---It's such a great time for leisure travel, if you're flexible. Check out FareCompare.com, Kayak, and all the others. Amazing fares. ... if you're flexible. And hotels, check out the four and five-star bargains. Utterly amazing.
---In general (and here with regard to good hotels, corporate meetings, and even business airplanes that have a sensible purpose) Everybody's mad and got their pitchforks out, but let's remember what happened After the Bastille got stormed. The Terror and Napoleon and all of that. Not to mention the Congress of Vienna and WWI and Hitler, all connected dots ...
--Does anybody bookmark that simpleton Drudge anymore? I sure don't.
---"They Call Him `Mister Lucky-san'": Off the ya-can't-make-this-up beat: In Japan, 93-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was on a business trip to Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on that city, killing hundreds of thousands, on Aug . 6, 1945, managed to get home in two days, though with serious burns. Home was, yup, Nagasaki, where he was when the U.S. dropped the second atomic bomb on Aug. 9. The Japanese government last week finally certified him as a survivor of both bombings, though his compensation, and coverage for funeral costs, will not increase. Mr. Yamaguchi is 93 and, to me, a symbol of the indomitable human spirit to survive, and may he do so for many more years.
[UPDATE: That last item was phrased inappropriately, in the glib "They Call Him Mr. Lucky-San" lead-in. Rather than just rewrite it and make it disappear, which I consider weaselly on a blog except to fix typos and obvious dumb mistakes, I should say that Mr. Yamaguchi was not all that lucky at all, my smart-assedness aside. Profoundly injured, and struggling for the rest of his long life with the effects of radiation poisoning and burns, he said recently of his recognition as a survivor of both horrific bombings: "My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation of the horrible history of of the atomic bombings even after I die."
As someone who blithely survives physically unscathed today despite an incredible mid-air collision, I should know not to be glib about luck, fate and the consequences.
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By JOE SHARKEY
Bio
- Joesharkey.com
- Joe Sharkey's work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years until 2015 he was a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He is now a weekly travel and entertainment columnist with the global website Travel.Buzz, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, He has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel, one of which is in development as a movie. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer. On Sept. 29, 2006, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 over the Amazon. All 154 on the 737 died. His report on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London magazine. He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson with horses and parrots. He is working on a new novel about an international travel writer who hates to travel. "JoeSharkey.com" is Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Joe Sharkey.
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