Finally! Terri’s fashion shoot (mentioned earlier) has appeared in the Sunday Globe magazine!

While we were having dinner at the Bertucci’s across the parking lot, I remembered something I meant to write about our adventures in the airport. I was calling hotels from the courtesy phone in the airport. I don’t think I’ve ever used one of those before, so I was actually a little psyched. It made me feel like a grown-up. I guess I should start gauging my feeling like a grown up on how infrequently I note something that I’ve never done before. Nonetheless, the moment was noted.

I called the Comfort Inn first, and then checked it against the Hampton Inn. I asked the guy at the Hampton Inn how much a room was. He said “where are you?” If you’re also a grown-up, you also may have come to learn this: when you ask someone how much something is, and the answer is another question, you should probably not end transaction with a ‘yes’.

Still, I answered “at the airport”.

“Are you a distressed passenger?”

Oh, my goodness. I am a distressed passenger! “You know, I hadn’t called myself that until now, but yes, I am a distressed passenger.”

He offered me the same price as the Comfort Inn, so we went with them, since we had fond memories of putting people up at the Comfort Inn in Danvers for our wedding.

It actually worked out reasonably well: they’re literally next door to the airport, and they have a special park and ride deal, where we pay a little extra to leave our car in their lot and use the shuttle. Basically, if you subtract what we would have had to pay at the airport parking garage, we are only paying $30 for the hotel.

I have been Googling every phrase I can think of, but I still can’t find anyone who’s put a tofurkey in a deep frier and lived to blog about it. We’re not planning this. I was just curious. Honest.

Barf. We’re batting 0 for our last 2 attempts at getting on a plane. We left Boston at 2:30pm for a 6pm flight, and didn’t pull into the Providence airport until 5:40. Needless to say, we missed the flight. It usually takes an hour and a half, and we did allow ourselves some extra time for heavy traffic.

Sooooo, it being the heaviest travel day of the year, the next flight was basically not until 6:05am. After 3 hours in the car (part of which was spent on the phone to US Airways to see if they had any advice about what we’d do if we missed our flight) and a frantic 20 minutes trying to get onto a plane we basically knew we couldn’t get on, it was almost a relief to just be able to relax for 12 hours.

So here we are, at the Comfort Inn, watching BBC America. It’s some show with Judi Dench. We had basically no intention of driving back to Boston, and then driving back at 3am.

The first pleasant surprise of the misadventure was that we ran into some friends in the Providence airport, who we’ve been meaning to track down and invite to our holiday party, en route to their Thanksgiving destination. The second was that we have free wireless in the hotel courtesy of my company, which has recently joined this iPass thing which is some sort of multiple-sign-on to a variety of wireless networks. So I get to blog about not making the flight. Yee ha!

A quick overview. It’s nice to get the point of view from someone who has been there. There’s basic stuff that the news reports seem to never get across.

Leondard Nimoy directed Three Men and a Baby. Really! Who knew?

I just stumbled on a useful idea of Freud’s called “the narcissism of minor differences”. File under “I never knew there was a word for that”. It seems like such a prevalent part of human experience & behavior that it seems obvious that there should be. Here’s a succinct definition which I lifted from here:

Why are Republicans so hateful toward Bill Clinton when he is more like them than virtually any other Democrat? He has pushed through many of their favorite policies, such as cutting welfare, promoting the North American Free Trade Agreement and proposing that portions of Social Security reserves be privatized. You would think Republicans would regard him among their favorite Democratic presidents. Instead, the opposite is true. They seem determined to kill him politically through character assassination fueled by a hatred that is hard to understand.

Sigmund Freud had a brilliant explanation for this type of animosity: the narcissism of minor differences. The psychoanalyst contended that human beings express their most virulent hatred toward those who are just slightly different from themselves. This is because slight differences pose a greater psychological threat to ones core sense of self (ergo: narcissism) than those who are extremely different from ourselves. Freud used this concept as an explanation for the most heinous forms of aggression.

I originally saw it in this Globe article about transatlantic relations.

You knew it would come to this, and it’s finally here: RateMyProfessor.com. William Placher: great guy, great professor. Sexy?

There’s a thoughtful Malcolm Gladwell bit on plagarism in this week’s New Yorker that takes a fresh middle ground in recent debates on intellectual property. “And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going. The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life.”

From Slate: “Consultant Ray Soifer (Harvard MBA, 1965) has been tallying the career paths of fellow HBS alumni for several years, and what he has discovered confirms what every Yalie has always suspected: Harvard is bad for America… Soifer has found that the initial career choices of HBS grads amount to a ‘rather esoteric but nonetheless generally accurate long-term indicator of the US equity market,’ he notes in his most recent report. Make that a contra-indicator. The more Harvard grads on Wall Street, the worse the market does.”

The Apple Store singles scene: “And if you talk to a guy in the Apple Store, you already know he’s going to be modern and up-to-date and sober. It’s healthier than picking up someone in a bar.”

Speaking of every shade of wrong… I Am Curious (Black) is a Lois Lane comic from the early 70’s in which our heroine becomes black to get a scoop. Courtesy of the excellent Accordion Guy. (In case you’re not up on your Swedish erotica, the title is a reference to I Am Curious (Yellow)).

This Amazon Listmania List: “So you’re going to jail” is very shade of wrong. It’s also #1 in their Top 100.

One of the things I like about iTunes is the ability to create “smart playlists”, which are basically just filters on any piece of metadata that iTunes keeps for a song, but they show up in your playlist. Apple gives you “60’s Music” and “My Top Rated” and a few others as starters. I created one for “recently added” so that I can easily listen to things that I’ve just put into my library within the past few days.

My smart playlist of the day is the “Track 7″ playlist, which just plays songs which are the 7th track on their original album. Back in the days of the Doug, Marco, and Ezra morning radio show, we used to do that when we were being too lazy (or half-awake) to decide what to play on the show. It was our “Lucky 7″ feature: we’d play 7 track 7s. I’m sure at least one of the Crawfordsville High kids that listened to us thought it was clever. Then again, maybe not.

Harvard study: “‘In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it’s not there.’… Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable. Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme - with tightly controlled autocratic governments - also experienced low levels of terrorism. “