Airplane Travel Quotes

Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow.

I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.

Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags. And while those bags might hold a few hazy recollections—a diner with a jukebox at the table, being pushed on a swing set, the way it felt to be picked up and spun around—it didn’t seem enough to last a whole lifetime.

Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.

There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyages, and there are those who say that there is no substitute for venturing out into the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel.

Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky.

Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags

Air travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.

When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise. Clare has turned the second bedroom into a wonder cabinet, full of small sculptures and drawings pinned up on every inch of wall space. There are coils of wire and rolls of paper tucked into shelves and drawers. The sculptures remind me of kites, or model airplanes. I say this to Clare one evening, standing in the doorway of her studio in my suit and tie, home from work, about to begin making dinner, and she throws one at me; it flies surprisingly well, and soon we are standing at opposite ends of the hall, tossing tiny sculptures at each other, testing their aerodynamics. The next day I come home to find that Clare has created a flock of paper and wire birds, which are hanging from the ceiling in the living room. A week later our bedroom windows are full of abstract blue translucent shapes that the sun throws across the room onto the walls, making a sky for the bird shapes Clare has painted there. It's beautiful. The next evening I'm standing in the doorway of Clare's studio, watching her finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see Clare, in her small room, closed in by all her stuff, and I realize that she's trying to say something, and I know what I have to do.

I write to get ideas out of my head

Where can one buy a lit of that *Right Stuff* bravado required to shrug off the fact that your airplane is now a convertible?

Secondhand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. Theyd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up on a mountain where the air thinned.

Born at Letterman Army Hospital. I never actually lived in San Francisco. It's not my home town, but then, I don't have one. I'm a nomad...a gypsy...an Army Brat. Put me on an airplane, send me anywhere. That's where I belong...anywhere.

I am no fan of plane travel. I have always been too skeptical of the physics of the phenomenon to ever be truly comfortable in an airplane.

I turned off my tape-recorder and just sat looking at him for a moment, this strange time-traveller from the year 1890 or so, who remembered when there were no cars, no electric lights, no airplanes, no state of Arizona.

[...] grew up here, in what show business people, which now includes our best-known politicians and so-called journalists, often call 'flyover country.' We are somewhere between television cameras in Washington DC, and New York, and Los Angeles. Please join me in saying to the undersides of their airplanes, 'Go to hell.

From trains to automobiles to airplanes, each time the speed of connection quickens, travelers have expressed a sense of growing alienation from the land blurring past our windows. In the same vein, many people currently worry that digital technology is making us less connected to the people and things in our immediate environment.

There is already enough chattering nonsense on the ground. Do we really need aviaries in pressurised tin cans at 30,000 feet as well ?

flight and possibly, antigravity.  In fact, his last patent in 1928 (# 6,555,114) was for a flying machine that resembled both a helicopter and an airplane.  Before

We are in the process of finding out what filling the sky with hundreds of thousands of satellites does to all life on Earth.

He chuckled. “All I can see is that goddamn necklace. Being seen with you could jeopardize my career. Do you have anything illegal in that bag?” “Never,” I said. “A man can’t travel around on airplanes wearing a Condor Legion neck-piece unless he’s totally clean. I’m not even armed … This whole situation makes me feel nervous and weird and thirsty.” I lifted my sunglasses to look for the bar, but the light was too harsh.

The problem with aspirational lists, of course, is that they often skip the point entirely. Instead of helping us grapple with our finitude, they have approximated infinity. With unlimited time and resources, we could do anything, be anyone. We could become more adventurous by jumping out of airplanes, more traveled by visiting every continent, or more cultured by reading the most famous books of all time. With the right list, we would never starve with the hunger of want. But it is much easier to count items than to know what counts.

Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:--the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:--the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:--the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?--she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didn't let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didn't mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God--but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didn't know she loved me--I didn't understand.

But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don't grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn't exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here." He touched his heart. "It isn't there." And he pointed at the dusty road.

In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass--a network of lights, flames, stars.

Childhood memories were like airplane luggage; no matter how far you were traveling or how long you needed them to last, you were only ever allowed two bags.

Looking out airplane windows makes me sentimental.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.........the step taken to climb the ladder which gets you into the airplane...

Heck, I remember that I used to dress up to take an airplane flight; today, it looks homeless people fill up the planes.

And back up they would go, not knowing where or when they would be able to land again.

This is the way of air travel: fellow passengers applaud because they didn't die, and then they cut in front of you so they can exit four seconds earlier.

Consider that children who grew up traveling by horse and cart and burning wood for heat in the late nineteenth century spent their final days traveling by airplane and living in houses warmed by the splitting of the atom.

Second hand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They'd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned. "Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had child-like scrawls on the acknowledgement page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loathe were they to damage their treasure. I loved them all. And I found it hard to part with them. Though years of book selling had steeled me. I had to let them go, and each time made a fervent wish they'd be read well, and often. Missy, my best friend, said I was completely cuckoo, and that I spent too much time alone in my shadowy shop, because I believed my books communicated with me. A soft sigh here, as they stretched their bindings when dawn broke, or a hum, as they anticipated a customer hovering close who might run a hand along their cover, tempting them to flutter their pages hello. Books were fussy when it came to their owners, and gave off a type of sound, an almost imperceptible whirr, when the right person was near. Most people weren't aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them.

When live entertainment was not available, women delivered the film and ran the projectors for the hundreds of movies that were shown to the soldiers. Frances witnessed the popularity of movies time after time; they were shown in warehouses, airplane hangars, on battered portable screens, or projected against the wall of a building in the village square where townsfolk crammed in around the soldiers. “Charlie and Doug” were the two favorites, but anything showing familiar sights from home—the Statue of Liberty, a Chicago department store, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—created a sensation and bolstered morale. Toward the end of the war German propaganda films left behind by the retreating army became a prime attraction.30 Frances traveled to and from Paris for a few days at a time, usually arriving on or near the front after a battle to witness doctors and nurses doing what they could for the injured in the shattered villages and burying the dead. She was struck by how thoroughly exhausted the Europeans were after four devastating years of war.

