Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 94 Editor's Choice: 19
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On the subject of airport renaming...
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As a Balltimore resident, I certainly had no fundamental quarrel with the decision to formally rename BWI after the late Thurgood Marshall -- both because it honored one of Baltimore's towering native sons and, less nobly, because it added a bit of partisan balance to that other DC-area airport named after a Republican president. As somone who's pretty cheap, I even approved of their plan to not drop a lot of money on new signage, but just add the new moniker to signs as they were scheduled to be replaced over the next few years.
As an editor, though, I was horrified by the exact configuration of name they chose. The name change almost foundered on the state's obsession with making it obvious that that BWI is a true Washington-area airport (somethat that isn't just optimistic branding; it's by far the most convenient option if you're in DC's Maryland suburbs, and it has a direct rail connection to the district, which is more than Dulles will be able to say until 2015). The "Baltimore-Washington" part of the name had to stay front and center. All well and good. So the new name was "Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport." That's right, not, as you might expect if you, say, speak English natively, "Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport." I guess they thought that if they separated "Washington" and "International" then they wouldn't be allowed to keep using the "BWI" abbreviation? The mind boggles.
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Um, anonymous...
[Read the article: Do I have to be a mommy to "opt out"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm pretty sure she was being ironic.
The only thing I would say about the LW's question is: do your siblings know about/support your idea of dedicating yourself to their kids this way? You might want to have a talk with them about it. Probably they'd be fine, but you never know how people could get territorial.
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planes, trains, and...
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Patrick mentions birdwatchers, but I wonder about the overlap between planespotters and trainspotters. I would call myself a casual airline fan but a more serious railfan, but I think it comes from a common impulse. (I'm actually more interested in route maps and stations and airports than the vehicles themselves...)
Transit employees tend to call railfans "foamers", a name that some have cheerfully taken up as an ironic self-deprecating nickname. Are there any such terms for planespotters?
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not a shock
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm honestly surprised this doesn't happen more often. Baseball announcing consists of a need to feel an aching expanse of dead air. Frankly I just assume most people just say whatever comes into their heads after a certain point.
jf
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one I've always been curious about...
[Read the article: Ask the Pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...is "purser." I'm assuming this is some kind of ancient jargon relating to the person in charge of the money on a ship or something, but what is its relevance to a modern air crew?
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about those DNA tests...
[Read the article: My husband has Chinese ancestry but his son wants to keep it secret]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]People don't really seem to understand what these DNA tests mean, despite their widespread popularity. If the LW's husband took the kind of test that I think he did, which is based on the Y chormosome, it determined the provenance of his direct male line ancestry. We all have thousands of ancestors, the number doubling in each generation; it happens that *one* of those ancestors -- the one that happens to be at the end of a chain composed entirely of men -- was Chinese. The commentor who said that Henry Louis Gates did not have African ancestors is off base; rather if you follow Henry Louis Gates' male-line ancestry back far enough, it ends up in Europe (not surprising based on the amount of unacknowdged racial mixing that went on under slavery). But his mother probably had African ancestors, or his father's mother, or his father's father's mother, or ... you get the picture. It's just that those ancestors didn't contribute pass his Y chromosome down to him.
As for the familial drama, it all sounds very sordid, but I feel like there's stuff missing. It would be nice to know why LW's stepson and wife were so upset about the Chinese angle. It might be that they were racists. But it could be that any discussion of biological ancestry just touches a nerve based on their family situation and the lies they've told about it. The sad part is that, if I'm reading the chronology right, the granddaughter is now a young adult, and probably deserves to know a little something -- like why the woman she thinks is her biological grandmother treats her badly, for instance.
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DCA-LGA? Ugh, why bother
[Read the article: Ask the Pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Pilot, I know you're an afficianado of flight, but there is no reason -- none -- to fly between DC and NYC. Amtrak's NE Corridor is the only rail line in America that actually competes with driving and flying on convenience, so you might as well make use of it if you're travelling in that direction. And the train cars, while not brand-spanking-new, will seem shockingly spacious to anyone who spends most of their travel time flying.
On that note, there's an Amtrak station actually at Newark Airport (connected to the terminal by a people mover of the sort that connects the terminals at many airports). If you're flying from somewhere in the NE to an international flight at EWR, you might want to think about taking the train instead -- if only to do your little bit to relieve air congestion.
On a different note, it's kind of shocking to me that all of the top 10 airports are in the United States. Do PHX and IAD really see more takeoffs and landings than LHR and CDG? I wonder if it's because most Europeans take the train to make the sort of trips that Americans make by regional jet.