This week in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each side's respective leadership strives to out-stupid the other.
There's a huge public health cost to overusing antibiotics in farm animals, and it's not reflected in the price of the product. Which means that the cost is borne by society at large.
There's also a cost to underfunding food safety.
Do y'all remember when I felt kinda bad, on my way back from the Canadian Rockies, when I wouldn't switch seats with a small child, partly because he was being obnoxious about it? Well, I still don't think I owed him anything, and I generally resent it when people ask me to cede to them the seat that I've chosen. But apparently, families have few qualms about asking.
I very much respect David Mendelsohn, but there's a lot to hate in his scathing review of Mad Men. I'll start with a spoiler alert for the review, and a disclaimer for myself: I love the show. I am not a TV critic, so I've considered the show as a consumer, not an analyst. That said, I've (1) consciously noted the amazing acting; and (2) never thought to notice the writing, which indicates that the writing is pretty good. In other words, when I watch the show, I focus on what's happening, not on what's been written; it doesn't come across as something that's been written. I also take issue with Mr. Mendelsohn's critiques of the characters; I'm not sure why they're so unbelievable to him, as people. They--the imperfect beings--make perfect sense to me. I'm also not sure why he thinks that the stuff of life that is spun into the stuff of the show--divorce, adultery, abortion--is exclusively or particularly the stuff of soap operas. It's his call to dislike the show, and I suppose it's his job as a critic to root that dislike in theory, but I'm just not seeing it.
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Re: seats. We recently had this same problem on our flight home from STL to LAX. We had 3 seats booked together when we first booked, but somehow, something changed and we could only get two seats together, neither of which was a window seat, which is required if you have a car seat. The stewardess asked folks to move and people were very nice about doing so. Then we had engine trouble and were forced to get off our non-stop and take two flights to get home. The gate agent booked us in 3 seats together for this flight, but the first flight was delayed on the tarmac, so we were forced on to a later flight, and only could get two seats together, and the guy in the aisle seat didn't want to switch seats with my husband, so he was forced to listen to my daughter scream, "Dada! Dada!" if she even caught a glimpse of him for a three hour flight. He was married, but didn't have children. And I could tell he was angry the entire flight.
Listen, if people want peaceful flights it's in their best interest to let families sit together. When people don't let families sit together, then they're forcing situations like making someone have to single parent on a flight or forcing children to sit by themselves in other rows, possibly annoying other passengers because their parents can't supervise them.
I don't blame the passengers who refuse to move for these situations. I blame the airlines. The reason I refuse to fly AA ever again is because they make it virtually impossible to ensure that you can sit with your family. It would be better for everyone if airlines let you reserve (and keep) your seats together from booking. Maybe you could check a family box, so that this could happen. It would seriously make everyone's flight experience so much better.
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