The Friday Random Ten+5 gets all historical and stuff.

This week's +5 is pretty straightforward -- Five Historical Figures Whose Lives I'd Really Like To Live. I'm not going to get too deeply into the impetus for this particular list, except to say that it started with a conversation with Holly about the University of Virginia and an acquaintance of hers who really would've liked to have had sex with Thomas Jefferson. OK, I may have already said too much.

But anyway, here's my list -- of people I'd want to be, mind you:



Winston Churchill
Every time I think I might like to run for some kind of public office, I think of the fishbowl that my life would be in and start to think that it'd be more trouble than it's worth. I mean, eventually someone would go back and find out about all the drinking and debauching in my past and end up revealing what a horribly irresponsible person I am. So I reckon the only way to have a career in public office and still be able to enjoy all those things is to a) be a political leader at a time before that sort of stuff started getting immediately dragged out into the open and b) be such a hero that nobody would've cared anyway. Voila: Winston Churchill, who held the UK together and made it a bulwark against the spread of the Nazi empire even while he was sucking down cigars and pickling his liver to within an inch of its existence. Oh, and annihilating pretentious dinner-party guests with cutting bons mots. Plus he got to be called "Sir," which is worth it right there.



Al Capone
Sharp dresser, very shrewd business mind, and OK, yeah, he killed quite a few people, but ultimately all he was trying to do was bring sweet, delicious bootleg liquor to a country that had been cruelly deprived of it by a tyrannical, nannying government. So if you think about it, he was really kind of a civil-libertarian folk hero. OK, maybe not, but nevertheless, the Geto Boys wrote a whole song about how good it feels to be a gangster, so who am I to argue with them?



Ian Fleming
When writing the most famous series of spy novels in the history of English literature qualifies as one of the least exciting things you've done in your life, you know you've lived said life to the fullest. Before he wrote 14 James Bond books (AND Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), Fleming lived an entire lifetime's worth of adventure leading the 30AU commando unit in World War II; while he was writing, he hung out with JFK, married a widowed baroness, and carried her off to a seaside villa in Jamaica. "I have always smoked and drunk and loved too much," he once said. "In fact I have lived not too long but too much. One day the Iron Crab will get me. Then I shall have died of living too much." I have no idea what the Iron Crab is, but it sure sounds like Fleming got everything he wanted out of life before said crab finally took him down.



St. John the Apostle
He was BFF with Jesus and wrote part of the Bible. Nothing else comes close to having that on your résumé.



Orville Wright
Along with his brother, invented powered flight. That seems like a pretty significant contribution to civilization. I'm picking him over Wilbur because a) Orville got to fly the plane first; b) he kept most of his hair; and c) he had a truly kickass mustache. Sure, facial hair is less aerodynamic, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices.

Thought about putting Cleopatra on there just so I'd get to say "Hey, I got to see Cleopatra naked," but it would also involve sexual relations with quite a few caesars, and those guys were freaks. Not to mention it would all end with a snakebite. To live that eventful a life, only to meet your doom at the non-hands of a reptile, seems pretty bush.

So. Here be the Ten:

1. Genesis, "Invisible Touch"
2. Animotion, "Obsession"
3. David Cross, "Welfare Dentist on a Bender"
4. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, "Go Daddy-O"
5. Pet Shop Boys, "London" (Radical Blacklite edit)
6. The Chemical Brothers, "Not Another Drugstore"
7. David Holmes, "The Ballad of Sarah & Jack"
8. The Chemical Brothers, "Get Up On It Like This"
9. The Clash, "Janie Jones"
10. Downright, "Drinking the Dregs"

Your own Tens, and your lists of people whose lives you wouldn't mind Quantum Leaping into for a spell, are welcome in the comments.

The Friday Random Ten+5 gives some shout-outs, then books out.

I'm kind of having to punt on the +5 this week because I have to leave for Atlanta in less than an hour and a half, so it's going to be more or less a roundup of random awesome stuff -- My Heisman Ballot Of Five Things That Have Been Awesome To Me This Week.



Green's package store on Ponce de Leon in Atlanta
Always a frequent spot to hit on the way to a Saturday of tailgating in Athens, but now virtually mandatory due to the fact that a) they keep expanding their liquor selections, b) they have a new walk-in Belgian beer cooler, and c) it takes a lot of alcohol consumption to make Georgia's defense look good.



Erin Andrews in glasses
Not a great screengrab above, but if you were watching Georgia's game against Arkansas last week then you know what I'm talking about. EA looked hot enough that all actual sexy librarians should now be referred to as sporting the "Erin Andrews at the Georgia-Arkansas game look."



Airplanes with funny paint jobs
See also: the Southwest Airlines "Shamu" planes; Western Pacific's old "Simpsons" plane; and SkyEurope's Boeing 737s with supermodels on the side. OK, that last one isn't really "funny" per se, but it still gets your attention.



