BRIC-A-BRAC: Poetry in Motion

One of the more peculiar aspects of travel on Chicago's elevated trail lines is the occasional appearance of solicitors. There you'll be, barely paying attention to your surroundings, hoping against hope that no one will come and claim the seat next to you so you won't have to get into some awkward elbow showdown, and then your reverie will be interrupted by someone announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen, if I could just have a moment of your time..."

This isn't legal, of course. The CTA reserves the right to sell on their trains only to those major corporations who have paid to slap giant ads to the outside of the train car. But these are far from legitimate businessmen flouting the rules. As a rule, these folks are homeless, and the El has become a last refuge.

Typically, the pitch is a flat-out appeal for money, which is the most irritating, because who wants to just give someone money? Often, the panhandler will explain that they are trying to turn their lives around, and that the money is just so they can get a CTA pass (which always brings up the question of how they got on this train), but when you come right down to it, they're just begging. And years in the city make you hard to that sort of thing.

A few hardy souls want to sell you something. Sometimes it's a spiritual trinket, because there's probably a percentage of the population who can't turn down an appeal of a sacred nature. And I guess that's a step up from the Streetwise vendors who used to be a much more common sight on street corners.

(For the uninitiated, Streetwise is a quasi-periodical that homeless people are legitimately hired to hawks on the streets. I bought one the first year I was here, and I found it highly uninteresting. More memorable was the time a Streetwise vendor tried to sell me the latest issue in front of the Field Museum, and I was feeling generous, so I was prepared to hand over my dollar, and the guy tells me that he can't give it to me because it's his only copy. And then I got really annoyed, because I went from doing a good deed to being the victim of a scam in the space of a few seconds, and I guess it was only a dollar, but, you know, come on. So he didn't give me a damn Streetwise, and I didn't give him a dollar, and I've never been persuaded to try and buy one since. So that certainly worked out for everyone.)

The guy on the train today was different. I ignored the first several minutes of his commentary, because, you know, that's what you do. But as we neared the next stop (and probably moments before he switched cars so there was no chance of the authorities coming after him), he finally explained what he was selling.

It was his book of poetry.

His pitch kind of got more pathetic as it went on. Normally, he said, he sells his book for ten dollars. Sometimes, he went on, he marks it down to seven bucks. Today, he would be willing to let it go for a mere five-dollar bill. And if that wasn't low enough, he'd consider selling us a single poem for a dollar.

So there it was. I like to support artists. I like to get something for something. And by gum, I've got a dollar.

"This is called 'Glass Menagerie'," he told me as I dropped four quarters into his palm. "It's one of the first poems I got published."

It's not a great poem, of course, but it's interesting free verse. The poem is printed on nice paper. The poet -- Emmett R. McBain III -- has his e-mail address on the page. It's even got a copyright date on it. How on earth did this man find himself resorting to hawking his poetry on the El? The answer, interestingly enough, is in the poem. Since it's got a copyright on it, I won't share the whole thing with you. But this excerpt provides a surprising solution to my mystery.

Am I sane?
I am here
But
Am I sane?

Hopefully
The doctor
Will believe so

Not a nice place to stay
Not a nice place to visit
For me
At least

I'm glad I bought the poem.

(P.S. Four day gap in posts. Not too shabby. Gettin' back on that horse.)

Oh, Hi! Didn't See You There.

The text message from my friend hit with the force of a lightning bolt.

If you're no longer blogging (safe to assume) could you at least do Facebook or Twitter so we can see what's up?

Now, we'll be diplomatic and overlook the fact that my friend's own blog lasted approximately two posts, and now looks like this. Because the fact remains that, well, it has been a while. Over 16 months.

16 MONTHS!

A lot can happen in sixteen months:

* America can elect a black man president
* A baseball team from Tampa Bay can win the pennant before the Cubs
* A major motion picture can be released in which Pierce Brosnan sings

These are heady times, to be sure. And not to mention, significant personal life changes can take place, which I'm not going to get into at this juncture. But the point is, a lot of time has gone by, and there is definitely a lot to talk about. But the problem is, who the heck has the time? I don't. I mean, the reason I'm not writing here is largely because of the things that would be most interesting to write about. It is a dilemma.

So, what to do? My friend has made suggestions. However...

I won't Facebook. Don't trust it. More than half the people I work with seem to be on it, and it monopolizes their time, or makes announcements to the world about them which they are not necessarily eager to share, or half a dozen other things that just seem more aggravating than helpful. I know, I am old and curmudgeonly. So be it. I have precious little time as it is, and I will not be tied down to a webpage that demands I update my status.