There was a school here now, in Concourse C. Like educated children everywhere, the children in the airport school memorized abstractions: the airplanes outside once flew through the air. You could use an airplane to travel to the other side of the world, but—the schoolteacher was a man who’d had frequent-flyer status on two airlines—when you were on an airplane you had to turn off your electronic devices before takeoff and landing, devices such as the tiny flat machines that played music and the larger machines that opened up like books and had screens that hadn’t always been dark, the insides brimming with circuitry, and these machines were the portals into a worldwide network. Satellites beamed information down to Earth. Goods traveled in ships and airplanes across the world. There was no place on earth that was too far away to get to. They were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended. This is the yellow mass of land in the shape of a mitten; this pin here on the wall is Severn City. That was Chicago. That was Detroit. The children understood dots on maps—here—but even the teenagers were confused by the lines. There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain.

Of course, all nights are dark days, because night is simply a badly lit version of day, due to the fact that the Earth travels around and around the sun reminding everyone that it is time to get out of bed and start the day with a cup of coffee or a secret message folded up into a paper airplane that can sail out the barred window of a ranger station.

She positions herself on a stool in front of a giant washing machine, watching her garments twirl in flashing patterns of red and white on a sea of black. It subdues her, that clothes can be washed in Boston or Rome and look the same for it, that she can step on an airplane and be anywhere else in the civilized world within a day and wear the same clothes and be the same person. That the small realities stay knitted together!

In September 1970, airplane tickets were outrageously expensive, which meant only the rich could travel. OK, that wasn’t entirely true for an enormous number of young people whom these outdated media outlets could see only for their outward appearance: they wore their hair long, dressed in bright-colored clothing, and never took a bath (which was a lie, but these young kids didn’t read the newspaper, and the older generation believed any news item that served to denigrate those they considered “a danger to society and common decency”). They were a danger to an entire generation of diligent young boys and girls trying to succeed in life, with their horrible example of lewdness and “free love,” as their detractors liked to say with disdain. Well, this ever-growing number of kids had a system for spreading news that no one, absolutely no one, ever managed to detect.

That’s how an Aerolineas Argentinas airplane, stopping in Lima (Peru) in 1991, managed to deliver dozens of cholera-infected people that same day to my city of Los Angeles, over 3,000 miles from Lima. The explosive increase in world travel by Americans, and in immigration to the United States, is turning us into another melting pot—this time, of microbes that we previously dismissed as just causing exotic diseases in far-off countries.

All the various time travel devices used by Verne and Bert were stored in the repository, Poe explained, including the ones that had never quite worked as they were meant to. There was one that resembled a blue police box from London—“Stolen by a doctor with delusions of grandeur,” said Poe—one that was simply a large, transparent sphere—“Created by a scientist with green skin and too much ego,” said Verne—and one that was rather ordinary by comparison. “This one looks like an automobile,” John said admiringly, “with wings.” “The doors open that way for a reason,” Verne explained, “we just never figured out what it was. The inventor of this particular model tried integrating his designs into a car, an airplane, and even a steam engine train. He was running a crackpot laboratory in the Arizona desert, and he never realized that it was not his inventions themselves, but his proximity to some sort of temporal fluctuation in the local topography, that allowed them to work.” “What happened to him?” asked Jack. “He’d get the machines up to one hundred and six miles per hour,” said Bert, “and then he’d run out of fuel and promptly get arrested by whatever constabulary had been chasing him. The sad part was that Jules figured out if he’d just gone two miles an hour faster, he’d likely have been successful in his attempt.

One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

Stormy, tell me about where you were when John F. Kennedy died.” “It was a Friday. I was baking a pineapple upside-down cake for my bridge club. I put it in the oven and then I saw the news and forgot all about the cake and nearly burned the house down. We had to have the kitchen repainted because of all the soot.” She fusses with her hair. “He was a saint, that man. A prince. If I’d met him in my heyday, we really could’ve had some fun. You know, I flirted with a Kennedy once at an airport. He sidled up to me at the bar and bought me a very dry gin martini. Airports used to be so very much more glamorous. People got dressed up to travel. Young people on airplanes these days, they wear those horrible sheepskin boots and pajama pants and it’s an eyesore. I wouldn’t go out for the mail dressed like that.” “Which Kennedy?” I ask. “Hmm? Oh, I don’t know. He had the Kennedy chin, anyway.” I bite my lip to keep from smiling. Stormy and her escapades.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, intently studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies and what's the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without, issuing small profound "hmmmms" and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.

The charm of traveling is everywhere I go, tiny life. I go to the hotel, tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush. Fold into the standard airplane seat. You’re a giant. The problem is your shoulders are too big. Your Alice in Wonderland legs are all of a sudden miles so long they touch the feet of the person in front. Dinner arrives, a miniature do-it-yourself Chicken Cordon Bleu hobby kit, sort of a put-it-together project to keep you busy.

And as I toured the world, I had time to reflect that Robert and I had never traveled together. We had never saw behind New York, save in books. We never sat next in an airplane, holding each other’s hand to ascend into a new sky, and descend onto a new earth. Yet Robert and I had explored the frontier of our work, and created space for each other. When I walked on the stages of the world without him, I would close my eyes and picture him taking off his leather jacket, entering with me the infinite land of a thousand dances.