The Jaguar XFR
The James Bond of cars: handsome, suave, doesn't look out of place at either a five-star restaurant or a competitive sporting event, and can straight-up murder any of its competitors without really breaking a sweat.



Hot wings at B. Merrell's in Columbus
I know I make fun of Columbus all the time, but it does have one major claim to fame: the site of the best Buffalo wings in the universe. A bold statement, I know, but B. Merrell's has ruined me for hot wings just about any place else in the world because theirs are so much better. Crispy without being breaded; sauce that's hot but not overpowering; perfectly rotisserie-cooked so that you can pack away 20 of them in barely more than the blink of an eye. Wing perfection, and I should know, because if you'd seen my gut lately you'd know that I've put away a few.

And now the Ten:

1. Thom Yorke, "Skip Divided"
2. Hall & Oates, "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)"
3. Dr. Dre, "Let Me Ride"
4. U2, "North and South of the River"
5. KRS-One, "2nd Quarter -- Free Throws"
6. Richard Cheese, "Fight for Your Right"
7. Meat Beat Manifesto, "Let Go"
8. A Tribe Called Quest, "The Infamous Date Rape"
9. Radiohead, "Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner)"
10. Dead Kennedys, "Stealing People's Mail"

What's been awesome to you this week? Throw that stuff (along with your Random Tens) in the comments . . . and I'm outta here.

Monday Morning Cage Match IV:Heavily armed VTOL ground-attack aircraft vs. AWW WOOKIT THE WITTLE BABY.

For the first time in the history of the Cage Match, I've got a dog in the fight -- a literal dog in the fight, come to think of it -- but I'll try to be as objective as I can in judging the battle royale of Harrier vs. Terrier. No animals will be harmed in the production of this post.

	[Boeing/BAE Systems AV-8B] Harrier	[Boston] terrier
Price	$30-35 million	$300-$1,000
WINNER: Terrier
Lineage	Hawker P.1127, first flown in 1960	Bull-and-Terrier and various breeds of bulldogs, first bred in the 1870s
WINNER: Tie
Original purpose	Ground/naval attack	Pit fighting, catching and killing mice and other vermin
WINNER: Harrier
Cuteness	Negligible	OFF THE CHARTS
WINNER: Terrier
Lethality	Considerable	Generally only to stuffed toys and Milk-Bones
WINNER: Harrier
Biggest drawback	Not supersonic	Gassy
WINNER: Harrier
Notable owners	Armed forces of the United States, Italy, and Spain	Rose McGowan, Famke Janssen
WINNER: Terrier

FINAL SCORE: Harrier 4, Terrier 4. From which we are forced to conclude that both are equally awesome.

The Friday Random Ten+5 dreams big.

Well, yesterday I turned 31, and for some reason I actually found myself taking stock of my life more than I did last year when I hit the big three-oh. Some of the things I'd wanted to do -- graduate from college, travel outside the country, date a stripper, go to the Michigan-Ohio State game -- I've managed to cross off my list, but there are still a few things hanging out there that I haven't done yet. So this week's +5 is Five Things I Want To Accomplish In The Next Thirty-One Years Of My Life. Hopefully 31 years will be enough time to knock them all out, but you never know:



Get mentioned in a Wu-Tang Clan song
There are still eight members left, so I figure I should be able to make friends with at least one of them. Preferably GZA or Ghostface.



Open a Hooters in a foreign country
This is one where I've kind of got to get on the stick -- Hooters has already opened up establishments in 24 foreign countries and a few overseas territories besides, so I'm running out of opportunities to truly break some new ground here. But as near as I can tell, Rio de Janeiro, Bratislava, Heidelberg, and Moscow are all ripe for new locations. Any one of those cities would have a large customer base, and an extensive pool of "talent" with respect to potential employees, to draw from.



Drive a car through a fruit stand or plate-glass window
This happens often enough in action movies that I'm kind of disappointed I haven't gotten to do it yet. I'd compensate the fruit vendor and/or glass company for their loss of assets, of course.



Meet Hugh Hefner
I bet a guy like that has all sorts of sage advice to offer someone like me, including the answers to major life questions such as "How can I remain an incredible badass even at the age of 83?" and "How do you maintain three ridiculously hot girlfriends at once and keep them all from despising each other?" I mean, I should be so lucky as to ever be faced with either of those issues, but still.



Eject from a fighter plane
I've already crashed a car and made the airbags go off; this, I guess, would kind of be the next step up. They both involve controlled explosions and a vehicle that's probably going to be unusable afterward.

And now the Ten, courtesy of the iPhone 'cause my iPod's in my car and I don't feel like going down and getting it:

1. The English Beat, "Mirror in the Bathroom"
2. Sloppy Seconds, "I Don't Wanna Be a Homosexual"
3. Donna Summer, "I Feel Love"
4. The Police, "Every Breath You Take"
5. R.E.M., "At My Most Beautiful"
6. U2, "11 O'Clock Tick Tock"
7. Dead Kennedys, "Short Songs"
8. Talking Heads, "(Nothing But) Flowers"
9. Joy Division, "Love Will Tear Us Apart"
10. Pet Shop Boys, "My Head Is Spinning" (Electro set remix)

Your turn -- Random Tens and goals for the next however many years of your life go in the comments.