(Fun fact: this blog engine's spell-checker thinks "Facebook" is misspelled. Ha!)

I also won't Twitter. This seems incomprehensibly stupid to me. It's text messages to the world. Really? Critical need filled? Look, this blog is already about the most navel-gazing thing I could do, and at my peak, I was updating it daily. Is anyone truly clamoring for me to provide new entries by the minute? I can think of no situation in which anybody I know needs to have a blow-by-blow account of anything that I have ever done or will ever do. And if they do, there's probably only one person at a time who needs that information, and I'll call them. Again, the future is not impressing me.

Which brings us back to the blog, which my friend has observed I no longer do. So that's out.

Or is it?

I'm giving me one last shot to make this thing work. I won't lie to you, I'm not optimistic. Life is pretty crazy, and I talk too much. But I've got a lot of things to tell you. Some of it even interesting. Bits and pieces you might actually enjoy.
And besides, as Lyle Lovett said,

Look
I understand too little too late
I realize there are things you say and do
You can never take back
But what would you be if you didn't even try
You have to try

You do, indeed.

So wish me luck. Once more...here we go.

A Break In the Writer's Strike

He sucks!! I am never reading his stupid blog again.

-- Jackie Stout Barrera

Oh like he updates his blog.

-- Holly Hanchey

There's nothing worse than facing the reality that people have your number.

My last post went up when? August? And the last four topics are two entries on a space shuttle flight (there has been another since), an installment in the ever-floundering Hitchcock Project, and a one-dimensional account of a trip in JUNE. Boy, a person who lets that much time go by must have a really good excuse. Whatcha been up to, Wilson?

The Professional World
I tend to be kind of tight-lipped about my work life (mainly because I always hear stories about people who discuss their jobs in their blogs, and it never turns out well). I think the last time I really discussed what I was up to concerned my departure from Jellyvision almost a year ago. After that, I worked for a little while for a publishing company based in Lincolnwood. That was fun, and I met some really lovely people there, but the job had the great misfortune to be located in Lincolnwood, a town which is not conveniently located (Hello, suburban bus line!) and which was not built for pedestrians (Goodbye, sidewalks!). I was there for the first half of 2007, leaving right before they moved from Lincolnwood to Morton Grove, which is somehow even more remote and walking-unfriendly.

So now? I'm back at Jellyvision! I know! What goes around literally comes around. It's a flattering thing to be asked back. When I stop and think about it, I'm still surprised.

The House
Quite a few changes, foremost among them being a new paint job in the living room. For anyone who had the chance to visit Wilmont Manor, you may recall that our walls were once a distinctive Kermit green. Clair felt like it was toying with our mental well-being. Not anymore. My Dad popped in to help us transform the walls into a beautiful buttery yellow (actual paint name: Warm Cocoon), and the difference is extraordinary. I have never painted my home before -- actually, I haven't painted anything since elementary school. But I can definitely see the appeal.

Also, in an attempt to reduce the staggering amount of clutter in our house, we have divested ourselves of a great many worldly possessions, foremost among them a dining room table. To our overwhelming glee, we managed to persuade our friends Matt & Brandi to accept our furnishing albatross, which they have evidently found to their liking. Two more tables, a host of boxes, guitars, coat racks, Christmas paraphenalia -- I'd guess we've shipped out nearly a third of our possessions. And I don't feel like we've made so much as a dent. Very frustrating.

A Side Note
When my Dad was here, I had the chance to take him to see the resident company of Jersey Boys, the smash hit Four Seasons Broadway musical that, ironically, you can now only see here, since the Broadway company is shuttered owing to a stagehands strike. Dad is a big fan of the band, but I had an additional reason for wanting to see the show: we know someone in the cast. That would be stage star Steven Goldsmith, who regularly plays the role of "Joey", but also understudies for the vocally-challenging role of Frankie Valli, the Seasons' falsetto-crooning lead singer. Now, we only saw him in his usual role, but I can honestly tell you, he and the show are awesome. Thinking of seeing it? You should.

Further anecdote: Steven was at our friend Jessica's wedding in Miami in June, as were we. At one point during the reception, the DJ spun Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", and Steven rolled his eyes, having found himself in a weird sort of busman's holiday. I love show business.

