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This past year has been called "the worst year ever for U.S. airlines." What has your experience with the airlines been like when you've traveled in recent months?

How do you answer this question?  Where do I start?  My experiences have been everything from barely sufferable to downright miserable.  Between idiotic and despotic security regulations to poor service on the actual plane to inconsistent standards and practices within the airlines themselves, traveling has become a waking nightmare.

Recently, I flew Northwest from L.A. to Oklahoma City, with a plane change in Memphis.  I was carrying a small backpack with a padded compartment for a laptop, which was inside.   When boarding the plane  in Memphis, the gate staff told me that I would have to check the bag.  When I explained about the laptop, I was told to remove it and carry it on board by itself. During takeoff and landing, the flight attendant told me I would have to put my laptop, unprotected, in the overhead bin and that if I was worried about damage I should have gotten a case for it.  When I explained that I had a case and had been told to check it, I was told not to make a fuss and just put the laptop away.

On the return flight, I was able to carry my backpack aboard with no problems.

Other airlines are no better.  I have had lost luggage, delayed flights (due to mistakes, not weather or other uncontrollable events), patronizing, useless staff, impatient and rude security personnel, and just general inconvenience after inconvenience.  It seems the airlines have forgotten that passengers are paying customers, especially in their hub areas where it is more difficult to get competing flights.

Something should be done, but, unfortunately, no one seems to have any answers.  For myself, I fail to understand why the U.S. does not build a network of high speed trains across the country.  It seems somewhat ridiculous to fly from Oklahoma City to Memphis, which is about a five hour drive.  A bullet train could make it in three, and, while a plane makes it in an hour and change, by the time you have to check in and go through security, you're right back at five hours.

Build trains and stop flying so much.  That's it.

Flickr pro users can now upload 90 second videos which has members complaining about everything from slowing Flickr down, lack of community consultation, and diminishing Flickr's inital purpose: photography. What do you think -- Do you support video on Flickr?

This is a good question.  I've been browsing around the video and I like some of the stuff I've seen, but I think Flickr would have been better off making a sister site with lots of interaction and cross applications.  Something like the way the 43 Things group of websites works - they're all separate, but they cross-link and work together fairly well.  Having said that, they've done it, and done it fairly well and all that's left to be done is to wait and see how the hardcore Flickr users adapt and change the service offered.

As someone who is both a liberal and appalled at the cosmic unfairness of life, I found this article quite interesting:

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

There was nothing really new in the thinking, I guess, it's more that it's disturbing to have scientific evidence backing up the idea that conservatives are happier because they're better at justifying life's unfairness.  I mean, after all, how many rich conservatives have you heard offer excuses like "they're poor because they're lazy" or "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, you can too!"

Sigh.

In November of 1993, while Nirvana were in New York recording their Unplugged performance, Groove Neuter and I were working for a college radio station in our hometown.  A few months later, when the performance aired, Groove came over to my house and we spent a few hours rigging a VCR and a cassette recorder to the t.v., bootlegging the entirety for our radio show.

A short while after that, I came home to find my dad listening to the radio news.  "Hey son.  Did you hear that Nirvana kid shot himself?"

"What?"  I ran to the phone and called Groove at the station.

He laughed, the way he always does when there's something emotional he doesn't want to deal with.  "Yup.  It's true." He said, then read me the story straight off the news wire.  I hung up the phone and went back to the living room where my dad was waiting.

"Jesus, Dad.  You just don't know how this feels."

"Yeah, probably about the same way I felt when Elvis died."  That was enough to jolt me out of my shock.  That my dad, who was never to really appreciate the grunge and punk that I loved, could never-the-less empathize because of his own musical idol's self inflicted deification penetrated the fog in my head.  I got back on the phone with Groove and we started planning our Nirvana hour, a combination tribute and mourning.

The funny thing is, I had not even liked Nirvana when I first heard them.  A friend had a copy of a copy of Bleach and I thought it was a mess.  Back in 1989, Guns 'N' Roses was still the be all and end all of my musical universe.  I had grown up with an aunt, who, at only eight years my senior, built my early musical tastes.  I listened to Adam and the Ants, later Clash, the Pretenders, and other early 80s New Wave.  By the time I hit junior high school I had abandoned all that for the pop metal tastes that my friends preferred:  Poison, Warrant, Bon Jovi, Ratt, Cinderella.  And then I heard Guns 'N' Roses and my tastes shifted again.  By the time high school started I was into Metallica, Iron Maiden, and other, harder, metal.

My sister gave me Nevermind for Christmas the year it came out.  Another gate opened and now I began adding grunge albums into my collection, from there punk, from there...Nirvana changed their sound.  They did an Unplugged show, with several covers by bands I had never heard of (Vaselines), or from people my mom liked (David Bowie).  And now the gates were hanging off the hinges and I was grabbing any kind of music I could.  I got into the Ramones and the Clash and even Bowie.

And perhaps I'm not explaining it well, but Nirvana's acknowledgment of their influences made it ok for me to like things outside my chosen genre; the performance made it acceptable to have diverse and eclectic musical tastes.

And then he shot himself.

Groove and I carried on with our radio show for another year or so before moving on to other things, but for years after, whenever there was something untoward happening, one or the other of us would look at the other and just say, "fucking Kurt" as a way of summing up whatever fucked up situation had just arisen

My last trip to the U.S. I bought a copy of the just-released DVD of Nirvana's Unplugged performance that I hoped Groove and I would have a chance to watch together but, the way things go, we did not have that chance.  We chose to spend our limited time hanging out and finding new things to bullshit about, new situations to bitch about, new things to bond over.  That's a good thing of course, but I do wish we had had a chance to reminisce over this performance, especially as I sit here now with the DVD playing in the background.

My dad called me up a few years ago for no real reason other than to tell me he had just gotten Elvis' Comeback special on DVD.  I get that now.

Has anyone ever done something so horrible to you that "I'm sorry" couldn't fix it?

Yes.

What fictional character do you relate to most and why?

Charlie Brown.  Irrepressible optimism in the face of unswerving and often vicious defeat at the hands of fate is something I could wish to emulate, yet seem to find myself nodding along to the humable pathos of cynicism.

MarioKart has been on my must-play list since I first had a Nintendo system, way back in my university days.  I've played it on the N64, GameCube, DS, and, now, the Wii.  And it rocks so hard.

I've been playing somewhat obsessively for the past couple of days (I've had some time off of work) and have been enjoying myself immensely.  I've managed to rack up gold cup trophies in 7 of the 8 cups so far, although only at the 50cc level and have to remind myself to shut the machine down after an hour or so and go do something else, less I play all day.

The best part, for me, is that I finally have a game that my wife will sit down and play with me.  She finds the wheel easier to use than the crosspad other versions have required, both for steering and for drifting. 

I'm rambling.  The point is, go get the game.  It is awesomeness squared multiplied by awesomeness cubed.

What's your ultimate rainy day song?
Submitted by J-Len.

Show us your favorite pair of shoes.

Torn-up Old Boots

It says: "Going away was something I never thought I'd stop wanting to do."

Which yet-to-be-released movie are you excited to see?

Speed Racer

I know a lot of people are ready to trash this but I'm dying to see it.  I loved the cartoons as a kid and I have had  a movie crush on Christina Ricci for a long time, so, yeah.  Speed Racer!