The Friday Random Ten+5 gets wistful. Or maybe just pathetic.

The other day Orson Swindle announced that he'd gotten an advance copy of Phil Steele's legendary preseason college-football publication, that lucky rat bastard (except for the whole, you know, breaking your back and ending up immobilized for weeks thing). Between the imminent release of the annual Steele opus and the preseason top 25s that have started popping up on various Web sites over the past few weeks, I've really been reminded just how much I'm starting to miss football. It was acute enough when we still at least had the distractions of National Signing Day, spring games, or the NFL draft to distract us; at this point we've basically got three more months of nothin'. And it hurts.

But that's just one of the things I've been missing lately. There are plenty of other things I've found myself pining for, or at least wishing they'd pop up again, and thus this week's +5 is Five People, Places, And/Or Things I've Been Missing Lately:



Alfa Romeo
Originally, this Italian car company, which had stopped selling in the U.S. in 1995, was supposed to return to the American market in 2007. Then it was 2008, then 2009. And now that the economy has gone in the crapper and the auto industry is on life support, it looks like they've pushed the date back to 2011. That may actually be a good thing, since it'll probably take at least that long for me to pay off the rest of my credit-card debt, but once I get that off my permanent record I want to be able to buy a Brera (above) or, barring that, a 159, particularly the station-wagon version. Speaking of which, I miss station wagons.



Getting to visit the cockpit
I can remember flying on Piedmont Airlines as a little kid and getting to go up and say hello to the pilots (and no, none of them ever asked me if I liked movies about gladiators or had seen a grown man naked), and then getting my "pilot wings" pinned on me by a flight attendant. Post-9/11, of course, you practically need security clearance to get anywhere near the cockpit, and I'm kind of bummed my kids are never going to be able to have that experience. And at the risk of sinking into "What's the deal with airline food?" humor, I also miss decent snacks on airplanes. I can remember when Piedmont would give you a bag of smokehouse almonds even on a short hop over the Smokies; then airlines throttled back to honey-roasted peanuts, then regular peanuts, and now you're lucky if the flight attendants fire a bag of goldfish at you with one of those compressed-air guns they use to launch T-shirts at people at basketball games. And why don't they just make the whole airplane out of the black box?!? OK, I'm done now.



Mike Wallace
Wallace is/was the standard-bearer for a dying breed of journalist: the investigative reporter/interviewer who wasn't afraid to be a complete asshole. Once upon a time, interviewers were less concerned with currying favor and being best buds with their sources/interviewees than they were with actually asking tough questions and getting relevant information, and when you sat down across from Wallace, you knew you were going to get some shots across the bow (or maybe right into your gut). Who has that kind of balls these days? Hardly anybody on the Sunday-morning talk shows, that's for sure, and not even Wallace's own son, Chris, who is a dead ringer for Dr. Leo Spaceman but has yet to do anything else to distinguish himself.



Punk rock
Watched the movie "24 Hour Party People" the other night, about Factory Records and the Madchester music scene of the 1980s, and it was awesome. And it reminded me how much I miss good music in general, but also punk rock in particular. And I'm not talking about bullshit pseudo-punk like Fall Out Boy, or even goofball pop-punk like Blink-182, I'm talking about genuine, angry, garagey punk like the Clash or the Sex Pistols or the Buzzcocks (above) or Iggy Pop. I mean, the economy's in the shitter and nobody can find a job, which was a defining theme in a lot of the British punk of the late '70s, and just like the people in that period, we're coming off a long stretch in which pop music has sucked out loud and desperately needs someone to rebel against it. Somebody give me an oi.



Boobs
Yeah, it's been a while.

And now the Ten:

1. Richard Cheese, "More Human Than Human"
2. Flight of the Conchords, "The Prince of Parties"
3. Naked Eyes, "Promises, Promises"
4. Radiohead, "Paranoid Android"
5. Big Country, "In a Big Country"
6. Elvis Presley, "Suspicious Minds"
7. Sting, "Seven Days"
8. Underworld, "Shudder/King of Snake"
9. John Phillip Sousa, "The Liberty Bell"
10. U2, "Lemon" (Bad Yard club mix)

Your turn, punks. Random Tens and lists of stuff you've been missing lately go in the comments.

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Bad ideas in every bite.

· Are you following Hey Jenny Slater on Twitter yet? You should be, because then you can learn about stuff like this, which I spotted on Valley Avenue ion Saturday while making a run to Costco.



Open question to any and all of my readers in the Birmingham area: Did any of y'all actually avail yourselves of this service? If so, how'd that work out for you? I'm honestly curious.

· As public declarations go, though, I think a message from a grown man in a diaper might still be preferable to this.