The Hitchcock Project
Yeah, yeah. I've actually watched the next film on the list, The Farmer's Wife, and the one after that, The Manxman, has been in my house for weeks. But I've definitely hit a rut, and what worries me is that I've slowed to a halt at about the same point I stopped the first time I tried to read this biography. I'm sure that means something, either about me or Hitchock. I don't know what that is yet.

What's worse is that fate is clearly trying to help me along with the project. AMC has been on a Hitchcock trip as of late, and the art museum up at Northwestern University is featuring an exhibit of storyboards from Hitchcock films. I should have seen that by now. As the old joke goes, they've sent me two boats and a plane. What more could I ask for?

So that's a little of what's been going on. But does that explain the failure to write? Does that justify my complete absence from these pages? What the hell is up?

Jackie and Holly got this entry started, and I think they can reveal my secret far better than I. Here's the extended cut of their conversation:

HOLLY: Oh wait, did Shane not tell you guys that they're expecting? I'm assuming that he didn't because he never tells anyone anything.

JACKIE: What?!! Shane Wilson is having a baby? I can’t believe that loser didn’t tell us. He sucks!! I am never reading his stupid blog again.

Jackie, I totally hear you. That Shane is a jerk.

I Touch the Future: Follow-Up

Just for the sake of closure...

Endeavour is on the ground. Barbara Morgan is back on Earth. Mission complete.


Whew.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: #6 - The Ring

I made a surprising discovery after finishing this film, when I went back to my Hitchcock biography to read up on it: this was pretty much the same point where I stopped reading the first time around. Clearly, there's something about this period in Hitchcock's career that is deeply uninteresting to me.

I'd like very much to blame that on the stories he's telling. They're not especially, well, Hitchcockian. All the suspense, the intrigue, the dark humor that we expect from one of his films has been missing. And that's certainly true of the latest entry in the oeuvre, The Ring. After all, it's a movie about boxing.

The problem with that theory is this: uniquely among his films, Hitchcock takes a writing credit on The Ring. Unofficially, Hitchcock had a great impact on the story of most of his films, usually through his direct influence on the writers. But to actually slap his name on the title card as writer and director is pretty unusual.

And it's regrettable, because the story of The Ring is pretty simple-minded. Our hero is a carnival attraction by the name of "One Round" Jack Sander (played by the surprisingly stringy Carl Brisson), who earns his nickname by challenging all comers to last more than one round against him in the ring. Of course, since he's a skilled fighter and most of his would-be opponents are either weaker, drunk, or both, "One Round Jack" has things pretty well in hand. He's friends with everyone at the carnival, and he's in love with the ticket girl, whose name is Mabel, or might be Nellie (the character played by Lillian Hall-Davis in the credits as "The Girl", so I was really surprised to find out she might have a name; the IMDb kind of threw things into chaos). For a guy who travels around with circus freaks and makes his living punching people, life is pretty good.

The fly in Jack's ointment is a fellow by the name of Bob Corby (played by Ian Hunter; NOT the MTV VJ). Corby defeats Jack, and then reveals that the whole thing was kind of a cheat; Corby is the world boxing champion, so Jack never had a chance. But Corby is impressed enough to hire Jack as a sparring partner, and to give him a chance to work his way up through the ranks. So things are ever brighter for Jack, except that Corby has an ulterior motive. He's infatuated with Mabel/Nellie/Whatsername, and he's already plying her with trinkets like an arm bracelet. Soon enough, Jack realizes that he's going to have to fight for his girl, both literally and metaphorically.

I have two major gripes with The Ring. The first is the boxing. It looks terrible. The film culminates -- very much like Rocky -- with a lengthy, dramatic battle inside the ropes, and the whole thing falls apart because the boxing is so wussy. Honestly, it looks like a Girl Scout fight. I was inclined to chalk it up to lousy casting, until I read that Carl Brisson got the part because a middleweight boxing champ. Which led to my new theory: that boxing in the 1920s was awful.

But the much bigger grievance, and the one that actually made me angry, involves the central conflict of the film. Jack is losing his girl to Corby, and he feels powerless to stop it. There's a good reason for him to feel this way: his girl is a cheap slut. Seriously. The moment -- I'm telling you, the very moment -- that Corby starts coming on to her, she completely loses interest in Jack. She even marries Jack, and yet hardly gives him the time of day. Most telling is a wild 1920s hullaballoo in their apartment, where Corby fawns all over Mabel/Nellie, and all she does is look contemptuously at Jack. Sweet girl. So knowing that the outcome of the fight depends on her choice of man is infuriating. She's done nothing to deserve it.

