Actually, the agent just stared had me as if I had just exited a Neanderthal cave and smiled sympathetically. Back to the beer.

Have a beer, walk 15 minutes to the gate only to be told the fight is sold out. I say but the app says there are 30 empty seats. Agent says it's sold out. I say but the app. Agent says that's why I never use the app. I say but Delta told me to use the app. Agent says are you stupid.

On the app it showed a fight leaving mid-afternoon, wouldn't let me choose a seat but showed plenty available. So go to JFK five hours ahead of my booked flight, go to the Delta counter, told I have to wait til boarding to get a seat assigned.

Thanks

And Burgum thinks it's funny

We built them into an enemy we could not defeat and almost everything we did against them we ended up doing more effectively to ourselves.

I've reported two and a half books on the perpetrators of 9/11 and the main think I've learned is that the attackers were a bunch of not especially talented guys who got extremely lucky. But we decided al Qaeda and its adherents were supermen capable of global conquest. They were not.

"You spread your anger on sharp-edged knives
Cut my skin and make it bleed
Like pilate in his self righteousness
You're a traitor and a thief." The entire album is brilliant. As was the one preceding it, Car Wheels, and the two that followed, World Without Tears and West

Funny, but probably not unique. When Amgen, the huge biotech, hired its lead scientist back in the 80s, he was given his choice of projects to pursue. He chose to search for EPO. The other candidate was to make a better indigo dye for denim.

Brilliant Blade Runner reference; not so brilliant political analysis. Sheesh.

Exactly. And against a deserter.

Richard Sennett's Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. Also, from the other end of the spectrum, David Macaulay's The Way Things Work