I wanted to write an adventure story, not, it's true, I really did. I shall have failed, that's all. Adventures bore me. I have no idea how to talk about countries, how to make people wish they had been there. I am not a good travelling salesman. Countries? Where are they , whatever became of them. When I was twelve I dreamed of Hongkong. That tedious, commonplace little provincial town! Shops sprouting from every nook and cranny! The Chinese junks pictured on the lids of chocolate boxes used to fascinate me. Junks: sort of chopped-off barges, where the housewives do all their cooking and washing on deck. They even have television. As for the Niagara Falls: water, nothing but water! A dam is more interesting; at least one can occasionally see a big crack at its base, and hope for some excitement. When one travels, one sees nothing but hotels. Squalid rooms, with iron bedsteads, and a picture of some kind hanging on the wall from a rusty nail, a coloured print of London Bridge or the Eiffel Tower. One also sees trains, lots of trains, and airports that look like restaurants, and restaurants that look like morgues. All the ports in the world are hemmed in by oil slicks and shabby customs buildings. In the streets of the towns, people keep to the sidewalks, cars stop at red lights. If only one occasionally arrived in a country where women are the colour of steel and men wear owls on their heads. But no, they are sensible, they all have black ties, partings to one side, brassières and stiletto heels. In all the restaurants, when one has finished eating one calls over the individual who has been prowling among the tables, and pays him with a promissory note. There are cigarettes everywhere! There are airplanes and automobiles everywhere.

Before we move on, let me clarify that there is a fundamental difference between what we do and how predictable we are. When it comes to things we do-like the distances we travel, the number of e-mails we send, or the number of calls we make-we encounter power laws, which means that some individuals are significantly more active than others. They send more messages; they travel farther. This also means that out-liers are normal-we expect to have a few individuals, like Hasan, who cover hundreds or even thousands of miles on a regular basis. But when it comes to the predictability of our actions, to our surprise power laws are replaced by Gaussians. This means that whether you limit your life to a two-mile neighborhood or drive dozens of miles each day, take a fast train to work or even commute via airplane, you are just as predictable as everyone else. And once Gaussians dominate the problem, outliers are forbidden, just as bursts are never found in Poisson's dice-driven universe. Or two-mile-tall folks ambling down the street are unheard of. Despite the many differences between us, when it came to our whereabouts we are all equally predictable, and the unforgiving law of statistics forbids the existence of individuals who somehow buck this trend.

Then there would be many long minutes of commercials, mostly for products to keep one’s bowels sleek, followed by filmed reports on regional murders, house fires, light airplane crashes, multiple car pile-ups on the Boulder Highway and other bits of local carnage, always with film of mangled vehicles, charred houses, bodies under blankets, and a group of children standing on the fringes, waving happily at the cameras and saying hi to their moms. It may only have been my imagination, but I would almost swear that it was the same children in every report. Perhaps American violence had bred a new kind of person – the serial witness

If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere? In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.

recorded his family’s experiences year after year. He did so in such an entertaining and original manner that his films have gradually become classics. In Disneyland Dream, the family – father, mother, and three children aged between four and eleven – enters a competition sponsored by the then-new Scotch tape. The winners are to be treated to a trip – by airplane! – to the recently opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Lo and behold the youngest child, Danny, wins first prize with the indomitable slogan: ‘I like “Scotch” brand cellophane tape because when some things tear then I can just use it.’ Excitement all round, and the Barstows’ neighbours step out into their front gardens to wave the family off. Then comes the thrilling

I was recently on a plane from Raleigh to Boston when I overheard a conversation between two women in the seats behind me that captured the national mood perfectly. An older woman with a Boston accent remarked, “It’s gone to shit. Everything’s gone to shit. The economy is terrible. Crime is crazy—I mean, I just go to work and come home and I don’t even go out.” The younger woman, who had a Southern accent, sighed knowingly. “It makes you wonder if you want to bring a child into this world,” she said. These were women who could afford airplane tickets. They were traveling between two affluent cities during a period of historically low crime rates in the richest nation during the wealthiest period of the history of the world. Clearly, it didn’t feel that way.

That done, we could finally relax about the baggage and start seriously to worry about the state of the plane, which was terrifying. The door to the cockpit remained open for the duration of the flight and might actually have been missing entirely. Mark told me that Air Merpati bought their planes second-hand from Air Uganda, but I think he was joking. I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don’t think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I’m driving. But once you’re in an airplane, everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it around the sky. There’s nothing you can do.

We hear the crack of a bullwhip because its tip is moving faster than the speed of sound, creating a shock wave, a small sonic boom. A thunderclap has a similar origin. It was once thought that airplanes could not travel faster than sound. Today supersonic flight is commonplace. But the light barrier is different from the sound barrier. It is not merely an engineering problem like the one the supersonic airplane solves. It is a fundamental law of Nature, as basic as gravity. And there are no phenomena in our experience—like the crack of the bullwhip or the clap of thunder for sound—to suggest the possibility of traveling in a vacuum faster than light. On the contrary, there is an extremely wide range of experience—with nuclear accelerators and atomic clocks, for example—in precise quantitative agreement with special relativity.

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul—and ambiguity, for that matter—out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse.

Liya looks from an airplane window at the curving boundary of ocean and sky below. Impossibly, she is sitting on her mother’s lap; they are going to America. Her mother says, Once we believed the earth was flat. We did not think that two people, flying like birds from the same point in opposite directions, would one day find themselves face-to-face. In a similar way we still misconceive of time. Time is not separate from space, they are in fact two aspects of the same thing. Imagine a sphere like the earth, but drawn in four dimensions instead of three. The fourth dimension, the one we have trouble seeing, is time. Imagine two people starting at the same point in space-time, flying around this new sphere, in opposite directions: one travels in the direction of the future, the other in the direction of the past. Just like the people who circle the earth, these travelers will eventually collide.