And all the while, Jack seems to do nothing but quietly bemoan his fate. When he invites all his old pals from the carnival over to the new home, and The Girl is nowhere to be seen, all they can do is look at each other sadly while he pathetically stews about his delinquent wife. In other words, the man has a backbone made of Jell-O. Oh, he seethes at Corby, destroying a punching bag while watching his wife flirt with the champ. But he doesn't say one word to the woman he presumably loves.

This comes to forefront in a pivotal scene at a nightclub, where Jack has gone looking for his wife. He finds Corby, who cheerfully offers him a glass of champagne. (In a nicely acted moment, Brisson coldly pours it on the floor.) But more importantly, he has a cheerless dance with a pretty reveler (much prettier than Mabel/Nellie, if you ask me) who clearly is smitten with him, but whom he blows off. Now good for him for the sanctity or marriage and all that, but what was clear to me was that Jack's really alright. He's not a total pushover; he's a fighter, and the chicks dig him. But when it comes to The Girl, he's a total pussy. And that's what I was yelling at the screen: "Jack, you idiot! She totally doesn't deserve you! Either confront the ungrateful little tramp or dump her!"

I tried to stop caring about the story, because I felt fairly certain that Hitchcock didn't. The very opening of the film shows the carnival in all its glory. With quick cuts, dissolves, multiple exposures, all the tricks at his disposal, he captures every element of the fairground, all the fun and all the nastiness. Hitchcock the Visualist is in full bloom in The Ring, especially in that big boxing scene I was talking about. The fighting may be lousy, but it's filmed awfully well. He uses shots from the very top of the arena, and he uses shots that get right into the ring with the combatants, which must have been a novel idea in 1927. He even uses a series of point-of-view shots, giving us a look through each boxer's eyes as our opponent comes at us. (Unfortunately, this also serves the highlight the terrible boxing.) In many ways, The Ring feels like an experimental film, as though Hitchcock had all these great ideas for what to do with a camera, and he just made up some silly story as a way to showcase them.

Unfortunately, my other great surprise from Patrick McGilligan's biography was the discovery that The Ring is one of the most acclaimed of Hitchcock's silent movies. I just don't see it. Maybe technically, I suppose. But I can't get past the notion that the whole film falls apart if the hero -- just once -- stops acting like a wet dishrag and stands up for himself. I'm not against passive heroes, and judging from his future output, neither is Hitchcock. But they usually end up earning their triumph, because they overcome their passivity. And "One-Round" Jack really doesn't do enough to earn his way into Round Two.

We're almost done with the silents. And thank goodness, because the randomly inappropriate music these public domain DVD producers are using is driving me batty.

I Touch the Future

Barbara Morgan is in space.


I've all but given up on the hope that anybody I know -- absolutely anybody -- shares my enthusiasm for the exploration of space (if not the ineptly-run "space program"). But the fact remains that tonight, Barbara Morgan is in space. And I couldn't be happier.

It takes something really unusual to get most people's attention focused on a shuttle launch these days. Either there's someone notable on the flight, or people think it might explode. Otherwise, no one gives it the time of day. Barbara Morgan is, it turns out, one of the more noteworthy shuttle passengers in recent years, and still very few people are paying notice. I admit that even I'm a little attentive to this flight, and Barbara Morgan is the reason.


That's her with Christa McAuliffe. They were the two people selected by NASA's Teacher in Space program over two decades ago. McAuliffe was to fly; Morgan was the backup.

And of course, Christa McAuliffe died when a booster rocket malfunctioned, and burned a hole in an enormous tank of fuel, and her spacecraft was destroyed and she plummeted for two minutes until she smashed into the unforgiving surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

(Thinking back over the list of gross errors NASA made in allowing McAuliffe and her colleagues to perish in that accident still infuriates me. That may have been noticeable just now.)

I was in high school when Challenger was launched for the final time. We weren't avidly following the flight that day, but the Teacher in Space program had not escaped out notice. I learned precious little chemistry in my chemistry class, but I have never forgotten the day our teacher, a small but imposing man named Karl Jones, was asked why he didn't apply. His response seemed, at the time, cynical and cruel: "I'm not really interested in sitting atop a guided missile built by the lowest bidder."

