I’m in North Carolina for my brother’s wedding, and I almost missed my flight because my cab never came (in Utah! You can’t just FLAG ONE DOWN HERE, at 5:30am) and I was reminded that a friend of ours says the optimum number of flights to miss in your lifetime cannot be zero, or you have wasted too much time being early for flights. That friend is made of sterner stuff than I.
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I’m obsessed with “Annotation Tuesday,” and cannot believe Elon Green got Lillian Ross ON THE PHONE to talk about her 1950 New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway:
You know, the first time I ever ate caviar was when Mary Hemingway served it in the hotel. That didn’t make me addicted to caviar. It was an interesting experience and I liked it. If they were drinking, I would taste it. It didn’t make a drinker out of me. I also knew Faulkner. He’d come visit me in New York and say he was going into detox. It was never very successful. If he wanted to drink, that was his business.
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Ten great Christmas songs recorded by Jewish singers.
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Someday we’ll be famous enough to score interviews with Baxter from Anchorman.
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Anne Helen Petersen talks to Danielle Henderson, the woman behind Feminist Ryan Gosling:
Real talk: what’s book promotion like, labor-wise?
Either I’m really awful at it or I’m not as misanthropic as I’ve always thought, because it was kind of awesome and mostly a breeze. To be fair, it’s not like I wrote War and Peace—my book has 120 pictures of Ryan Gosling in it, so it’s not really a hard thing to sell.
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These oral histories from Vulture are just incredible. And…this one is about the final death montage from Six Feet Under:
Lauren Ambrose (Claire Fisher): I cry when I hear the song. It’s Pavlovian. If it comes on when I’m at yoga or something, I’ll cry. I’m always worried people will notice and be like, Oh, is that the girl from the show? But I live in the woods in the middle of nowhere.
Hall: I just associate it with an image. I see Claire backlit by the sun, driving, right on the crest of crying. It’s that image — boom — it sweeps into me.
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Our Dad Magazine editors and frequent Toast contributers Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky have turned their comic into a BOOK, which you could BUY.
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Hey, welcome to North Carolina! We have horrible politics and amazing food.
I feel like this should be the welcome sign to the entire southeast region of the US. Maybe once you cross the Rappahannock in Virginia… Northern Virginia’s should be “Welcome to NoVA! We have horrible traffic and amazing food!”
Oh Buzzfeed, every time I think you find the bottom, you invent some new drill or dynamite the floor or just send a guy down there with a canary and a shovel. Soon you will be at the earth’s core and going for China and the world will be consumed by hot magma and Baxter and I will dance and howl as the world burns around us.
Mallory and I LOVE Buzzfeed, Worm.
JAYA AND MATT! AN ACTUAL BOOK! well done! If I had more money I’d be buying it right now.
Everyone is getting books before me, man.
I tried watching “Six Feet Under” a few years ago, but didn’t make it to the end of the second season. Partly this was because I met Boyfriend at the time and got very distracted, but it was also because the characters’ unhappiness was very convincing (I feel kind of the same way about “Mad Men”) and depressing. I think I need to give the show another shot, though.
it is basically all misery but it’s really well-done and funny misery? I watched the entire series with my mom and we both loved it, but I don’t recommend that unless you want to look at a lot of penises with your mom (I usually prefer not to but I made an exception because it is such a good show and also I didn’t realize how many penises)
The ending sequence is worth watching even if you don’t watch the rest of the show.
Wahhh our book made it! Yes, buy it, read it, I’ll put on lipstick and kiss a napkin and write something like “You’re the best, stud” on it and mail it with your book.
I am not comfortable kissing any napkins, but maybe I can draw a napkin in the margins of the book
If my Khaleesis command you to kiss a thousand napkins, you will do so. Whether they are sanitary or Bounty.
The whole point of writing for The Toast is to receive our unflinching support for all of your non-Toast ventures.
Missing a flight, rebooking a flight and waiting for new departure time costs you more time than just showing up early. Signed the lady who is reading a book and drinking wine in an airport 90minutes before every flight she takes.
I always arrive early assuming security will be a nightmare, and then it never is, and then I have time to people-watch while eating an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. Win-win.
This my favorite part of traveling, frankly–having that down time when I can’t do anything but read and drink!
I especially like it when I’m heading home after having spent a week over the holidays with my family. I love them, but I also love that they can’t follow me through security.
The only flight I’ve ever missed was the first one I took after my son is born, because apparently having a baby makes you too stupid to realize that taking the train to the airport with an infant requires twice as much extra time as you think it will. After that, we just figured the cost of a car service into any trip.
On the other hand, I did show up for one flight an entire day early once. At an airport a two-hour drive away from where I was staying. That is too long to hang out in the bar with wine.
…I have never missed a flight. But I am also early/on time to everything. I’ve recently figured out that this is due to my dad, who is ready way before everyone else and is always a proponent of driving to the airport 3 hours before any flight.
One time in 2008, I missed a flight because I arrived at the airport (Heathrow) 52 minutes before the flight and they wouldn’t let me check in because you have to check in at least 1 hour before a flight. I have never been less than 1.5 hours early for a flight since.
