Flyin' High Again (and again, and again....)

Mark Malkoff is a filmmaker and comedian, who happens to have Erica Jong's disease: Fear Of Flying. He's lived with it some 33 years, and he's finally had enough. So how do you get over such a thing? This may not work for you or me, but Mr. Malkoff decided to book an Air Tran flight from NY LaGuardia to Atlanta on June 1st. That was just the beginning. He is attempting to fly all-day, every day for a full month, and his itineraries range from 5 to as many as a dozen flights per day, with destinations including Raleigh, N.C., Jacksonville, Fla., Denver, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. By selecting Air Tran, he's a bit more limited on where he goes than carriers who also handle the Caribbean, Europe etc. But it DOESN'T MATTER! It's all about being airborne. To combat the loneliness, his wife actually joins him and flies with him on the weekends. He says the hardest part is washing his hair in the lavatories on board, and cleaning himself with baby wipes. He insists his fear is abating, and that overall the experience has been a positive one. It's had the side-effect of curing some of his other fears as well. Previously, he had excruciating anxiety attacks, riddled with fear of:

1) Baby wipes
2) Rolling carts filled with beverages
3) Snoring strangers
4) Unruly kids with oblivious parents

and most of all

5) The embarrassment of not understanding the
workings of a seat belt (practice makes perfect!)

You can check out his daily blog at http://www.markonairtran.com/

Don't you love it when companies pretend to care? I always find it laughable when I see a TV ad for an oil company, spouting about how they are loving and caring to the environment. Yeah SURE you are. Here's a new twist on that notion from "across the pond" in Britain. London's celebrated high-end restaurant Nobu serves a bluefin tuna entree, for the equivalent of about $51.00 US Dollars. However, they are apparently ashamed enough about serving bluefin, according to a May report in the London Daily Telegraph, that it comes with a caveat. Printed on the menu is this advisory:

"Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species -- please ask your server for an alternative."

The dictionary describes that as "blatant disregard"

It's not just the Brits with strange headlines this month. The BBC also has news from the Czech Republic. Seems the Czech newspaper Lidove Noviny reported recently that, as late as 1975, the communist government of Czechoslovakia was actively planning to dig a tunnel from that landlocked country, underneath Austria and the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia, to give it rail access to the Adriatic Sea, 250 miles away. It is not known what the Austrians and the Yugoslavs thought of the idea, but just imagine if Mexico or Canada tried to run tunnels under the United States. Good plan. No word on whether the then-Czech communist government had considered digging straight through to China, to save on skyrocketing rice and tea prices.

Then again, we're not immune to weirdness right here in North Carolina. Just an hour up the road in Hickory, NC a man named Donny Guy, 31, was arrested and charged with burglary of the Captain's Galley Seafood restaurant, in a caper caught on surveillance video. Mr. Guy was immediately a suspect, because he lives in an apartment just 150 feet from the restaurant. Little did he know, he had left two identifying paper trails during the robbery, which led police almost directly to his front door. Watching the video, they saw the suspect "escaping" with two cash registers, one under each arm. Unfortunately for Mr. Guy, he failed to notice that the spools of receipt paper from each machine had snagged on something in the restaurant, and were unraveling with each step he took. Sort of like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs to mark their path, only easier to spot. Authorities subsequently nabbed him, just before he was able to erect a 200-foot neon arrow pointing towards his apartment, emblazoned with giant letters proclaiming "I DID IT!"