I don't remember where I was headed when Sunny Hsieh stopped me in the hallway and said, "The shuttle blew up." I didn't believe him. It seemed like a bad joke. (Although not nearly as bad as the ones I would hear over the next few weeks. Every dead astronaut joke was like salt in a wound.) But the ugly truth was confirmed when I reached my locker, which was next to a bank of windows looking into the metal shop. There was a television, and in the way that network news does, it played the tragedy on a continuous loop. All through lunch, I stayed in that hallway, staring through the window, watching the television, hoping I wouldn't get in trouble.

Now, for me, the presence of a teacher wasn't necessary to make it more tragic. (The loss of Columbia four years ago was just as much of a sucker punch, although years of NASA aimlessness deadened the pain somewhat.) But for good or ill, Christa McAuliffe is the face of that ill-fated flight. For defenders of the space program, she's a martyr. For opponents, she's a symbol of incompetence turned deadly. For the indifferent, she's just a sad story, someone to put on the cover of People.

For Barbara Morgan, she was something else entirely, and that's why I really like her. For her, Christa McAuliffe was a friend and a co-worker. But even more, she was the embodiment of an idea. She represented the notion that there was a lot to learn from space. And as far as Barbara Morgan was concerned, until someone got up into space and taught the lessons that Christa McAuliffe was supposed to teach, then something very important, very meaningful, remained unfinished. So she lobbied NASA to keep the Teacher in Space program alive. She taught the lessons of her friend, and campaigned to finish her mission. Eventually, she left her teaching job and became a full-fledged astronaut. (She'll operate the robot arm that will install new solar panels on the space station.) She fought and fought to make sure that Christa McAuliffe's sacrifice did not go for naught. And almost 22 years later, she's about to realize that dream.

I get overly emotional about these things, which is why I blogging is a perilous venture for me. But that emotion is why I watched the launch of Endeavour on my computer at work this evening, even though I had work to do. I want to see Barbara Morgan complete this mission, and I'll be watching anxiously until she touches down in two weeks. And right now, she's in orbit. So far, so good.

Godspeed.

WHILE YOU WERE OUT: If You Had Wings

In an feeble effort to atone for my complete and utter absence for weeks at a time, I'm going to try and catch up on some of what's been going on during all that time. Once I've done that, I'll probably disappear again. I'm awful, you see.

One of the columns that I wrote over and over in my head was the open letter I was composing to the CEOs of United Airlines and US Airways, as a great big thank you for the awesomely incompetent job their companies were foind in the field of getting people from one place to another. Of course, as you know if you've boarded a plane at any time in the past seven months, the entire fracking industry has given the American public the middle finger.

Our June travel extravaganza was particularly ripe for trouble, because we were zig-zagging across the entire continent within a 10-day span, and we had no room for flexibility. Naturally, we were so screwed. And yet I've never felt as screwed in the realm of air travel as I did this time around. Let me take you on a little trip.

Leg 1: ORD->MIA. We flew to Miami for the wedding of our friends Jessica and Jason. This trip would be the last one that wasn't fraught with trouble. We took off on time, we landed on time, and other than a run-in with the world's stupidest Avis counter representative, we had no difficulty at all. Which is astounding, when you consider that we left O'Hare, which has a just reputation as the most irritating airport on earth. But no, we had no problems with O'Hare. No, that was someone else's evil domain. We drove from Miami to North Carolina, having no idea what fresh hell lay in store.

Leg 2: CHA->ORD->YVR. For reasons to complicated to go into, Clair had to attend a conference in Vancouver right in the middle of our trip. But we were rolling with it. I drove Clair to Charlotte with plenty of time to spare. Clair checked her bag, despite her absolute certainty that they were going to lose it. (To be safe, she kept a particular dress in her purse, just in case.) And about two hours later, as I was making my way back across North Carolina, I got the text message: "Computer failure. All flights grounded."

Yes, evidently United Airlines has a single computer that does all of the fuel and weight calculations for every single flight they run. And when some yokel decides to play Minesweeper at the same time, that computer goes down, and the entire system goes into a giant kerfluffle. And from what I understand, THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME THAT THIS HAS HAPPENED. United, let's face it: you're idiots. Buy another damn computer, you morons. It's truly a miracle that Clair made it to Vancouver at all, let alone hours late.

Oh, and they lost her luggage.

