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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
column AND letters from readers. lol
Re: dog hair, there is a bald guy in baggage handling in Santa Fe who collects the hair on bags to make a hairpiece.
Re: Swiss glaciers, animals and birds do things that make surface snow or ice unappetizing and unhealthy. Do you eat off the lawn?
In a moving car during an earthquake, unless it is huge you do not feel it. The motion of the car and its suspension swamps the movement of the earth. This happened to me once; the radio announced the earthquake but I could not feel it.
If the plane did not crash with serious injuries, it was not a near death experience. A good landing is any that you walk away from.
Patrick is right, most of those questions are beyond answering.
Do you have any more? Great column.
Jason G. calls me a penis *and* a douchebag. I went and read his past letters, posted in reply to various articles here in Salon.
Holy shit!! I did exactly the same thing after reading this guy’s trenchant criticism, wondering what huge bug might’ve crawled up his ass (well, almost the same thing; it only took me the first few of his letters to determine that he wasn’t the total freak I was expecting). Oh well; I guess we’ll have to chalk-up his tirade to the aftereffects of some kind of psychotic episode or a grand mal seizure, or the simple fact that there’s just no accounting for taste.
Patrick Smith’s column was the first thing that had me reading Salon on a regular basis, and I still find him not only to be smart as hell and consistently well informed, but the most incisive and gifted writer on the staff. As a rule, I tend to get a bit testy when the column focuses on anything other than the government’s relentless use of airline security as a tool of fascist social conditioning, since, well, it just matters so much more than any of the other assorted problems and experiences associated with air travel.
But this column was just so damn funny, it had me laughing out loud. Really fucking hard.
what would ease your pain, Patrick??? That one was great!
Cropdusting: When a flight attendant has a gastrointestional compulsion to slowly stroll down the aisles, wearing a bemused smile. This need is usually signaled to a fellow attendant via the code words "cover my rows-I'm going to do a little crop dusting".
Thanks, and next time I'll email my questions. By the way, I do not consider you a douchebag. Nor a penis. Possibly a belly button.
And add me to the list of people who are curious why plane flights trigger flatulence. (Or maybe that's one for Cecil Adams.)
the suitcase was carefully removed and sent to a secret government lab where the dog hair was removed as a simple matter while they were busy implanting RFID and GPS chips in the bag in order to track you because Israel needs to blame the whole nuclear war from space against the Iranians on you, you personally.
Didn't you get the memo?
I wish that traveling would remove the cat hair on my luggage. However, the white hairs on the black bag DO make it easy to identify which is mine in the baggage claim.
I agree with the person who is always cold on planes. I've learned to dress for it now.
Funny column and funny letters, thanks for the laugh.
The mystery deepens. Dog hair vanishes. Cat hair doesn't.
Cat hair, it seems, is impervious to the same static that lifts dog hair during flights. My luggage starts out covered with cat fur and when I land, it's still covered with cat fur.
that there is a difference between dog fur and cat fur in the triboelectric series? Curiouser and curiouser indeed!
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
