If you’re tired of airline food that “verge(s) on parody,” you may be interested to know how much better airline food used to be. What happened? The fifth paragraph gives a hint: “(o)nce upon a time in the pre-Reagan era, flying in the United States still had a whiff of glamor.” See? Reagan ruins everything! Even I remember eating actual meals on two-hour flights as a kid, and though I think of them the way I think of school lunches, they were also demonstrably better than literally everything I’ve had on an airplane over the last 20 years. The challenges of making food taste good in an artificially-dry environment are real, but they’re only “impossible” because big airline corporations value stock prices über alles. You’ll find contemplating the difficulties of cooking on a zeppelin entertaining, plus you’ll learn how the convection oven (and strong federal regulation!) made airline food better.
Alley Wilson at Global News takes us to “Canada’s first dementia village” in Langley, British Columbia, where folks suffering from dementia can live relatively dignified lives. It’s a gated community purportedly designed so that folks suffering from dementia can “move about as they wish,” since staying inside all the time (as you would in a nursing home or other institution, or, hell, at home) doesn’t actually help those folks very much. If you want to stave off the worst effects of dementia as long as possible, you’ve got to go places, hence there are cafés and chair yoga, not to mention specially-trained staff I’m sure are much easier to find and train in a nation that makes sure everyone has health care. I have to say I still remember The Prisoner vividly enough to really wish this place wasn’t called “the Village.”
Finally, Tom Scocca at Indignity takes on one of the worst takes on Jordan Neely’s murder, one coming from newly-minted never-Trump New York Times columnist David French. “The rule of law is failing on New York subways,” Mr. French writes, but “rule of law” doesn’t mean “don’t execute someone for screaming” but “Mr. Neely should have been locked up” – though he had been unconstitutionally-detained for 15 months without trial on an assault charge. Thus Mr. Scocca is left to write, that while the killing would not have happened if he’d been locked up, “the killing also would not have happened if Penny hadn't killed him.” Perhaps you thought punishing the right people was the conservative thing to do; how strange that today’s “conservatives” don’t seem up to the task.
Comments