Read. You should read Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and listen to Coltrane, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Son House, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Nick Drake, Bobbie Gentry, George Jones, Jimmy Reed, Odetta, Funkadelic, and Woody Guthrie. Drive across America. Ride trains. Fly to countries beyond your comfort zone. Try different things. Join hands across the water. Different foods. New tasks. Different menus and tastes. Talk with the guy who’s working in construction on your block, who’s working on the highway you’re traveling on. Speak with your neighbors. Get to know them. Practice civil disobedience. Try new resistance. Be part of the solution, not the problem. Don’t litter the earth, it’s the only one you have, learn to love her. Care for her. Learn another language. Trust your friends with kindness. You will need them one day. You will need earth one day. Do not fear death. There are worse things than death. Do not fear the reaper. Lie in the sunshine but from time to time let the neon light your way. ZZ Top, Jefferson Airplane, Spirit. Get a haircut. Dye your hair pink or blue. Do it for you. Wear eyeliner. Your eyes are the windows to your soul. Show them off. Wear a feather in your cap. Run around like the Mad Hatter. Perhaps he had the answer. Visit the desert. Go to the zoo. Go to a county fair. Ride the Ferris wheel. Ride a horse. Pet a pig. Ride a donkey. Protest against war. Put a peace symbol on your automobile. Drive a Volkswagen. Slow down for skateboarders. They might have the answers. Eat gingerbread men. Pray to the moon and the stars. God is out there somewhere. Don’t worry. You’ll find out where soon enough. Dance. Even if you don’t know how to dance. Read The Four Agreements. Read the Bible. Read the Bhagavad Gita. Join nothing. It won’t help. No games, no church, no religion, no yellow-brick road, no way to Oz. Wear beads. Watch a caterpillar in the sun.

This book will help you learn to practice mindfulness by teaching you two skills—awareness and compassion. These skills are like wings. Just as a bird or an airplane needs two wings to fly, you need these two skills to help you travel on your journey to recovery. I described mindfulness earlier as steady, open, and kind awareness. In order to take in our moment-to-moment experience with kind awareness, we must cultivate self-compassion. Dr. Kristin Neff (2003) defines self-compassion as an attitude of kindness toward ourselves, especially when suffering from painful experiences such as trauma. An important part of self-compassion is the understanding that life’s hardships and emotional pain are part of being human. They are not a personal failure. Instead of being harshly self-critical, we extend understanding and comfort to ourselves. Another important part of self-compassion is accepting that all human beings are in the same boat—none of us is perfect, and we all wish to be happy. If

Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds. More than $4 million of government largesse flows each year into the Colorado City public school district—which, according to the Phoenix New Times, “is operated primarily for the financial benefit of the FLDS Church and for the personal enrichment of FLDS school district leaders.” Reporter John Dougherty determined that school administrators have “plundered the district’s treasury by running up thousands of dollars in personal expenses on district credit cards, purchasing expensive vehicles for their personal use and engaging in extensive travel. The spending spree culminated in December [2000], when the district purchased a $220,000 Cessna 210 airplane to facilitate trips by district personnel to cities across Arizona.” Colorado City has received $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pave its streets, improve the fire department, and upgrade the water system. Immediately south of the city limits, the federal government built a $2.8 million airport that serves almost no one beyond the fundamentalist community. Thirty-three percent of the town’s residents receive food stamps—compared to the state average of 4.7 percent. Currently the residents of Colorado City receive eight dollars in government services for every dollar they pay in taxes; by comparison, residents in the rest of Mohave County, Arizona, receive just over a dollar in services per tax dollar paid. “Uncle Rulon justifies all that assistance from the wicked government by explaining that really the money is coming from the Lord,” says DeLoy Bateman. “We’re taught that it’s the Lord’s way of manipulating the system to take care of his chosen people.” Fundamentalists call defrauding the government “bleeding the beast” and regard it as a virtuous act.

Online’ sales on the Internet are only an improvement of the old mail order catalogues, which were introduced in . . . 1850; they do not represent a structural change. Similarly, the Internet, multimedia cell phones, cable television, smartcards and the general computerisation of society — even genetic engineering — do not represent structural changes. They are all only developments of what already existed. There is nothing in all this to compare with inventions that really turned the world upside down, the real techno-economic metamorphoses introduced between 1860 and 1960 that revolutionised society and the framework of life: internal combustion engines, electricity, the telephone, telegraph, radio (which was more revolutionary than television), trains, cars, airplanes, penicillin, antibiotics, and so forth. The ‘new economy’ is behind us! No fundamental innovation has taken place since 1960. Computers only allow us to accomplish differently, faster and more cheaply (but with much greater fragility) what was already being done. On the other hand, the automobile, antibiotics, telecommunications and air travel were authentic revolutions that made possible what before had been impossible.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Olson had traveled across the United States overseeing field tests that dispersed biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters in San Francisco, the Midwest, and Alaska. Some field tests involved harmless simulants and others involved dangerous pathogens, as Senate hearings later revealed. One such dangerous experiment was conducted by Olson and his Detrick colleague Norman Cournoyer. The two men went to Alaska and oversaw bacteria being sprayed out of airplanes to see how the pathogens would disperse in an environment similar to that of a harsh Russian winter. “We used a spore,” Cournoyer explained, “which is very similar [to} anthrax, so to that extent we did something that was not kosher. Because we picked it up all over [the United States] months after we did the tests.” A third man involved in the covert tests with Cournoyer and Olson was Dr. Harold Batchelor, the bacteriologist who learned airborne spray techniques from Dr. Kurt Blome, whom Batchelor consulted with in Heidelberg. Olson and Batchelor also conducted covert field tests in closed spaces across America, including in subways and in the Pentagon. For these tests, the Special Operations Division used a relatively harmless pathogen that simulated how a deadly pathogen would disperse. A congressional inquiry into these covert tests found them “appalling” in their deception.

Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow. Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

If I had lied to the CIA, perhaps I might have passed a test. Instead of writing a book about the White House, I’d be poisoning a drug kingpin with a dart gun concealed inside a slightly larger dart gun, or making love to a breathy supermodel in the interest of national security. I’ll never know. I confessed to smoking pot two months before. The sunniness vanished from my interviewer’s voice. “Normally we like people who break the rules,” Skipper told me, “but we can’t consider anyone who’s used illegal substances in the past twelve months.” Just like that, my career as a terrorist hunter was over. I thought my yearning for higher purpose would vanish with my CIA dreams, the way a Styrofoam container follows last night’s Chinese food into the trash. To my surprise, it stuck around. In the weeks that followed, I pictured myself in all sorts of identities: hipster, world traveler, banker, white guy who plays blues guitar. But these personas were like jeans a half size too small. Trying them on gave me an uncomfortable gut feeling and put my flaws on full display. My search for replacement selves began in November. By New Year’s Eve I was mired in the kind of existential funk that leads people to find Jesus, or the Paleo diet, or Ayn Rand. Instead, on January 3, I found a candidate. I was on an airplane when I discovered him, preparing for our initial descent into JFK. This was during the early days of live in-flight television, and I was halfway between the Home Shopping Network and one of the lesser ESPNs when I stumbled across coverage of a campaign rally in Iowa. Apparently, a caucus had just finished. Speeches were about to begin. With nothing better to occupy my time, I confirmed that my seat belt was fully fastened. I made sure my tray table was locked. Then, with the arena shrunk to fit my tiny seatback screen, I watched a two-inch-tall guy declare victory. It’s not like I hadn’t heard about Barack Obama. I had heard his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His presidential campaign had energized my more earnest friends. But I was far too mature to take them seriously. They supported someone with the middle name Hussein to be president of the United States. While they were at it, why not cast a ballot for the Tooth Fairy? Why not nominate Whoopi Goldberg for pope?

English has so many words that do not exist in Sharchhop, but they are mostly nouns, mostly things: machine, airplane, wristwatch. Sharchhop, on the other hand, reveals a culture of material economy but abundant, intricate familial ties and social relations. People cannot afford to make a distinction between need and desire, but they have separate words for older brother, younger sister, father’s brother’s sons, mother’s sister’s daughters. And there are 2 sets of words: a common set for everyday use and an honorific one to show respect. There are three words for gift: a gift given to a person higher in rank, a gift to someone lower, and a gift between equals.

I was on a 747 flight out of Denver with four flight attendants on the plane. One of the flight attendants got off the plane to go check someone’s carry-on bag in the cargo hold, and while she was gone, the door closed and we began to taxi out. While we were giving the demo, we looked out the window of the airplane to see the flight attendant running alongside the plane in the snow, waving and yelling and trying to catch up to us. ‘Did you notice that we’re missing someone?’ I said to the other flight attendant. ‘Yes, but try to keep it low-key—there’s a supervisor on board!’ Well, it’s hard to keep it low-key when someone is running alongside your plane, waving and screaming. The plane stopped and the air stairs went down so she could get on board, and my co-worker said, ‘Tell her to try to be inconspicuous when she gets back on.’ Well, she had to walk the entire length of the plane to get back to her station, and everybody on board broke into applause.

...some of the more smug cyclists live in eternal hope that humanity will somehow realize the error of its ways and reject the automobile altogether .... This is not going to happen....never in the history of the world has humanity forfeited an invention that makes our lives profoundly easier, as the car does. Nobody ever said, "This newsprint is making my fingers filthy. I'm going back to smoke signals." TV was supposed to rot your brain and ruin your eyes, but instead of going away it only got bigger and flatter, and we now have like four hundred channels instead of three. And airplanes are still the world's preferred mode of very-long-distance travel, even though terrorists still try to fly them into buildings and we now have to be dismantled into our component atoms, sifted through, and reassembled in order to board them. So if we have yet to jettison these abominations, why would people give up their cars either?

One of the things that Jessie liked about the heightened security surrounding airplane travel was the fact that you didn’t have to sit around the airport making polite conversation until flights were called.

Leor smiled. “Merci, Monsieur Rusé.” “De rien.” Jean replied, and then he checked his watch. “Our flight will be leaving soon. Are you ready for that adventure? Can you brave the terrors of second class?” Leor laughed. “It depends if I get the window seat.

Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.

The attack on 9/11 was a localized event, affecting only a relatively small number of Americans. As indicated earlier, the general threat of terrorism, even factoring in the large death toll on that tragic day, produces a statistically insignificant threat to the average person’s life. People across the country, however, were gripped with fear. And because we are an object-oriented people, most felt the need to project that fear onto something. Some people stopped flying in airplanes, worried about a repeat attack—and for years afterward, air travel always dipped on the anniversary of 9/11.4 Of course, this was and is an irrational fear; it is safer to travel by plane than by car. According to the National Safety Council, in 2010 there were over 22,000 passenger deaths involving automobiles, while no one died in scheduled airline travel that year.5 Nevertheless, Congress responded by rushing through the USA PATRIOT Act six weeks after 9/11—a 240-plus page bill that was previously written, not available to the public prior to the vote, and barely available to the elected officials in Congress, none of whom read it through before casting their votes.6 Two weeks previous to the bill’s passage, President Bush had announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” He explained that “[t]he Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”7 The office’s efforts culminated in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) one year later as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This law consolidated executive branch organizations related to “homeland security” into a single Cabinet department; twenty-two total agencies became part of this new apparatus. The government, responding to the outcry from a fearful citizenry, was eager to “do something.” All of this (and much, much more), affecting all Americans, because of a localized event materially affecting only a few. But while the event directly impacted only a small percentage of the population, its impact was felt throughout the entire country.

Such travel is not through space foreign to us, but in a space that belongs to us. We do not move from our point of departure, but with our point of departure. To be moved from our living room by an automobile whose upholstered seats differ scarcely at all from those in our living rooms, to an airport waiting room and then to the airplane where we are provided the same sort of furniture, is to have taken our origin with us; it is to have left home without leaving home. To be at home everywhere is to neutralize space.

The two events were probably unrelated, but both jolted Dave the way a sudden air pocket reminds nervous passengers that they’re soaring above the clouds in a pressurized metal tube.

He didn't like to fly--the noise and vibration gave him a headache--but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't--a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight.

As the metaphor of the airplane reminds us, the destination is within reach. And the journey can be rich, enriching, and joyful. In fact, the journey is really part of the destination, because in the family, as in life, how you travel is as important as where you arrive.

