Librarian of Fortune

"use" of quotation marks

Sign seen at the Philadelphia airport today:

This is
"not" an
"exit"

Apparently, the only way one can indicate emphasis in written communication these days is to put "quote" "marks" around the "word."  This drives me bat-shit.

Does the TSA really keep us safer?

I'm doing back-to-back flying these days, and I had in my briefcase both a boarding pass from yesterday's flight home and today's flight to Minneapolis. At the TSA security check, I accidentally gave them yesterday's boarding pass from DC to Denver. The TSA pern dutifully checked the boarding pass and my ID, stamped the boarding pass and let me through, with a boarding pass from the wrong day and the wrong airport. And I have in the past forgotten to take my 3 oz of Purelle out of my bag for separate screening. No one has ever stopped me to examine the rogue liquid.

Why in heaven's name do we have to go through TSA security if it's this lackadaisical?

My flight to nowhere

I admit, I'm a whore for United Airlines. It's got a hub in Denver, my local airport, and generally flies to where I need to go. So, for several years now, I've managed to get 1K status, meaning I've actually flown 100,000 miles a year. It's not pretty.

This last December, I realized that I had not flown enough to qualify for 1K this year, so I found a cheap flight to Honolulu and back, which just bumped me over the top. I managed to upgrade to business class, and actually got a lot of work done, but what a weekend... Left the house for DIA at 11am on a Saturday, arrived in Honolulu at 8pm, spent the night sleeping in the open-air terminal, caught a flight home at 8am the following morning and arrived home at 9pm. (No hotel rooms for love or money, since I arrived on the day after Pearl Harbor Day.)

I had that too-familiar feeling of being dehydrated, bone-tired and stiff, and I didn't even get a new stamp in my passport. At least business-class airplane food isn't too bad.

The real London Underground

I go to London a couple of times a year, and often take the Tube to get around. The feature and the bug of the Tube map is that it's highly stylized -- great for calculating transfer points, but what you don't realize is two points a block apart may appear to be much farther apart when viewed on the map. Now I have The Real (London) Underground map -- a clever tool that morphs the stylized map into one that reflects the actual layout.

Stuff I saw while in Australia

I've been collecting notes of strange / interesting / unusual stuff I see while I'm on the road. Here are a few things I saw the last time I was in Australia.

• We hired a car to drive from Melbourne to Canberra -- a nice drive if you've got the time. The rental car has a little coffee cup icon that lights up on the dashboard if the engine hasn't been turned off for 2 hours. There are also signs every 5 or 10 miles along the highway, reminding people to stop and rest.

• One night we went to the Gurkhas at Carlton - a Nepalese restaurant in Melbourne. The menu "main courses -- vegetarian" and "main courses -- meatatarian" Now I know what to call my omnivore friends.