I can see this being an on-again/off-again situation for a long time. When Rs are in power they’ll remove it, and when Ds are in power they’ll restore it. We need something like this to be enshrined in the law of the land, but more and more it feels like that isn’t ever going to be possible as everything will be open to re-interpretation forever.
I love JetBlue. I live about 20 miles from the Long Beach, CA airport and used to use them all the time. I was so sad when they left LGB for LAX. LAX is terrible and I only fly out of there when I absolutely must.
I was 12 and grew up in an American suburb. I remember the contrast of how dull and drab a lot of places were compared to where I was living.
I found an East German pfennig on the ground at the airport, the material it was made out of seemed almost like it was plastic.
There was a stereotype at the time that the toilet paper in the USSR was going to be like sandpaper. What I remember is that the toilet paper in the public bathrooms was the same material as the paper towels in our public bathrooms. I had brought a couple of rolls of toilet paper from home, but they didn’t last the whole trip.
Going through Checkpoint Charlie was legit scary. There were armed guards, with German Shepherds, searching the bus we were on. The guards walked up to each person and closely examined your passport and made sure it was you.
German girls were cute and they liked our American accent. I don’t remember interacting with many (or any) Soviet girls. The Soviet boys we met would ask us for “chewing gum” or “chocolates”. I had brought along a big bag of insividually-wrapped gum (Double Bubble maybe) and a big bag of Tootsie Rolls to give out.
In Moscow, Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral were very impressive, Lenin’s Tomb was very underwhelming.
It was July, and Leningrad is so far north that the sun didn’t set at all. We were sitting up in our hotel room talking, thinking it must still be evening because the sun was still up, but it was 1 in the morning.
There were shops that only took foreign currency (no Rubles) which meant it wasn’t for locals, only for visitors. They had Pepsi and a few other well-known American brands of things for purchase.
There were status of Lenin everywhere.
West Berlin smelled like diesel exhaust.
When I got back home it was around midnight. I told my parents I was hungry, and they asked where I wanted to eat. I said In-N-Out, so that’s where we stopped.
My sleep schedule was backwards for about a week and a half.
It was July 1988 and I had never flown on an airplane before. I flew on 10 airplanes in 21 days (with some driving from Frankfort to West Berlin and then to East Berlin.)
Utah’s MLB team should keep the “ends with Z” theme. They probably couldn’t steal “The Buzz” from the minor league team, so maybe “The Fuzz” or “The Whizz”.
It’s like you close your eyes, and then 5 seconds later you open them and hours have passed.
That’s what it was like for me. However when I “woke up”, my wife was in the room next to me and I was already sitting upright on the bed, dressed and shoes on. Apparently I had been awake for about a half hour and we both had a conversation with the doctor about how things went. I remembered none of it.
That’s one that most people don’t often think about. You just assume that your OK because you have a spare. Happened to me once, although fortunately not in the middle of nowhere.
Every time I hear people worried about the robot uprising, I remember the time Google Location couldn’t figure out what method of transportation I was using for 2 and a half hours between the Santa Ana, CA airport and the Denver, CO airport.