Yes, you definitely don’t want to be out in the open sun between about 10 AM and 4 PM in the tropics.
Unless you are a mad dog or an Englishman
Seattle?
A bird and a bagpipe?
That particular bagpipe always looks like a bird to me. And yes, rather like Colibri’s.
Yes.
I dare say most of the contributors to this thread are good at geography and/or like to study it. Question: How many of you have globes?
I’ve been thinking lately that with the rise of online map tools, while we now have so much useful geographic information at our fingertips, fewer people have / use / look at globes. But spending a few minutes every week just looking at where countries are and their relationship to each other would fix a lot of common misconceptions.
No office is complete without a globe
Would this sort of thing even be possible anymore? Nowadays, they have to scan your boarding pass before letting you on the plane. And if you’re travelling internationally, they’ll check your passport as well.
Up until today I thought it was a bird and a mosquito.
I used to have a globe in my bedroom when I was a kid. I’d love to have a nice, attractive globe now, not the cheap schoolkid kind. Preferably one that I could store stuff in, like D&D dice or earbuds.
These posts from 2017 seem to indicate it can still happen, although very rare. It would seem to be due to human error when a gate agent sees an alert but thinks it is for some other reason than wrong destination, and does a manual override. Also, the scanner may be out of order. A passport check just verifies that the name on the ticket and the passport are the same.
Probably not possible anymore. But imagine the confusion, if you were in LA at the International terminal, hearing the announcement for a flight to “[Oa]kland” and thinking that flight were merely going to the Bay Area…so why would it be leaving the Intl. terminal?
Here’s one I did not figure out until surprisingly late, having lived in Seattle nearly 20 years. Seattle is really, very far north. In fact it is further north than any point in the continental US east of the Mississippi.
Related to the above: Seattle is the closest major US city (not counting Anchorage) to Asia. From here you get the shortest flights to Japan etc. Also, on maps centered on North Korea showing the range of their various nuclear missiles, Seattle is in range of a lot of their older stuff. It’s only the newer nukes that are (finally) able to reach Chicago, LA and the east coast cities.
Untrue, International Falls, MN is further north, as is Angle Inlet, and Grand Marais, MN. All of which are east of the source of the Mississippi river. And Grand Portage, MN is further north in addition to being east of the entire Mississippi river.
I love nitpicks . . .
It’s been a while (about 11 months) but at LAX, there are international flights out of the United terminal (terminal 7), though I’m relatively sure they don’t fly direct to either Oakland or Auckland…
There’s another off-and-on discussion of @Northern_Piper’s interesting but confusing avatar started by me here:
I think his green pipes have probably set the record for most-discussed avatar on the 'Dope.
The link in Colibri’s Jan. 30 post doesn’t work for me, but if it’s about the incident I think it is, here’s what happened:
As some background, Air New Zealand operated a flight that went London-Los Angeles-Auckland. I think they still do, actually. Passengers can book a ticket for just the LHR-LAX leg, as Air New Zealand has fifth freedom rights on the route.
The person who mistakenly went to Auckland had booked a flight from London to Oakland, flying the first leg on the Air New Zealand flight to LAX, then connecting onward on a domestic flight to Oakland. Upon landing in LAX, he misheard announcement saying passengers continuing to Auckland should wait in a holding area. Mistakenly believing this meant him, he waited with the Auckland passengers. When it came time for the Auckland passengers to re-board, as I recall he had either misplaced or mangled his boarding pass, and the gate agent let him board without checking closely enough. And since he had just come from the UK, he had his passport with him.
Seattle is farther north than Canada. Everybody in Canada lives in the Toronto/Montreal corridor. There are like 17 people that wander the trackless wild Canadian muskeg north of 49 (Northern Piper and 16 others). Sometimes it seems like more than that, but they have to move really fast to stay warm, so you keep seeing the same people (and the bears that you often mistake for people).
Here’s how it happened back then:
For many years Air New Zealand had a flight that went from London to Auckland, with a stop in Los Angeles. A couple had tickets on Air New Zealand from London to Oakland. They were supposed to get off in LA and switch to a small flight up to Oakland.
Upon landing in LA, they announced that people headed for Auckland should remain on the plane. The couple misheard that as Oakland, so they mistakenly stayed aboard.
You see how neither the boarding pass scan nor the passport check blocked them: They had been checked in London, and in LA they were already on the plane!
Edited: Whoops, ninja’d!