For years I didn’t realize this because so many others had more. We were surrounded by extreme affluence, which tricks you into thinking you’re in the middle of the pack. I mean, sure, we have twenty-four hundred square feet for only five humans to live in, but our kids have never been on an airplane, so how rich could we be? We haven’t traveled to Italy, my kids are in public schools, and we don’t even own a time-share. (Roll eyes here.) But it gets fuzzy once you spend time with people below your rung. I started seeing my stuff with fresh eyes, realizing we had everything. I mean everything. We’ve never missed a meal or even skimped on one. We have a beautiful home in a great neighborhood. Our kids are in a Texas exemplary school. We drive two cars under warranty. We’ve never gone a day without health insurance. Our closets are overflowing. We throw away food we didn’t eat, clothes we barely wore, trash that will never disintegrate, stuff that fell out of fashion.

And it’s not just your job. The Industrial Revolution profoundly altered how much physical activity people do not just at work, but also for the rest of the day. Many of the most successful products invented and manufactured since the start of the Industrial Revolution have been labor-saving devices. Cars, bicycles, airplanes, subways, escalators, and elevators reduce the energy cost of traveling. Recall

I hope I leave this world gracefully, like a pilgrim slips from the back of his donkey at the end of a long ride, like a traveler disembarks from an airplane that has carried him across a great ocean.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts.

THE VARIOUS GAINS OF FLIGHT DELAY DAMAGES Travelling byair is one of the handiest means to get from one point to another. It's quick, safe, and hassle-free. Obviously, hassle-free is a subjective term as some folks find all the safety precautions cumbersome. Since there are much fewer plane accidents when compared with automobile accidents however, it's a good deal better mathematically talking. Naturally, travel issues are not merely limited to injuries and crashes; occasionally, the ones that are most problematic are the small things that eventually become larger. Having the flight postponed for 5 - 10 minutes does not seem much to most folks. However, for people who will be catching a connecting flight after, this really is an extremely large difficulty. They need to run across the next airport simply to make it in time or they will need to get it rescheduled and watch for the next available flight. Either way, it's a very big hassle and it all came from a 5 minute delay. What You Can Get That is why you should be aware of the many benefits that you can get. Flight delay compensation isn't a simple thing that airlines give just to keep customers satisfied; the law requires to give damages for faulty service as mandated them. Different areas have different laws regarding this but it usually means that if your flight got delayed, the airline must help you during that time. If, for example, you may end up late to your connecting flight, then you can certainly ask aid from the airline to assist you look for an accessible connecting flight, have it reserved, and even request financial compensation as you need to wait for the brand new boarding time if it's a few hours more. Typically, you can demand help for the amount of money you are going to be spending simply because your flight was delayed. This can happen whether the flight was delayed for a very long time due to technical issues. That those can get somewhere to sleep in, some airports will open up the VIP lounge. Also, they are going to be given free food and drinks especially if they must stay for more than one night. Inclusions and Exceptions Flight delay settlement is all about getting compensated for hassle and all the trouble that an undue delay has brought on. Delays caused by neglect or some other reason which was a result of the airline can be deemed as such. This implies that if they couldn't have prevented the issue no matter what, you won't be able to seek damages. For example, if the weather suddenly took a turn for the worse and the whole airport was locked down and no airplanes are permitted to fly, then this is a problem that they couldn't avert. It would not be safe to fly with such conditions and no one can do anything about it. Naturally, you can still seek assistance but remember that they have no obligation to do so and you've got no right to demand money as reimbursement for the delay. In the end, the biggest difference between force of nature accidents and those due to negligence is that you can ask for aid but they're just required to do so during the latter. They have to give money for the hassle to you as well if it was their fault.

We can be intentional in our decisions about vacations and leisure time. Before we make our decisions, we can explore questions like, How far from home will we travel? Shall we go by bike, car, train, or airplane? Do we have closer alternatives nearby? What kind of tourism and recreation do we want to support with our choices? Travel has always been a big source of pleasure for Jim and me and we have struggled to find the right balance between saving and savoring. Some of our happiest times have been traveling to festivals and parks. We still travel but we are experimenting with the staycation. One day a month, we go off the grid. We wake up and make one decision at a time about what we feel like doing. We don’t take phone calls or look at our computers. We don’t pay bills or do housework. We just enjoy whatever we feel like doing in our area.

In many ways, airplane travel mimics the asceticism of the early desert monks: a limited and uncomfortable physical space in which to sit, limited availability of water, food that is less than appetizing, small chance of getting much sleep.

The global fleet of civilian airliners, while more efficient, was expected to double by 2040. That may now be pushed out a few years by the slower growth in passenger travel. Nevertheless, demand will return; over 80 percent of the world’s people have never been in an airplane.

You could run a fingertip along the spines, smell that glorious old book scent, flick them open, and unbend a dog-eared page. Read someone else’s notes in the margin, or a highlighted passage, and see why that sentence or metaphor had dazzled the previous owner. Secondhand books had so much life in them. They’d lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They’d been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned.

At 30,000 feet up The mind has plenty of space to wander:

Photographs from Distant Places (1) In distant villages, You always see the same scenes: Farms Cattle Worship spaces Small local shops. Just basic the things humans need To endure life. (2) ‘Can you stay with me forever?’ She asked him in the airport, While hugging him tightly in her arms. ‘Sorry, I can’t. My flight leaves in two hours and a half.’ He responded with an artificially caring voice, As he kissed her on her right cheek. (3) I was walking in one of Bucharest’s old streets, In a neighborhood that looked harshly beaten by Time, And severely damaged by development and globalization. I saw a poor homeless man Combing his dirty hair In a side mirror of a modern and expensive car! (4) The shape and the color of the eyes don’t matter. What matters is that, As soon as you gaze into them, You know that they have seen a lot. All eyes that dare to bear witness To what they have seen are beautiful. (5) A stranger asked me how I chose my path in life. I told him: ‘I never chose anything, my friend.’ My path has always been like someone forced to sit In an airplane on a long flight. Forced to sit with the condition Of keeping the seatbelt on at all times, Until the end of the flight. Here I am still sitting with the seatbelt on. I can neither move Nor walk. I can’t even throw myself out of the plane’s emergency exit To end this forced flight! (6) After years of searching and observing, I discovered that despair’s favorite hiding place Is under business suits and tuxedos. Under jewelry and expensive night gowns. Despair dances at the tables where Expensive wines of corruption And delicious dinners of betrayal are served. (7) Oh, my poet friend, Did you know that The bouquet of fresh flowers in that vase On your table is not a source of inspiration or creativity? The vase is just a reminder Of a flower massacre that took place recently In a field Where these poor flowers happened to be. It was their fate to have their already short lives cut shorter, To wither and wilt in your vase, While breathing the not-so-fresh air In your room, As you sit down at your table And write your vain words. (8) Under authoritarian regimes, 99.9% of the population vote for the dictator. Under capitalist ‘democratic’ regimes, 99.9% of people love buying and consuming products Made and sold by the same few corporations. Awe to those societies where both regimes meet to create a united vicious alliance against the people! To create a ‘nation’ Of customers, not citizens! (9) The post-revolution leaders are scavengers not hunters. They master the art of eating up The dead bodies and achievements Of the fools who sacrificed themselves For the ‘revolution’ and its ideals. Is this the paradox and the irony of all revolutions? (10) Every person is ugly if you take a close look at them, And beautiful, if you take a closer look. (11) Just as wheat fields can’t thrive Under the shadow of other trees, Intellectuals, too, can’t thrive under the shadow Of any power or authority. (12) We waste so much time trying to change others. Others waste so much time thinking they are changing. What a waste! October 20, 2015

A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear translated into about 1,000 more highway fatalities in that period than in the same period the year before—hidden casualties of the September 11 attack.24

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the speed and scale of globalization amounted to a quantum leap as the number of passengers boarding airplanes alone surpassed 2 billion a year. Elective air travel, however, was only part of a far larger phenomenon. In addition there are countless involuntary immigrants and displaced persons in flight from warfare, famine, and religious, ethnic, or political persecution. For Lederberg and the IOM, these rapid mass movements decisively tilted the advantage in favor of microbes,

SARS presented many of the features that most severely expose the vulnerabilities of the global system. It is a respiratory disease capable of spreading from person to person without a vector; it has an asymptomatic incubation period of more than a week; it generates symptoms that closely resemble those of other diseases; it takes a heavy toll on caregivers and hospital staff; it spreads easily and silently by air travel; and it has a CFR of 10 percent. Moreover, at the time it appeared, its causative pathogen (SARS-associated coronavirus) was unknown, and there was neither a diagnostic test nor a specific treatment. For all of these reasons, it dramatically confirmed the IOM’s 1992 prediction that all countries were more vulnerable than ever to emerging infectious diseases. SARS demonstrated no predilection for any region of the world and was no respecter of prosperity, education, technology, or access to health care. Indeed, after its outbreak in China, SARS spread by airplane primarily to affluent cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Toronto, where it struck relatively prosperous travelers and their contacts and hospital workers, patients, and their visitors rather than the poor and the marginalized. More

It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple. A happy example is seen in the comic strip <>. Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and travelling back in time, or <> himself into animal shapes, or using it as a <> and making clones of him-self. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work. In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin. For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly fom spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs). But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science detect what was really happening. (...) The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as <>. One of the chief advocates of the spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory. From the limited view of cells that microscope provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a <> not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better.

It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple. A happy example is seen in the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes". Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and travelling back in time, or "transmogrifying" himself into animal shapes, or using it as a "duplicator" and making clones of him-self. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work. In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin. For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly fom spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs). But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science detect what was really happening. (...) The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as "simple". One of the chief advocates of the spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory. From the limited view of cells that microscope provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a "simple lump of albuminous combination of carbon" not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better.

The masks will drop down automatically in the event of the cabin being depressurized. If this occurs, put out your cigarettes.' Must we really prepare to die in a mask, remaining unrecognizable to ourselves even into the next world? I think there are thousands of dead people still hanging around on flights because they haven't been accepted on the other side on account of their masks. They go on travelling around in the most awful conditions and we brush up against them without knowing it. I could never travel in an aeroplane with God, nor with anyone who thought he was God (Verdiglione). It is too dangerous. It's not so much that you might crash as that you might never come down again.

First and foremost, I am experiencing much better sleep, and I am actually dreaming vividly almost every night now! This began happening during the FIRST WEEK of use! I used to have dreams like this when I was a kid, but before using this appliance, not in YEARS! I am sleeping all the way through the night as well. I am so much more awake and alert in the mornings, and all the way throughout the day, for that matter. As for the side effects, I am seeing my skin glowing, my eyes are brighter, and the bags under my eyes are gone! I feel like my circulation all around is much better, and I do not “gasp” for air anymore. Before, I would take [various brand-named allergy medications], nasal spray and gels, humidifiers, tea kettles, exotic muds and salves—you name it! Nothing would prevent me from going to bed fine and waking up stuffed up like hell and feeling like I was going to suffocate! Oh, and that is during NON-allergy season. During allergy season (or a bad allergy day), I would just be stuffed up constantly and medicate myself to the point of exhaustion. Now, I take nothing. I now sleep all the way through the night, and I wake up renewed and refreshed. I was skeptical trying this out. I had braces in the past and did not offer any resistance to the plan to remove two of my front teeth and “shrink” my upper jaw, effectively shrinking the “tiger’s cage” too small to allow normal growth or function. When seeing Dr. Liao, he saw this right away and recommended strongly that I be tested for a narrowed airway. I did not come for this: I came to have mercury amalgam fillings removed, so I was unsure. Dr. Liao took the time to explain to me that, despite my legitimate concern about the fillings, my priority should be to open the airway that had become so narrow that it, unbeknownst to me, affected almost every area of my life. … I opted to have both upper and lower appliances made to increase the size of my jaws, and braces and two false teeth installed later on to hold the shape of my new bite pattern. This was to take place over the course of two to three years’ time, and was to cost a significant amount of money. The appliance(s) began to work immediately, and since they are to be adjusted weekly (easily by us right at home with a small tool provided), they continue to open the airway more and more every day, allowing me to experience these results to an even greater degree as I go. I even had a flight recently to California (from Virginia), and I had NO ear pain or discomfort! I used to have to take a bunch of pills and wear [earplugs for airplane travel], and it would STILL kill my ears to fly, but not now. I never knew that I was being deprived of the oxygen I needed to thrive, but now that I am experiencing it for the first time in my adult life, I regret not looking into having this done YEARS ago! I highly recommend this to anyone who feels stuffed up in the morning, tired and groggy all day, or any of the plethora of other symptoms associated with a narrowed airway. Thank you, Dr. Liao!