Someone's idea of a joke, you say? Oh noooo. Check out this essay -- in which the statement "masturbation is sex" is made without even a smidge of irony -- and this MySpace blog post, in which the author "fearlessly testifies to her struggle and victory over masturbation!"

Maybe I'm being overly flip here, but doesn't this all seem a little . . . melodramatic, somehow? Here's a tip, guys: If you're "struggling" that much with masturbation, you're probably doing it wrong. All that said, though, I'll give fifty dollars to the first Hey Jenny Slater reader who purchases one of the "Ex-Masturbator" shirts and provides photographic proof of having worn it for the entirety of a Christian church service.

· If you're really "struggling" with masturbation, though, the GOP has a solution. Turns out they have a solution for everything. (Thanks to Mac G for the link.)

· Here's an honest question: Why does ESPN Classic only show old football games during football season? Why not show old football games now, when football junkies like me are that much more desperate for a fix? I rarely watch old games on Classic because there are usually new games to worry about, but if they showed them between February and July (and showed, say, basketball from August to November and baseball from December to February), I'd watch the hell out of that. Just a thought, ESPN! A brilliant idea, free of charge. You can thank me later.

· God, I hope Lane Kiffin never gets fired. Ever.

· Finally, a good idea: Southwest Airlines has added to their already extensive list of specially painted airplanes by putting Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model Bar Refaeli on the side of a Boeing 737.



We better make sure the ex-masturbators don't find out about this.

"Please take care opening the overhead compartments, as contents may have shifted during flight."

I was wondering whether anyone would ever come up with any video of the actual landing of US Airways flight 1549, and somebody did.



Obviously I don't have experience landing airplanes on water, or anything else for that matter, but I was still amazed at how easy the pilot made it look (from a grainy distance, at least). There's a common perception that water is a much nicer, softer surface to have to put a crippled plane down on than, you know, land, and under certain circumstances I'm sure that's true -- but the faster you're going, the harder your impact is even when you're hitting water, as anyone who's belly-flopped off a high dive will attest. Bullets fired at certain angles, for example, have been known to deflect off of water, and while the US Airways plane wasn't going nearly as fast as a bullet -- "only" around 125 miles per hour, according to this article -- go get in your car, get up to 125, and hydroplane the thing if you think anything's easy to control at that speed. Not only that, but anyone trying to land a plane on water has to bring it in almost completely flat and level, because if you don't, you run the risk of dipping a wingtip into the drink and ending up with something more along the lines of this. For that plane to be floating more or less placidly in the Hudson River with 150-something people standing on the wings, waiting patiently to be rescued, I don't know if it qualifies as an actual miracle, but it'll do until a real one comes along.

Somebody buy Chesley Sullenberger a drink, and in the meantime, if anyone's been looking for a cheap Airbus A320 they could take on as a "fixer-upper," I might have a few leads.

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:Knowshon! Legos! Videos! Bacon! It's a cavalcade of awesomeness!

• First things first: the Knowshon Hurdle, because you can't get enough of it . . .



. . . but to me, that isn't as personally affecting as today's revelation that KNOWSHON LIKES PLAYING WITH LEGOS. I already knew he was an amazing athlete; now I might just be prepared to call him the most awesome person who has ever lived.

Sorry, I'm gonna need a minute.

• While I do that, check out this campaign video for the Palin we should be electing this year.



Incidentally, I have the audio from the "strange women in ponds distributin' swords" scene on my iPod.

• Back to football for a sec: A couple seasons ago, as I'm pretty certain I reminded you multiple times over, I won the Job Award in the 2006 College Football Blogger Awards for doing the best job of toaster-throwing covering Georgia's midseason descent into madness (and subsequent redemption). That was flattering, and I appreciated it, but even I have to bow down to one Washington Huskies fan who, in the wake of Washington's controversial last-second loss to BYU, logged onto U-Dub's Scout.com forum and posted about as eloquent and original an expression of utter hopelessness and despair as I could ever hope to come up with even in my darkest hours:

Whatever sins the Husky football program committed, whatever the sins of the late James era, the Neuheisel era, the Gilby-Ty era...whatever sins were committed 100 years ago, the McElhenny years, the days of prejudice...whatever wrongs we have done individually or collectively as Husky Nation....surely we have been punished enough. because now, it's just piling on. I am officially calling a 15 yard unsportsmanlike penalty on God.

That's truly brilliant . . . blasphemous, certainly, but brilliant. Hat tip to Brian Cook, whose brilliant "This Week in Schadenfreude" series is almost as much fun as building Lego creations with Knowshon Moreno.

• Also brilliant is this story in The Onion this week, only there's one problem: The airplane in this fake ad . . .



. . . is not Air Force One, nor a Boeing 747 at all, but rather an Airbus A340 from those snooty-ass Eurotrash over at Airbus Industrie. [/OCDplanegeek]

Still, good show overall, and I also owe long-overdue props to The Onion for their "Onion News Network" series of fake news videos, because they are truly breathtaking in their verisimilitude and completeness. Not only are the segments funny, not only are the production values surprisingly high, but the actors who play the news "anchors" and "correspondents" are pitch-fucking-perfect in their portrayal of America's TV media. Seriously, they're like "The Daily Show" taken to another dimension of reality and lived-in-ness. If you haven't bothered to check any of them out yet, you can start with this one . . .


