I detect one flaw in your brilliant analysis, my dear Mr. Holmes and that is that I was out of breath even at rest in my tent as I sipped my too hot butter tea.

I remember when flying was a very pleasant experience - clean, new airports, smartly dressed polite staff who will actually speed you through the lines if you are late, hot meals on the flight, making you feel a bit like a VIP - it was about a month ago in China.

Dolls have backstories? I must be getting old....

Well, that explains it. I'm glad the yaks are off the hook. By the way, it is amazing that people have actually managed to reach the summit of Mt. Everest at 8,848 meters, or 29,029 feet without oxygen, though they nearly died doing it. As I said, I could barely climb a small hill when I was at 5,200 meters (17,064 feet) at the base camp. Here's some pictures of the camp:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_Base_Camp

We did take small canisters of oxygen, but they didn't help much.

If he did this to my 13 year old daughter I would cut off his balls.

Just what we need. Jews laughing at the stupid goys. And they wonder why they are so disliked.

There is no worse crime than harming a child, and a 13 year old is a child. It is simply the most disgusting abuse of a person in no position to defend herself or himself or even to understand what the adult is doing. If you have children you will understand this.

It is unbelievable that Polanski's passport was not taken, allowing him to escape from a very serious crime. The state is therefore culpable in this rape of a minor.

To the extent that prices go down, recessions can actually help those with secure jobs and first time home buyers. On the other hand, wages stagnate during a recession so even the employed receive less. If prices go down even more than wages, then the securely employed are better off in a recession. Plus they get to laugh at their unemployed neighbor for whom they always bore a secret grudge.

Is the root of most evil in the world. The "us" versus "them" mentality disgusts me. The "we are the chosen people" mentality disgusts me, whether it is espoused by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Tibetan Buddhists, Scientologists, Taoists, Sufis, Jehovah's Witnesses, or Seventh Day Adventists.

The state is criminally negligent in my opinion. Isn't it standard practice to seize the passport of anyone charged with a serious crime? And there was every reason to believe that Polanski was a flight risk.

"The source for this information is the March 4, 1966 issue of, TIME magazine"

I don't need to look in an archive - it was called Intensity and you could vary the level of color from none (black and white) to much too much color. Hue adjusted the green/red balance. I did this as a kid. My favorite button at the back of the early color TV's was called "color killer". When you turned in on, it killed the color, surprisingly enough.

Exactly. Tribalism stinks. A Jewish friend's son is marrying a Chinese women. Things are looking up.

By tribalism I mean the tendency of groups to brand everyone outside their own group as "other", inferior and even sub-human. For most of human history, people have banded together in tribes in order to survive - so far you are correct. But this incessant tribal/racial/religious warfare has caused a very high mortality rate. The young men in amazonian tribes like the Yanomami have mortality rates approaching 50%. None of this applies today, in an interconnected world where you can be in China in 12 hours or play chess with someone in Japan over your coffee. So tribalism started as a fact of life but has now become a liability and an anachronism, as has religion and war.

Andrew,

I thought about your point before you raised it. I noticed that at no point in the interview did either of the Coen brothers question the taste of the joke about what happened to the goy - who cares? There is not one word of criticism of the frankly racist attitudes of the Jews toward the non-jews in the interview, which I find disturbing.

Patrick,

The Simpsons never approached the brilliance of Family Guy and American Dad is even better. South Park is also lame compared to Family Guy. It looks like people care more about cartoons than airplanes - now I see why some airlines are painting cartoons on their planes. As for artistic decline, Stravinsky is a good example. How could the miraculous brilliance of the Rite of Spring or Firebird descend to the mediocre level of his later works?

Patrick,

To get back to aviation, what do you think of Jefferson Airplane?

"You know what Marilyn Monroe said when she married Arthur Miller? "Thank god I never have to give another blowjob again!"

This seems hard to believe, knowing what we know about Arthur Miller.

Admit it, Cary. You write these asinine letters yourself.

Patrick,

Take my advice - ignore all comments. Make this the last comment you ever read. There are much more interesting things to do, like chess. e4....