Sounds like a pretty interesting place, even with the constant wars. The inhabitants must be utterly sick of foreigners. Why cant we all just leave them alone?

“Welcome to America. Now get out of my way.”

This British journalist ecountered a lot of the weirdness (compared to the rest of the world) of this country (read the article), but it’s the last paragraph of his post that nails it.

But it’s the idiocracy that really gets me down. The constant coaxing you have to do to get anything done. “No” is the default setting whether you want to change lanes on a motorway or get a drink on a Sunday. It’s like trying to negotiate with a donkey. Once, I urged a cop in Pensacola, Florida, to use his common sense and let me load a van in the no loading zone, since the airport was shut and it would make no difference. “Sir,” he said, “you don’t need common sense when you’ve got laws.”

That, I think, probably says it all.

One man told staff of his irritation at the number of holidaymakers who traveled with plain black suitcases, hindering his attempts to find his own plain black suitcase on the airport conveyor belt.

After discovering that the shampoo in her luggage had leaked during her flight, one woman bemoaned the fact that the hotel she was staying in provided complimentary toiletries, rendering the entire incident “very preventable”.

Another woman wrote in to complain that her plane journey was a disappointment because the sky was far too cloudy, impeding the view for her and her children and spoiling their game of eye-spy.

Following a trip to a local theme park, another woman wrote to the travel agent to complain that the Log Flume ride made her feet wet and the sun was so strong that her ice cream melted too quickly.

There’s more where these came from.

And since drinking tends to be a part of many a vacation, here’s some people who went a tad too far while imbibing and hit record blood levels.

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Lawrence M. Krauss, author of “The Physics of ‘Star Trek,” writes in the New York Times that if we ever attempt to send people to Mars, we should leave them there because it’s simply too expensive to bring them back. That sounds pretty cold, but Krauss says,

While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots. Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip, usually because the places they were leaving were pretty intolerable anyway. Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart.

Krauss also points out that he knows people who would be willing to go right now.

If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that astronauts would be willing to leave home never to return alive, then consider the results of several informal surveys I and several colleagues have conducted recently. One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

Would you guys be willing to travel to Mars knowing you’ll never come back? Would Michele Bachmann being elected president help in your decision? Four more years of Obama? Vote below.

Would you be willing to die on Mars?

• Yes, it’d be a great adventure and I’d be infamous!
• No, fricken way!

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Create a Blog Poll

Hilarious comment from Mr. Glum, “Um, pilgrims and colonists were going somewhere with an oxygen atmosphere.”

Good point!

‘Paris Syndrome’ leaves Japanese tourists in shock – msnbc.com The Japanese are the worst at doing some cultural research before they go someplace. This is what happens.

Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

“A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses,” Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.

Already this year, Japan’s embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors — including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them.

Found by Eric Blumenfeld.

There’s more bad publicity for Metro after a YouTube video surfaces of a Metro train operator apparently texting while on the job.

Metro officials said the operator was disciplined after video showing him apparently texting while operating a train was posted online. Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said the operator was suspended for a week without pay after officials learned of the June 5 incident. A passenger on the blue line in Alexandria apparently recorded the incident with a cellphone camera, then posted it to YouTube. Farbstein said Metro the operator has already served the suspension.

The incident was posted on YouTube last month and was brought to light Tuesday by local blog Unsuck DC Metro. Farbstein said operators are prohibited from texting or using cell phones while operating the highly automated system. Officials said no evidence has been found that the operator killed in last month’s crash on the Red Line was texting.

Crap, this moron should have been fired…..

Update: Hmmmm…Soon after posting this, You Tube has disabled embedding of this video, including the source. So you can see it here. I guess someone is upset about this.