Portrayal Of Obama As Elitist Hailed As Step Forward For African Americans

. . . and don't forget to also take a gander at "Reporters Expose Airport Security Lapses By Blowing Up Plane," which sounds like something "NBC Dateline" might actually do for sweeps week.

• Also covered in The Onion this week, albeit in entirely straight-up fashion: Should everything taste like bacon? I was a very early proponent of the theory that bacon is humanity's Universal Food, as it can be added to literally everything, so the prospect of adding bacony goodness to existing foods through "bacon salt" is one I find highly intriguing. What do you think, sirs?

A memo from the desk of Arnold T. Pants, Esq.:McLovin, Lincoln and Eazy-E.

• OK, I know you enjoyed Hayden Panettiere's sexual-harassment spot from a few days ago, but this one might be even funnier.



• Portrait of your modern-day Republican Party #4,472: At a Lincoln Day Dinner -- a Republican Party tradition named for the president who freed the slaves and ended the Civil War -- Rep. Geoff Davis refers to an African-American Senator, one of the leading candidates for president, as "boy." Honest Abe would be so proud!


"Sorry, I couldn't hear you, I was too busy SPINNING IN MY GRAVE."

• As for the folks who let loose with that kind of stupidity on the World Wide Internets as opposed to Lincoln Day Dinners, Roy Edroso has a hilarious guide to right-wing bloggers and how they're likely to cover this year's presidential election. It may only be funny to political junkies like me who have spent way more time slogging through both the lefty and righty blogospheres than they ever intended, but you might as well internalize it now, because a few of these folks (Glenn Reynolds being only the most obvious) are no doubt going to start popping up on your TV screens in cable-news talkfests before too long.

As for me, I know my political blogging has been pretty sparse lately, which will come across as lazy to some of you while being a blessed relief to others. I don't know -- Tuesday morning at Starbucks, I ran into an acquaintance of mine with whom I'd worked fairly closely in 2004, and she asked me, "Staying active lately?" And I had to reply that I was active for a while, but at this point I was pretty much just sitting around waiting for the primary season to be over so that we can crown a f$#@ing nominee already. And I blame the mainstream media for my apathy; when you're parsing a candidate's beverage choices and going apeshit over "controversies" that nobody actually seems to care about, it's possible you may have run out of relevant comments to make. MSNBC, CNN, Fox, y'all just wake me when August rolls around.

• The merger between Delta and Northwest Airlines has been set in motion, and while I think anything that makes Delta bigger and wider-reaching is probably a net positive for the South, I have to admit I'm going to be a little sorry to see this go:



Northwest is definitely the gangsterest airline of all time; you've got to be hard-core to paint a tribute to N.W.A. down the side of a fricking Airbus A330. Somewhere in the great beyond, Eazy-E is raising a forty of Old English to Northwest's memory.

• Courtesy of SI.com's Campus Clicks, we have a list of the Top 10 Shirts to Get Arrested In. I liked the comment they gave for this one:



At any rate, smart-ass T-shirts are a subject near and dear to my heart; I have this one and this one in my dresser right now, to name just two. And in high school, I had a shirt that said "Thank You for not Projectile Vomiting" (somewhat obscured photo of the very same shirt here), and I wore it on the day of my driver's test, just to see what kind of reaction it'd get from the test-scoring guy or the state troopers down at the Department of Public Safety. For some reason, though, I didn't think that they would actually be taking my picture and popping out my license that day, so once I'd passed the on-the-road portion of the test, we went back to the DPS office and they stuck me in front of a camera. And for the next several years, the bottom of my driver's-license photo revealed a little stick-figure man spewing lime-green vomit inside the universal "no" symbol. My mom was absolutely mortified, and when I lost that card a few years later -- forcing me to go get a new one made -- I'm fairly certain she was responsible.

The Friday Random Ten+5 is expecting delays.

Baby sis is currently in the midst of a blog hiatus that is scheduled to last until January 1, so I guess it's up to me to tell the story of what happened to her this past week.

Sis spent last week in London, visiting some friends she met during the semester she spent abroad during her sophomore year at UGA. She got a (relatively) cheap ticket on Air Canada from Atlanta to Heathrow with a stop in Toronto; she flew back Sunday, and when she landed in Toronto at about noon, there was a foot of snow on the ground. Her flight to Atlanta at about 5:30: cancelled. The last flight to Atlanta that night: also cancelled. She spent the night in the airport, and the next morning was told by the Air Canada folks that they couldn't put her on a plane until Tuesday. So she said eff that and spent an additional two hundred bucks to get one of the last two tickets on a Delta flight leaving for Atlanta at 5:30. At about 8 or 8:30 Monday night, she finally touched down on American soil, having spent about 30 hours in the Toronto airport and an additional 11 hours or so in the air.

