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Just posted a bit over a thousand new images, mostly to the tattoo sections. Thanks to all the contributors and to fiddlysticks for being the cover model (tattoo by Brandon Hanna at Lone Wolf Tattoo).
With sincere public apologies to Shawn who I was supposed to see in Phoenix, I've headed back to Mexico. I was just too tired out (and stressed out) to spend any more time away right now.
Our flight back was overbooked, and almost got us tossed in Guantanamo as well… We were traveling with our two year old daughter — Rachel actually travels something like 50,000 miles a year with her — so we had her FAA approved airline seat with us. After getting on the plane (last, because they screwed up and put us in the emergency exit lane which is illegal for anyone under 15), we got Nefarious all buckled up and were ready to go. Sitting across from us was an obese black stewardess fanning herself maniacally with a magazine, who kept talking to herself and every twenty seconds (I kid you not) literally threw her hands up in the air and shouted “Praise Jesus!”
A few minutes before the plane was ready to disembark, she got up and went to tell “Vicky Jo”, another one of the AA stewardesses, that we really needed to put the seat in “the right way”. So Vicky Jo came up to us and asked, “Do we have a problem here? Are you going to put that seat in correctly, or do we need to have you removed from the airplane?”
Personally I think that our “look” offended their religious sensibilities and they were just searching for any reason they could to get us off the flight — we tried to explain to her that it was an FAA approved seat (there's a logo right on the side that shows it), and that we fly regularly with it, having bought it specifically for the purpose of flying. She was getting visibly agitated and angry, and said she had to “check her manual”.
When she returned, she told us that the seat wasn't approved and was placed wrong, and we were going to have to get rid of it. There are instructions on the bottom and even more “FAA approved” stamps, so we had to undo everything to show her. She immediately points at the “how to use” diagram and declares that it shows that we couldn't use the seat and had it in wrong, even though the diagram showed we had it mounted exactly right. Rachel corrected her saying, “no, see, this is the outline of the seat, it shows exactly how to use it…”
Vicky Jo shouts at her, “I don't need you giving me lip about this!”
“Excuse me, you're the one yelling at us,” I say, and she says, “do I need to call the cops about this?”
Immediately she picks up the airplane phone and says, “can you send some marshalls back here, I've got some passengers threatening to cause a problem.”
(!)
After a bit more of her berating us and checking her manual, she clues in that she's 100% in the wrong and that we had it done correctly in the first place. No apology, just some vague cop-out statement like, “alright, this situation is resolved and you can put the seat back now.”
psycho.
And that wasn't even the last issue with the flight. During take-off (literally as we're taking off, not “just before”) the woman sitting in front of us jumps up and starts walking to the bathroom. The Jesus freak stewardess looks at her (since it's neither safe nor permitted to be walking around let alone using the bathroom during takeoff) and starts to say “excuse me miss”, and then stops, saying “aww, forget it, I retire in eight days” — and then proceeds to again shout “Praise the Lord!” at the top of her lungs.
Landing was pretty scary as well. We came in really low, and about eight miles before the runway were only a couple hundred feet off the ground — I literally thought we were going to be doing an emergency landing in the desert. Suddenly the pilots throw the airplane back up to full throttle and we skim over the ground for the remaining eight miles with the engines screaming the whole way. San Jose del Cabo airport sits on a slightly raised area, and we must have missed smashing into the side of the drop-off cliff by no more than forty feet, coming onto the runway tarmac harder than any student pilot landing that either Rachel or I have ever done.
Other than that, watch this MeFi thread. Almost ten thousand animals have died in China of what appears to be the bird flu (with potentially a hundred million carrying it), Qinghai province is under quarantine and media blackout, and now humans are dying from it as well. Is this “the big one”?
I'll write on this more later if I can find some time, but has SARS got you thinking we can keep this stuff under control? SARS was hard to spread with a low death rate — better remember the influenza outbreak of 1918 which killed between 25 and 50 million people. 28% of all Americans (and about a fifth of the world population) were infected, with about 1% of the total world population dying.
PS. More info on EPIDEMICA.
