Clueless F.A.A. Info (Cont'd)

Again, do not be fooled today by that useless F.A.A. "Airport Status and Delays"so-called real-time map at www. faa.gov

See that merry green dot over George Bush Houston Intercontinental Airport, signifying no delays, and all is well? Well, there definitely have been no delays at IAH as of 1 p.m. EDT. Yes indeedy -- exactly two planes took off so far today, and by dang, both left on time. There were no arrivals.

On the other hand, not shown on the happy little F.A.A. map: There have been 847 canceled flights so far today at IAH, according to the very reliable Flightstats.com

Yesterday, when the F.A.A. site was also showing that "everything's-hunky-dory" green dot over IAH all day, there were 980 canceled flights at IAH.

By the way, on a totally unrelated note, I read today a feature story that mentioned "Coffee Tea or Me?," the racy 1967 runaway best seller about the exploits of two sexy stewardesses (and that's what they were called).

Actually, that book was a wonderful hoax. It was in fact written by Donald Bain, a New York ad man who met two stewardesses trying to peddle a book but realized that they only had a few little anecdotes, nowhere near the stuff necessary to make a book.

So Don and a publisher signed the stewardesses up to pose as the "authors" on publicity tours for the book, full title: "Coffee Tea or Me: The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses."

Don wrote the book strictly from his own imagination, and didn't fess up to the hoax till almost a quarter century later, when an anniversary edition appeared. He later went on to write the "Murder She Wrote" mystery series and many other books (80 in all), and he's a gentleman of the first order.

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