In honor of baby sis's great misadventure, this week's +5 is my Five Worst Airport Experiences Ever, though you'd probably have to take any two of them and put them together to make something as bad as what she went through.



Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson-Whatever, June 2006
Expounded upon here. Basically, I got to the gate about 25 minutes before my flight to White Plains was supposed to leave, sat there, waited, and without so much as a "last call" the plane left without me. One minute I'm sitting there screwing with my iPod, the next minute I look up and they're changing the board from "White Plains 12:09 p.m." to "Myrtle Beach 2:00 p.m." After a very Twilight Zone-ish 30 minutes or so, AirTran put me on the next flight to White Plains, which brings us to . . .



White Plains, June 2006
My flight to Westchester County actually ended up getting off the ground at about 7 o'clock, and we had to circle the airport about three times because of bad weather in the New York area. We finally land a little before 10, and when we pull off the runway, the captain says we have to just sit there for a little while because there have been lightning strikes in the area and they don't want to send the ground crew out in those conditions. That's right: They'll let a plane with 100 people on it land in those conditions, but the ground crew, who is apparently made of sugar, can't go out there. We sit there for about an hour, then finally pull into the gate, and it takes another 45 minutes for our bags to start showing up on the carousel. I then take a cab, followed by the Metro-North Railroad, followed by the N Train, to my friend's house in Queens.

You're probably asking yourself, "Why the fuck did you fly into White Plains instead of an airport that's actually in New York City?" Well, I got a cheap ticket on AirTran for seventy bucks. But when you add the cab fare, the train ticket, and the subway pass, it probably ended up costing me about the same as a ticket to LaGuardia would have. Never mind that I didn't get to Astoria until 1:30 in the morning, which -- given that I'd left Birmingham for the Atlanta airport at about 7 that morning -- means I probably could've driven to New York and gotten there sooner. (In fact, Mapquest confirms that yes, I could've done that.) Lesson learned: The $70 ticket to Westchester County is a bitch goddess who cannot be trusted.



Atlanta, sometime in 1997 or so
Not much to tell about this one, other than I was on a four o'clock flight to Dulles that didn't end up leaving until after 1 a.m. and I finally got to Washington about three in the morning. Again, I could've driven and probably saved myself some time.



Washington-Dulles, sometime in the summer of 2003
Due to some tricky logistics, I ended up having to take the latest flight from Atlanta to Washington and then spend the night in the airport before somebody could come pick me up and drive me out to my grandparents' house in West Virginia the next morning. It was the first time I'd ever spent the night in an airport, but obviously I'd been stuck in airports for almost that long during the day on previous occasions, so I didn't think it was any big deal. I set up shop in a lounge in the main terminal and tried to sleep as much as I could, but when I looked down I saw rats. Rats, in the primary international gateway to the capital of the free world. They weren't New York subway rats, size-wise, but they were close. Suffice to say you're not getting much sleep when you know those bastards are scurrying around within a few feet of you, in an airport or anyplace else.



Venice, Italy, May 2005
This wasn't the airport's fault, but again, I had to spend the night there, and this time I had to spend it with a bad head cold I'd contracted in Florence a few nights prior. With the cold being intensified by the changes in air pressure on three separate flights between Venice and home, I pretty much wanted to die by the time I got back to Georgia, and between my illness and the fact that I'd been wearing more or less the same clothes for 36 hours, they had to handle me wearing hazmat suits.

Anyway, welcome home, sis . . . you know, if you'd stayed in Toronto just a few hours more, you would've qualified for Canadian citizenship. And now the Ten:

1. Pet Shop Boys, "It's Alright" (10" version)
2. David Cross, "My Child Is Enthralling, Especially When It Says Something Unexpectedly Precocious Even Though It Doesn't Understand What It Just Said!"
3. Patton Oswalt, "A Brief History of Shitty Comedy"
4. The Clash, "The Guns of Brixton"
5. Ice Cube, "Say Hi to the Bad Guy"
6. The Beastie Boys, "The Sounds of Science"
7. A Tribe Called Quest, "What Really Goes On"
8. BT, "Nocturnal Transmission"
9. Patton Oswalt, "The Best Baby in the Universe"
10. King Floyd, "Groove Me"

Feel free to share your own Tens and/or airport horror stories in the comments.

Tuesday Mystery Meat.

· Audience-participation time! See if you can figure out what sickened me the most about this story concerning legendary freakshow John Mark Karr:

John Mark Karr, who made what turned out to be bogus claims of killing Colorado child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, was jailed Saturday in a domestic argument at his father's house in suburban Atlanta.

Officers received an emergency call late Friday from the house about an argument between Karr, his girlfriend and his father, Sandy Springs Police Lt. Steve Rose said.

Got that? Confirmed child-buggerer John Mark Karr, who told everyone he raped and murdered JonBenet Ramsey apparently just for poops and giggles, has a girlfriend. And I don't. Help me out, readers -- pills? Drano cocktail? Garden hose from the tailpipe through the cracked sunroof? Your suggestions are always welcome.



