Why I Hate Flying

Ok, so hate is a strong word. Maybe more like "Why I Never Feel Very Comfortable Flying."

It's not the food. I'll eat pretty much anything. It's not the lack of space or the fact that sudden pressure changes wreak havoc on my eardrum that's mainly made of neck tissue (That's a long story, on a related note I'm traumatized by monkeys with cymbals and anything artificially banana flavored. But I digress.)

No, the real reason I don't like flying is much more pragmatic. I don't actually believe that it works. Sure, I learned about Bernoulli and all that in high school. I've seen experiments involving paper airplanes or ping pong balls. But there's the difference. A sheet of paper or a tiny, thin piece of hollow plastic does not compare the 20-ton behemoths we supposedly get up into the sky every day.

A 747 is nothing more than a heavy piece of metal with a couple of ridiculous wings attached. That pretty much sounds like a 50's Cadillac to me. And pound for pound, I'd say Elvis's car has a better chance of getting off the ground than one of those things.

And that's just the plane itself. Then you add a couple hundred people--and I mean good, solid Americans--whose average weight is certainly much closer to "Elvis" than "ping pong ball."

No, I don't believe there is a natural force on earth that could get that much steel and flesh up to 500 mph at an altitude of 6 miles (except maybe Arnold Schwarenegger colliding with Vin Diesel at near light-speeds. And we know that's impossible because they would burn up from the friction before they could reach each other.*)

I believe what's really happening here is pure voodoo magic. Some airline employee snaps the neck of a chicken right before takeoff. The airlines certainly aren't spending the money to sacrifice a goat for every flight. To fund that, they'd have to start charging passengers $10 for a bag of pretzels or $8 for no bag of pretzels. And now that I've written that down on the internet, some airline is going to start doing that anyway.

Anyway, since I don't believe in air travel I never worry about whether the mechanics did their job. I only worry that the medicine man (who probably works for the TSA) is doing the same half-arsed job all the other airline employees are doing. What if he's drunkenly performing the rituals wrong? Or only sacrificing one chicken for every two flights?

So instead I pray to the Catholic God (you know, the real one. That there's three of, but only one of) and figure He'll sort things out. It will be nice to get to heaven before Elvis--who's still out there somewhere, probably impersonating Paul McCartney.


* Obligatory pun: Diesel spontaneously combusts at 410 degrees Fahrenheit.

Feeding the Trolls

I love the internet. There's nowhere else on earth that a conversation about a neutral topic like Javascript can get so personal so fast.

Observe.