Grizzly Air

I’m not great with flying. The vast improbability that thousands of tonnes of metal and people won’t fall out of the sky always plays on my mind. But when the alternative is eleven hours sweating it out in a jalopy on the Hume, I can suspend my disbelief. Especially for the bargain price equivalent to two tanks of fuel.

What I find less easy to resolve myself to is why budget airline seats have a recline function. This isn’t long haul, deep vein thrombosis territory – this is a morning jaunt up the east coast in time for a breakfast meeting.

No one needs to sleep. No one needs to recline. There aren’t any gold-leaf clad virgins coming to feed anyone peeled grapes.

The fact is that on a standard domestic flight I have between ten and fifteen centimetres space between my knees and the seat in front. With the seat in front reclined the space disappears. I can’t wriggle forward. I smell the Rogain on the guy in front’s bald spot. I have to suck in my gut to get the tray table down. And I’m not even particularly large. It. Is. Ridiculous.

I just can’t understand how the market research geniuses paid six figure sums to lure passengers haven’t figured out that the small factor of comfort afforded the asshole that reclines the whole flight is infinitely negated by the frustration of passengers pinned to their pleather seats like unwitting UFC warm-up acts.

Or maybe the responsibility is less on the airline and more on the individual who places their own luxury above others’ comfort. People who might well hold the door open for an elderly shopper at the department store will crush a fellow flyer on the Melbourne to Brisbane without so much as a thought. For some reason the air is sanctified space. It’s like flying is still such a novelty, such an unlikely way to casually travel, that passengers have an entitlement complex reserved for the privileged few.

Whatever people. It is time to herald change. Enough of the Me First culture of the air. For the price we’re paying there isn’t much space. We all have to manage.

Suck it up and keep it upright.

Thankyou for flying.

..........

I finally realised why I hate Napoleon Dynamite so much...

How many super-cool kids did you see wearing 'Vote For Pedro' t-shirts in the early noughties? Behind the velvet rope at every nightclub sidewalk line on a Saturday night, among every clutch of faux-hawked and bleck-tipped lads at least one deliberately-distressed tee emblazoned with the Napoleon D reference. If you listened in carefully to those trendy kids, over the course of the night you might have even picked up the odd "GOSH!" among the homophobia and expletives.

Napoleon Dynamite made nerdy cool. It crossed cultural and sub-cultural divides, and had everyone cheering for the hopelessly daggy. And along the way, while the kids were laughing and rooting for Napoleon, nerdy got appropriated by cool. It isn't bona fide nerdiness, but that doesn't seem to matter when t-shirt sales are at stake.

And I'm not ok with it. I'm very fucking un-ok with it. Nerdy isn't cool - nerdy is the antithesis of cool. The existence of nerdy defines cool. Geeky might be able to straddle the gulf of cultural improbability into cool, but nerdy is and forever will be outside of cool. Those punks in their nightclub lines have no right to nerdy. Even the vasaline-lensed, quaint and redemptive kind of nerdy that 'Vote For Pedro' symbolises.

Cool kids get everything else. They're not allowed to have nerdy too. Not on my watch.

..........

Growing old gracefully...

How many gazelles die of natural causes?

Has there ever, in the history of the wild plains of Africa, been a gangly old leaper who met its ultimate demise through old age (which apparently is something like oxidization poisoning enough cells that the whole system just gives up)?

Probably how they get their reputation as being graceful - they never get all geriatric and farty and crooked and slow.

They just get eat'n.

..........

Super Amazing Vocabulary Time!

SUPER AMAZING REAL WORD: Fecundity.
I've seen this word written and heard it used a bunch of times. Maybe at some stage I figured out what it means by the context in which it was used. I hear it now and still think of the bulkheads of tankers, or the rusty iron filings in a jar. The correct usage however would be to describe the fruitfulness of something or the high level fertility of animal or vegetable (not so much mineral).
In a sentence; "The fecundity of the Belgian countryside goes some way to redeeming the barren cultural landscape."

I-CAN'T-BELIEVE-ITS-A-REAL-WORD WORD: Ironical.
Apparently, it means EXACTLY the same thing as 'ironic'. And it sounds stupid.

NOT, IN FACT, A WORD: Alcopop.
You can't just pick two words, put them together to describe something new, and then talk about the new thing in parliament with a straight face. You just can't.

Words are cool. Tell your friends.