· The Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" is here. And as big an advancement as this plane represents in terms of materials, fuel efficiency and various other technologies, the advancement that will be most readily apparent to actual passengers is probably in the area of interior design:




The mood lighting and soft curves in place of hard right angles might take some getting used to at first, but in the end I think even a "European disco" ambience will prove far preferable to "flying Greyhound." The 787 will make its first actual flight sometime in September, and will enter scheduled airline service in May or June of next year -- in plenty of time for a big marketing tie-in with the next "Transformers" movie, whenever that comes out.



· And there will be another "Transformers" movie -- actually two more, no doubt to the delight of everyone who went apeshit over the first movie that came out this past Tuesday. In this interview, Michael Bay says they're even exploring the possibility of a transforming aircraft carrier for one of those films. The reeking shitburgers that were "Armageddon" and "Bad Boys II" notwithstanding, I think Bay might turn out to be an OK guy after all.

· Still on the subject of airplanes, here's a tip for Clay Aiken: If you're flying coach from L.A. to Tulsa, Oklahoma, you're not a big enough star to be throwing your feet up on other people's armrests.

· Ah yes, more solid publicity coming out of my hometown of Columbus.

· I really don't have much additional comment on this -- I think I've made my point -- but man oh man, I never cease to be amazed at just what a huge pile of shit we've gotten ourselves into over there in the Middle East. It's getting to the point where I'm not sure any mortal human being can get us out of it. With that in mind, please let me know in the comments or via the e-mail address at top right whether you'd be interested in purchasing one of these. (I'm seriously thinking about having some printed.)

Thursday Mystery Meat: The stupid, it burns!

· Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, last seen impersonating Robert McNamara on an even grander scale, is receiving the Claremont Institute's "2007 Statesmanship Award" at their . . . wait for it . . . Churchill Dinner. As in Winston Churchill. Go ahead, wrap your brain around that; I'll give you a second. You may even need to have a Gatorade when you're done.

· Done? OK, now wrap your head around this: a story headlined "Lohan Plans Big 21st-Birthday Bash." OK, this is a girl who's an empirically verified drunk skank, and has spent the better part of the past year sashaying in and out of rehab like it was a changing room at Banana Republic. Why, exactly, should we give 0.001% of a shit that she's turning 21? Doesn't it seem like she's kind of been unofficially celebrating that milestone for a while now?

· Speaking of young ladies apparently in desperate need of attention, any of y'all heard about recently divorced Philadelphia news anchor Alycia Lane and the risqué photographs she sent to Rich Eisen, formerly of "SportsCenter" and currently of the NFL Network? Apparently this is far from the first time Lane decided to, uh, put herself out there for the attention of a potential suitor, though there was just one problem this time around -- Eisen is quite married, and to a real firecracker it sounds like, if his wife's reponse to Lane's e-mail is any indication. I'm glad Eisen, who's always come across as a pretty stand-up guy, didn't get drawn into any of this; as for Lane, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before her photos show up on Deadspin or The Smoking Gun or something. Not that I'm, uh, looking forward to that or anything.


All together now: You're with me, leather.

· There's a lot about this interview with "military historian" Victor Davis Hanson that should inspire eye-rolling and the making of the jerk-off gesture, but this bit is really what gets me:

All these Democrats now, for three or four years, have not just opposed George Bush, and not just opposed neoconservative idealism, but they've demonized it to such a degree that they've almost made Bush the equivalent of the enemy.

OK, let me get this straight.

For four years now -- more than four years really, if you count the run-up to the war -- anti-war liberals like myself have been insulted and condemned by people on the right. Some have merely said we're hurting the country by criticizing the incompetence of the Bush administration; some of them continue to go so far as to accuse us of colluding with the enemy because we have expressed outrage at the government's conduct in scandals such as Abu Ghraib and are calling for an end to the Iraq war. But now Victor Davis Tecumseh Bonaparte Hanson wants to complain about his side being "demonized" into "the equivalent of the enemy"? All I can say is that if "neoconservative idealism" is now regarded with the same derision as the flat-earth theory and the geocentric view of the universe, you might first want to start with the practitioners of said philosophy to see why it's become such a joke.


Tiny-violin virtuoso Rei Takahama plays a haunting solo just for Victor Davis Carmina Burana John Jacob Jingleheimer Hanson.

· On a related note, we have breaking news out of Washington, where George W. Bush has made a shocking announcement in a speech to the Associated General Contractors of America:

By the way, in the report it said, it is -- the government may have to put in more troops to be able to get to that position. And that's what we do. We put in more troops to get to a position where we can be in some other place. The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear -- I'm the commander guy.

What does this mean? Is Bush both the "commander guy" and the decider, who decides what is best? Or is he relinquishing his decider duties to focus on being the commander guy? If so, will he be naming an Interim Decider until an official nominee can be selected for confirmation? Or is that just going to fall to Dick Cheney by default?