Leg 3: YVR->LAS->PHI->Whatever the hell the code is for Newburgh, New York
Her return trip was even more brutal. She had to change planes twice, and evidently, they did not go out of their way to make it comfortable. Of course, I wasn't helping matters because of

Leg 4: CHA->EWR. Which is where I was within inches of ripping the larynx out of a USAir lackey's throat just for the pure satisfaction of hearing it crackle. USAir, bless their little incompetent hearts, found that they had scheduled way too many flights into the New York area. Turns out this isn't a surprise, since everyone schedules too many flights into the New York area. But I didn't know that at the time. So I wasn't too worried when I reached the gate and saw that my flight was delayed by two hours. Hey, I was still going to make it in time for the Broadway show I had tickets for.

Still, just out of curiosity, I checked the weather in New York. Crystal clear. Hmm. So I approached the counter, just to clarify the announcement. What's the matter again?

"Air traffic!" the prissy man barked.

Um, okay. So, like, weather patterns between--

"Air traffic!"

Ah, you're so helpful. So is there any chance the plane will be delayed again?

"No!" And he said it with this fey indignance. But, to be fair, he was telling the truth. It wasn't delayed again. Ten minutes later, it was canceled.

Evidently, you can do this. You can promise people something, take their money, and then renege on the promise, and they're not obligated to give a crap. It was breathtaking.

I'm sure I was supposed to be grateful for the fact that the USAir computers or whoever had automatically booked me for another flight -- four hours later. And an hour after my play started. After all, there were people who got bumped even later than that, and probably still more who ended up going nowhere at all. But it's hard no to be bitter. Even more so when I ended up two short on the standby list for another plane. I blame the Lu's for that. Some couple named Lu got paged 38 times, and right as they're about to call my name, this idiot who has been sitting in front of the counter the entire time says, real casual-like, "Oh, we're the Lu's." I didn't want that plane to crash. Just the two seats where the Lu's were sitting.

So what did I do to cope? Two things:
1) Sent pathetic text messages to my wife. The one who was getting on three different planes in a desperate attempt to make it all the way across the country for the second wedding on our itinerary. Classy move, Shane.
2) Read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which proved to be most enlightening, as Harry no longer seemed like the whiny, self-absorbed teenager that he had during my first reading, but rather an earnest soul who was unfairly treated by the world, and deserving of some overdue respect. Yes, Harry's anger and mine were flying in close formation.

I couldn't even get much angrier when my new flight, the four-hour later one, and which took off almost a full hour later than that, was forced to fly around for a while because New York was still too crowded and wasn't ready for us. It metasticized into pure surliness by the time I reached the hotel, around the same time my play was ending. Suffice it to say, I had never ordered Johnnie Walker Black before.

Last Leg: LGA->ORD. The fact that it was delayed would be anticlimactic, except for the fact that we were grateful for this delay. Why? Because our TRAIN didn't run on time. In fact, we found out when we got to the station that sometimes, the train we booked to get us back to New York City "doesn't run at all". Isn't that marvelous? Sometimes, there's just no train. That's just how things are. No one's in charge of this, evidently. We had seats on board the Existential Express.

Is there a reason for this? Well, yes, the Transportation Security Administration is borderline retarded, and summer is always busy, and demand is higher than ever, but in the end, don't blame terrorists. No, this is entirely the airlines' doing. As Patrick Smith, an airline pilot himself and one of my favorite writers on the web today, points out, airlines are switching to smaller planes that require the exact same amount of time as a 747 to be cleared by air traffic control. So Mr. Air Traffic! has no one to blame but his own bosses.

We saw clear evidence of this trying to get out of LaGuardia. Once our plane finally pushed away from the gate, disappointing the 97 people onthe standby list who had probably gotten screwed out of their own flights, we taxied beside a very long line of planes. The woman in front of me was counting them out loud. I believe her final tally was 26. And that line was the one we had to join at the end. And after finally reaching the front, we then crossed over three other lines just to get to our takeoff runway. Unbelievable.

And why would the airlines do this? Because they're making tons of money, that's why. I'll mention this again: if a restaurant brings you bad food, they replace it. Frequently, they don't charge you for it. A car dealer might take money off the price if you find a ding on the fender. In most industries, when you get a substandard product, you get compensated for it somehow. But in the wild world of air travel, where every seat costs a different price and where your only demand is that you get pretzels and you gladly punt your civil liberties because someone heard you can blow up a plane with AquaFresh, in this crazy mixed-up world, when the company doesn't give you the service you purchased, or they give you a substandard product, in this world YOU DON'T GET JACK.

This is why Americans love their cars.