Patrick, thanks for the visit to the Hollywood Aero Mock-Ups facility. The interior of an airplane is one of the few things about air travel that Hollywood consistently gets right, but I had always assumed that the studios just had some good set designers put together a fake fuselage. It's nice to know that the real-looking airplanes are really retired airplanes!

I wonder, though, about a couple of annoying little things in airplane cinematography. One is the airplane's pitch, or angle. When you fly, you spend a lot of time at angles other than level, even during the "straight and level" portion of the flight. (You can see this for yourself by looking at the drink on your tray table on your next flight.) Yet passengers in the movies - here I'm talking about scenes like in "Ordinary People" or "Friends", where the characters just happen to be on an airplane, rather than airplane disaster movies where the set seems to be on a rollercoaster - never seem to experience any subtle effects from the motion of the plane. Perhaps it would just be too difficult to film?

The other glitch in airplane scenes is the background noise. Or better put, the lack of background noise. Jet engines put out a lot of decibels, and a lot of that noise is audible in the cabin, especially in coach class over or behind the wings. It affects the way you talk and the way you hear what's going on around you. You lean close to the person next to you when you carry on a conversation. You make hand gestures with the flight attendant when asking for milk in your horrendous coffee, because you know she can't hear every word you say. You DON'T hear the conversations of people more than a few seats away, unless they are incredibly annoying and adjust their volume instead of their position vis-a-vis the person they are talking with. You DO hear the piercing shrieks of the baby several rows away, because babies cry at a much higher frequency than the low drone of jet engines. You don't really hear what the first officer is saying when she (well, usually he, but sometimes she on Air Maroc) is telling you that you've reached cruising altitude and can now see Des Moines out your left window, although strangely you hear every syllable when the purser interrupts your nap to tell you in four languages that you've only got 20 minutes left to buy from the duty free cart. When your plane finally parks at the gate, you might experience momentary physical relief when the engines are switched off and you are freed from the roar of the past several hours. All of this is part of the air travel experience, and it is completely lost on the Hollywood sound stage. I'm not suggesting that filmmakers should inflict the full brunt of a jet engine on their audience, but there could be some symbolic amount of excess background hum, and some change of behavior on the part of the actors to show that they are actually experiencing flight. If you are going to go to the trouble of shooting your film inside a genuine airplane segment, wouldn't it be worthwhile to add just a little audio verisimilitude as well?

breach of the law about a "specialized facility"? deaths in iraq of numerous army specialists? an attorney general who plays so dumb about the law that he looks like he belongs in special ed?

isn't it time for a special prosecutor?

KM made one goof in this article, stating that planes burn a lot more fuel on the ascent and the descent. Did anyone think of checking this with Salon's own Patrick Smith? It is true that planes burn tons of fuel (literally) as they muscle their way up to 7 miles above sea level at the maximum power their engines can sustain. The descent, however, is pure Isaac Newton. To oversimplify, the pilot throttles back and lets the plane drop out of the sky. Reduced power equals reduced emissions, end of story.

Try this experiment at home: find something heavy, like a brick or a stone. Lift it over your head. Carry it for a while. Set it down. Which required the most energy? Which required the least?

On another note, I would propose that one way to reduce carbon emissions from air travel would be to eliminate weddings. I'm all for the idea of long vacations with few flights, but we've got 4 weddings to attend this summer, in 4 countries. Not only does that burn a lot of fossil fuel, but it is eating up every day of vacation time for the year. How we would love to take 3 weeks sprawled out on a beach and bobbing around the waves on a zero-emissions inner tube instead!

Move along folks, there is DEFINITELY nothing to see here. I read the full AP story, and this has NOTHING to do with Richardson. (I'm not a Richardson man, by the way.) The "aide" was a minor local democratic party nobody hired to do campaign work in rural Nevada two weeks ago.

Chances that Richardson ever met the man? Slim.

Chances that Richardson was involved in his hiring? Slimmer.

Chances that Richardson knew anything about his past? Nil.

Chances that he was brought into the Richardson campaign in a Rovian maneuver to be discovered and bring embarrassment to Richardson (though why bother?) and/or the 'Democrat' Party? Hmmmmmmm.....