If you have traveled on a jet airplane, then you have had a high powered radiation exposure that you have no genetic adaptation to.

Josie said. “We almost gave up several times,” Dora admitted, shaking her head.  “But maybe the quilt did keep us from going home earlier than we had planned.” “I like the name Rolling Stones,” Josie commented. “Hey, that’s kind of like us. We didn’t use wagons, but we managed to tour part of the country.” “You’re right. I believe we should just keep the quilt.” “Won’t it remind us of all the anxious moments?” “Maybe, but we showed courage and persevered,” Dora said, soundly.  “Hey, where’s the bonus they promised us?” “Well, I don’t know.” Dora searched the box and held up a blue envelope. “Let’s see.” Josie whipped it out of her hand. She broke the seal and took out two airplane tickets. “Airplane tickets?” Dora asked in disbelief. “What do we do with tickets?” “Here’s a note between the tickets.” Josie opened it.  “It says the tickets are for a quilt show in Philadelphia. Milton wants us to attend.  He says he will meet us there and answer more questions for us.” “But we’re afraid to fly,” Dora protested. “Could we send the tickets back?” Josie suggested. “I don’t think so. Milton will be out his money.” “When is it?” Dora took the tickets and examined them. “In September. Only a month away.” Josie tapped her chin in thought. “If we decided to do more touring, we could extend our trip from there to the New England States.” “We could see the autumn leaves,” Dora said, excitement rising in her voice. “Anthony wanted us to visit him in Iowa,” Josie reminded Dora. “How are we going to work all this in?” “I have no idea. Why does traveling have to be so complicated and so full of surprises?”   ______   MDora looped a bright red scarf around her neck while glancing out her bedroom  window. The wind swirled bits of trash down the sidewalk of their Hedge City, Nebraska, home. She sighed, wishing she could stay at home today and read.  Buzzie looked up at her and meowed, expressing the same sentiments. She reached down and patted her softly.  But she didn’t have that luxury today. She had agreed to substitute teach for the current English teacher who would be out for at least a week.  Josie called from the kitchen. “Want more coffee?” “Yes, please.  Fill my mug.  I’ll drink it on my way to school.” She reached into the closet and pulled out a beige sweater. A glance in the mirror confirmed the bright red scarf did wonders for the nondescript sweater’s color. Josie joined her at the door dressed in russet slacks and matching jacket and handed Dora her mug.  “A little blustery today.” “For sure.” Dora eyed Josie, wishing she had the sense of style Josie displayed. The sisters would walk together and then would split to their separate ways, Josie to fill in at the

Miss Manners’ mother always told her to travel either first or third class, but never second, when crossing. (Not crossing class lines, silly; crossing the Atlantic Ocean, in the days when that was done properly, with bouillon at eleven on the promenade deck and tea at five in the salon.) In first class, in those days, you had luxury; in third class, you had fun. This is the proper distribution of the world’s blessings. In second class, you had neither. Naturally, then, someone invented the one-class ship, where the advantages of second class could be enjoyed by all, which is probably why we have those overanxious things called airplanes for crossings these days. You

As a professional speaker, Susanne travels all over the country and practically lives on airplanes. One day as she entered security to board yet another flight, she was struck by the poise, posture, and gestures of the man in front of her in line. As a communications expert, she observed his excellent presentation with appreciation and awe. The gentleman was dressed impeccably in a crisp white shirt and well-fitted suit and he sported a new haircut. She watched him as he removed his flawless leather belt, his gold money clip, and well-polished shoes. (And of course, he had Listerine in a baggie to ensure fresh breath!) The care with which he dismantled was impressive. His poised and fluid movements were deliberate and respectful of his personal possessions. As he regrouped and proceeded down the concourse, she was struck by how his stance and carriage intrigued and impressed her. His projection of elegance created a presence of pride and dignity. He left a remarkable impression.

I spend a great deal of time on airplanes traveling from one speaking engagement to the next. There have been times when I have sat for hours next to strangers with whom I never made eye contact or uttered a word. But then I have also met people with whom I engaged in such delightful conversation that it resulted in new business and referrals. The main difference was whether or not I took initiative to begin a conversation.

Tarik reappeared from room 104 carrying a soft-sided blue travel bag, large enough to hold a week’s worth of clothes, small enough to fit in an airplane’s overhead bin.

They have been here for two hundred million years,” he says, “and until recently there were ten thousand species. They evolved to go in search of food, traveling farther than any other animal to survive, and thus they colonized the earth. From the oilbird, which lived in pitch-black caves, to the bar-headed goose, which bred only on the desolate Tibetan plateau. From the rufous hummingbird, which survived in the freezing altitude of fourteen thousand feet to the Rüppell’s griffon vulture, which could fly as high as a commercial airplane. These extraordinary creatures were undoubtedly the most successful on earth, because they courageously learned to exist anywhere.

When I travel in airplane or the subway train, I feel my 'self ' is constant. In both cases I cover the time and space, hence the 'Self ' is out of these realms.

William Henry Davies wrote these lines in 1911, and they ring true even over a century later. It is the truth; we really don’t have the time to stand and stare. I always think of this when I don’t have the luxury of time and am told to travel by airplanes, usually for book fairs and literature festivals. I wish I could take the train to every destination I travel to. There would be so much more to see, and many more stories to tell. The first