This is another piece of evidence pointing to Heathrow being a Hellmouth.
Setting foot in Heathrow serves as sufficient evidence in my book.
While in North Carolina, you are legally required to at one point take your shirt off, and twist it ’round your head like a helicopter. Failure to do so will result in immediate ejection and banishment from the state, FOREVER.
Signed,
An NC Resident
My favourite part of March Madness is shirt helicoptering. Not having the opportunity to visit the state very often (or ever), I take advantage of the opportunities I get.
Your friend’s argument is good, but you should remind them that although it demonstrates that the optimal number is not zero, it could still math out to be much less than one.
Only once have I missed a flight, and it was not MY fault, but the fault of my then-boyfriend’s dad who insisted on driving us to the airport and also refused to believe that I, a mere woman, could be correct about “how long it takes to get to the airport from this town and in this traffic conditions” and so dragged his feet getting out the door despite the fact that we’d been packed and ready to go for nearly an hour. I have never come so close to actually hitting another person, let alone an older person to whom I was supposed to be polite and respectful.
Anyway, travelling brings out the fastidious/type A/anal retentive person that is apparently buried deep, DEEP within me and no one will ever convince me that it’s not better to get to the airport early and have time to kill than it is to cut it so short you’re sprinting down the terminal with your carry on bag, trying desperately to get on to the plane before they shut the gate.
It *is* better! I’ve done the sprinting thing off connecting flights and voluntarily starting out my travels with that just seems like the worst idea. I mostly fly out of tiny regional airports where you could probably manage to get to the airport, check in a bag, go through security, and then make it to the gate in fifteen minutes if you really wanted to, but then when would I have time to browse through tiny shops full of weird knick-knacks?
I have never missed a flight, but only from being incredibly lucky (the plane was delayed) and by the amazing work of a good expeditor and understanding flight attendents (so that even though I arrived at the airport less than 15 minutes before take-off, they still got me and my baggage on the plane in time). And I would say an extra half an hour of dicking around at home is so not worth the stress of missing/almost missing a flight.
This summer I was cutting it really close (although not 15 minutes, egads!) and asked a TSA person to help speed me through security (actually the person behind me in line asked for me because I was trying to be all easy-breezy, “it’ll be fine, probably! probably fine!”) and instead of helping she just advised that I ask every person in front of me in line if I could cut them. So I did. Asshole status for the day, cemented.
I think that’s one of the benefits of small airports! Our expeditor had called the airport before our connecting flight even touched down, and the frount counter person was waiting on the sidewalk out front for us with our tickets pre-printed. She had arranged for a baggage guy to come over and run our baggage directly through the scanners and out to the plane while she checked our ID and got us through security super-quick. Anyone flying in northern Canada, fly First Air! They are amazing!
Wow, that’s amazing service! I’ve nearly missed (ok, and missed) a few flights out of New York, and a very polite request for help from airline personnel has gotten me at the front of lines and to my gate in time. Even when the desk person said no, its impossible, I politely persisted and got on that plane. It is amazing what a little bit of politeness at the airport will get you.
And I fully admit my asshole-ness by being so late and am happy to report I’ve gotten waaaaaay better about it. But I have no excuse for the time I missed a flight – even though I was at the gate an hour before boarding time – because I was g-chatting with someone I had just started dating and got so in the flirting zone that I didn’t hear the boarding call. Rather, any of the boarding calls.
I once had a tight connection in Frankfurt that got even tighter because our first plane had to circle a bunch due to snowy conditions (somehow this didn’t delay the second plane from taking off).
As soon as we landed, before we even got to the gate, Lufthansa pulled me and a few other transfer-ers off the plane (we descended one of those open staircases like they use for Air Force One, there was snow flying around, it was very dramatic) and onto a little shuttle where a German Customs guy was waiting to stamp our passports, which he did as we drove across the tarmac to the second plane’s gate, where we boarded right before they rolled up the jetway. It was the most German thing that has ever happened to me.
Our bags made it onto the connecting flight, too, somehow– whether by German efficiency or Hessian demonic summoning, I’ll never know.
We almost missed a flight this summer when we went to the WRONG AIRPORT. There are 2 airports in Detroit and if you just type in "Detroit Airport" the dreaded Apple Maps takes you to the wrong one.
Fortunately, we were able to make the flight, but I felt like such a jerk when all these nice MidWestern TSA agents were politely asking "Are you two sisters? Do you live in San Francisco or are you going on vacation? What were you in Michigan for?" as I was trying to Usain Bolt to the gate.
The only flight I've ever missed was the first one I took after my son is born, because apparently having a baby makes you too stupid to realize that taking the train to the airport with an infant requires twice as much extra time as you think it will. After that, we just figured the cost of a car service into any trip.
On the other hand, I did show up for one flight an entire day early once. At an airport a two-hour drive away from where I was staying. That is too long to hang out in the bar with wine.
I was raised on the B.S. Xmas LP thanks to a Babs-loving father, and as a kid I thought she was angry in that song. It's almost punk: "Ja-ja-ja-ja-ja-ja-Jing-Jang-Gle!" That sleigh is powered by one horse and extreme hostility.