“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.

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.

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

Good point!

“If you’re brilliant, work really hard, and earn a world-class doctorate from a US university, IBM has a job for you at one of its US research sites — as a ‘complementary worker‘ (as this 1996 piece defined the then-emerging term). But be prepared to ship out to India or China after you’ve soaked up knowledge for 13 months as a ‘long-term supplemental worker.’ Newsweek sketches some of the bigger picture, reporting that IBM, HP, Accenture, and others are finding it profitable to detach from the United States (even patenting the process). ‘IBM is one of the multinationals that propelled America to the apex of its power, and it is now emblematic of the process of creative destruction pushing America to a new, less dominant, and less comfortable position.’”