Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Noted in the papers (miscellany)

Just got to the Sunday papers last night and over lunch today and noted the following:

--This interesting article on the front-page of Sunday's Post-Gazette about how airlines are experimenting with boarding procedures. This has long been one of the things about which I say while participating, "there must be a better way."

--Also on the Post-Gazette front-page, what they call a "dog bites man" story: turns out that lots of over-priced and badly maintained apartments are being rented by college students in the neighborhood adjoining Pitt and CMU. I'm shocked, shocked!

--Interestingly, the headlines of the previous two articles in the print version are much better than the headlines in the on-line version:
Which do you like better:
"Airlines fuss over best way to seat travelers" or There's more than one way to fill a plane"?
"An Old problem getting no better" or "Oakland living can be under par"?
Methinks someone thought the "fuss over" in the first story implied that the airline folk were improvising rather than using scientific modeling. Uh-huh. And perhaps someone noticed that the print headline for the apartment story kind of admitted that this wasn't exactly breaking news.

--Three cheers for Ed Rendell who not only came to the Pittsburgh Pride March, but also basically endorsed same-sex marriage: "Some day I hope that shirt says 'Just married in Pennsylvania,' " he said, to a roar of approval from the crowd. See the story in the Post-Gazette here.

--A question for the Sunday P-G editors: when the sitting governor of a swing state where the state legislature is considering a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage says that he hopes that gay marriage will someday be legal in his state, don't you think that should go on the front page of the paper? (You could have bumped the story of the college students with the broken walls to the front page of the local section.)

--Finally, this is really minor but I had no idea that the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York was not one of the original hotels built by the Astor brothers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like the airline story a lot! I've made two trips lately, both of them ENDLESSLY frustrating when it came to seating.

--the Cranky Professor