· Question #1 for you readers: What do y'all think of Delta's new colors? Honestly I think they're kind of boring, but at least the airline's out of bankruptcy and hasn't gotten bought up by someone who wants to move the headquarters across the country. Given the choice between a boring color scheme and half the population of Clayton County being unemployed, I'll take the former.

· Question #2: What if the managers of all 29 major-league baseball teams who aren't the San Francisco Giants got together and agreed to intentionally walk Barry Bonds every time he came up to bat, thus depriving him of the chance to break Hank Aaron's career home-run record? Tell me, People Who Know More About Baseball Than I Do (Which Is Just About Everyone), is there a rule against that? Would they be in violation of some kind of conspiracy or anti-trust legislation?

At the very least, I think it's something that should be looked into.

As an airplane geek, I am now insanely jealous.

When I first read that someone was turning an old Boeing 747 into a house, I was extremely envious. As it turns out, the project isn't quite as cool as I first thought it was -- they're not just taking an old 747 fuselage and plopping it down on someone's property, they're taking they thing apart and building a house out of the parts. And the rough computer rendering of the house design doesn't show a lot of recognizable 747 design touches in the final product. Still, though, it qualifies as "awesome" in my book. I've never actually flown on one, but the 747 has still been my favorite plane ever since I was a little kid.

But if I'm ever gonna do this myself, I guess I'm gonna have to build my house out of an even bigger airplane to top this first one. The logical choice is an Airbus A380, but those haven't even entered regular commercial service yet, much less completed their life spans and been scrapped -- besides, I want a good ol' American airplane, not some hoity-toity European plane. The Boeing C-17 would be the logical choice, then, but again, it's gonna be a while before the Air Force starts getting rid of those. How about a C-5 Galaxy? It's big, it's spacious, and plus, I hear the Air Force has an airframe they might be looking to unload sometime in the very near future. What do you think, sirs?


Look, it's even pre-broken-up and everything! I think I'll put my bedroom in the cockpit.

The weekend in pictures, part I: airplanes.

My apologies if I sort of bummed everybody out with the last post. It wasn't my intention to do so -- well, no, it kind of was. But I thought I might post something a little less dispiriting by throwing up some pictures I took over the weekend while I was in Columbus. I now have a 128-meg memory card for my little digital camera, so I decided it was time to let that sucker rip.

First set is from the air show I went to with my dad. "Thunder in the Valley" has actually gotten to be a pretty big deal around these parts -- it isn't Paris or Farnborough, needless to say, but it does draw a pretty big crowd each year, and they manage to take advantage of their proximity to Fort Benning to bring in some pretty neat military aircraft, among other things. I know I've ragged on Columbus at numerous points in the past, but I really do think that if they expanded and publicized this air show thing a little more, they could turn it into a nationwide deal. My sister and I have talked at length about how Columbus really needs something that Atlanta doesn't have to sort of distinguish itself and move itself out of Atlanta's shadow -- well, I think the air show could be the ticket, if they did it right.


The undisputed star of the show, and a new addition this year, was the C-17 Globemaster III, the newest heavy-lift cargo plane in the Air Force fleet. I think the guy told us that, fully loaded, it weighs something like 580,000 pounds, yet it can take off in only 1,300 feet -- less than 1/5th the length of the Columbus airport's main runway. Which ain't all that long, considering that we only get ASA commuter flights in there anymore these days.


A bunch of folks strolling up into the cargo hold of the C-17, which is big enough to hold a CH-47 Chinook helicopter or an M1A1 Abrams battle tank, among other things.


Pops behind the wheel of the C-17, about 20 feet off the ground. Dad is a funny guy: When I first asked him if he wanted to go to the air show, he was like, "Ahhhh, I don't know, it's usually kind of the same every year" -- but once we got up in the C-17, he was as excited as a kid, and actually elbowed three or four little kids out of the way so that he could sit in the pilot's seat. (Of course I'm only kidding here. It was only one kid, and he shouldn't have been looking at Dad like that.)


Here's an A-10 Thunderbolt II coming around to do another demonstration of a tank-killing strafing run. The A-10 is basically an airplane built around a cannon, one that fires Coke-bottle-sized bullets that aren't so much "armor-piercing" as "armor-liquefying." I think if I'd followed through on my childhood dream of becoming a pilot in the military, I'd want to fly one of these -- slow, butt-ugly, and downright terrifying. Kind of like me, except for that last part.


An Aero L-39 jet trainer, here in Red Air Force markings even though it was built by my countrymen in (w00t) Czechoslovakia. (You can purchase a flight in one of these if you're so inclined -- or if, like GM chairman Robert Lutz, you have an extra $200,000 lying around, you can buy the plane itself.)


Detail of the nose art on a B-25 Mitchell from WWII.


Business end of a FedEx Boeing 727.


Two airmen watching the show from the roof of the C-17, one of the better seats in the house.

Tomorrow: Dogs!