since most writers write what they know that women who aren't college-educated don't show up much in the media, including Salon.com.

There are way too many people in this world who need to believe that bad things never happen to good people -- that everything that happens is due to someone's malicious acts or flawed character.

It's a form of magical thinking: I'm a good person, so things like that will never happen to me.

Well guess what? The universe doesn't work that way. For all you people who say a good parent could never suffer a tragedy like this, I hope for your own kids' sakes you never learn otherwise firsthand.

Jazz has never been to the White House before? Not even during the time of the president who played the saxaphone on Arsenio Hall's show?

I love what the Obamas are doing in the White House, but they're not the first people to eat organic food, play jazz, etc. in the White House.

When I read an article like this, about a person (male or female) who dumps a marriage simply because one aspect of it no longer works, I wonder: just what do they think will be better without their marriage?

If Ms. Loh doesn't have the time and energy for an "improvement" project, how is she going to find the time and energy -- as a single mother -- to form a new, better romantic relationship? If she (and her husband) put half the energy into rekindling their marriage as they will into their divorce, let alone new relationships, they might just have something.

"...Allen is, if nothing else, the most self-aware of filmmakers...."

One thing I realized after the whole Soon-Yi debacle is that anything in Allen's movies that comes across as self-aware is purely accidental. I think, in fact, that he's the most self-absorbed and *least self-aware* of filmmakers. Why else would he think that there was anything interesting (to other people) or creative about making the same film about the same neuroses (his) over and over again?

Woody, you're a nebbishy Jewish intellectual who is obsessed with women who are for one reason or another "out of your league." We get that. We got that 30 years ago. What ELSE have you got? How about something really self-aware, like what it's like when you fall in love with an inappropriate person and unlike the fantasy land of your movies it isn't cute and funny and real people with real feelings get really hurt?

"Still, I will agree it's hard to love someone's work when its maker married his own kid in such a public fashion, and when she hadn't quite finished her puberty. I was overseas when that happened and missed the coverage at the time. How come he's not in jail?"

I don't know how serious this question was, but just to clarify, Soon-Yi was 22 when their relationship became public -- young but nowhere near pedophilia territory. If she hadn't been the daughter of his long-time lover, everyone would have shrugged, made some comments about younger women and older men, and then forgotten about it.

But she *was* his lover's daughter, he had known her since she was a child, and he had been a father figure in that household. He wasn't legally her father or even her stepfather, but there was still a serious ick factor. One of the kids he had adopted with Mia nailed it when he said, "it's not right when your father is sleeping with your sister."

"Dude is the governor of a small, pretty unimportant state; he apparently just got his teeth kicked in by his legislature;"

Right. And if he can't handle having his teeth kicked in by the legislature of a "small, pretty unimportant state" without needing to ditch the family and the security team and head to Argentina for a week (for whatever purposes), then how could he possibly handle being President of the United States, which is a couple of orders of magnitude more stressful? If that's his aspiration, he's just shown himself to be manifestly unfit.