Ultimate Checklist for Success
Middle seats tend to be filled starting from the front of the aircraft and moving toward the rear—which means that if your flight isn't full, you're likely to get an empty seat next to you if you request an aisle seat in the center section in the back.
Great tip, via Lifehacker. Just in time for my flight to SF this weekend -- I love having an empty seat next to me. It's not often a guy as tall as me gets to just... sprawl and let it all hang out, so to speak. At least, not without getting some real dirty looks or elbows to the face.
I'd add my own piece of advice though: if you're not on a flight halfway around the world, like a short domestic flight, use the bathroom beforehand or be lucky enough to have a steel bladder like me. Then grab yourself a window seat! You'll be able to prop up a pillow on the side and take a peaceful nap without getting awakened by the passenger next to you so he/she can get out of his seat to use the toilet. Worst of all, in that situation, you'll have to wait until the bastard finishes the job off, since they'll need you to get up again to let them back in... the nerve!
New slogan idea:
Window Seats - Get Your Anti-Social On!
hewwo derr
Switch out that MacBook Pro for... a dozen ice cold cans of Blue Ribbon. Could anything be more American?
Timbuk2 Dolores Chiller
Not all messenger bags are for business. The Timbuk2 Dolores Chiller ($110) is a portable cooler disguised as a messenger, offering a fully insulated interior, a metal bottle opener on the strap, durable ballistic nylon construction, waterproof TPU lining, and enough capacity for at least 12 cans of suds.
nyc’s “fireworks testing” week has unofficially begun. hope the good weather sticks around
Actual fireworks start at 1:10
I was somewhere in this crowd haha, watching the fireworks from Roosevelt Island in the summer of 2007. Can you find me?
One person wins the lottery, the other becomes a paraplegic. A year later, surveys are conducted and they are found to be equally happy. Happiness -- our one true and constant desire.. what would you do if you knew that the one thing you've been chasing after all your life is within your power to manufacture?
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness.
Tell me about my grandfather.
No. That isn’t yours to bear. He doesn’t understand your silence.
Tell me, please.
You feel something tear inside you with those three words — because what he asks, what he desperately wants, is really: tell me about you. Tell me about my father who sits and lives here. Who are you?
Enough. He flinches slightly at the sound of your voice, then recovers like a grown man, by staring at the wall behind you, emotionless. There is pride, but mostly a profound sadness, in seeing him that way. You lift the newspaper back up to your face until he exits the room. The ink mixes with the sweat of your fingers, smudging lines of Chinese characters beyond legibility.
Someday he’ll realize he’s understood all along and, with his tall American frame, he’ll bear it well, the heavy wordless burden.
But a hidden part of you hopes never.
It was on the morning of his thirty-seventh birthday that Vincent Van Ngo single-handedly overturned every historical precedent regarding man’s progression through middle age and made the most significant discovery of his life. At 5:41 AM, he suddenly became aware of his seat at the kitchen table. How long had he been sitting there? He could not recall if he had fallen asleep in the wicker chair the night before or if, in the throes of yet another somnambulistic fit, he had eventually gotten lodged there, like a leaf blown haphazardly into a storm gutter. Nevertheless, having finally settled on his location, his other senses began to unfold, gradually assembling the details of his immediate surroundings. At 6:01, he deduced from the burning sensation of something resembling coffee on his tongue and from the presence of an aproned woman in his kitchen, whom he initially mistook to be his wife and then, upon closer inspection, realized was, in fact, his wife, that it was a Monday.
It’s clear within the first few moments of your premature existence – you are a breathtakingly ugly baby. One for the records, the doctor thinks to himself as he enters your information into the system. The birth certificate reads, Albert Einstein Liao, and the world laughs, first of many at your expense. It’s a good chuckle all around, and even you giggle along, stupid ugly baby that you are, with everyone but the young black nurse named Winifred Oprah Johnston, who is here for the night shift, so go home and rest easy, ma’am.
She checks the colored tubes flowing in and out of your arms, and re-positions the oxygen mask. Her breath, soft and moist, smelling of cigarettes and tuna-fish casserole, skips over your face with gentle, constant rhythm, slowly ebbing, diminishing though filled with longing. She permits her fingers to glide, barely touching, through your sparse, dark hairs, calling to surface memories of her own, of another baby, so beautiful, so distant and perfect and brief. Two weeks later, cleared for discharge, weighing 7 ¾ pounds, you leave the hospital behind, grasping the knowledge that you are forever, abomination and beauty, young, stupid, alive… that dreams are not created equal.