I was on vacation when the whole Kevin Smith – Southwest fiasco happened but I don’t think I am too late to weigh into the situation. I don’t really care how Kevin Smith flies, as far as I am concerned his 1,6 million followers can all pitch in a buck or two and buy him a cargo plane to transport his fat ass around the country. This is not an issue of obesity and what our culture, or doctors, or friends say what a person should look like. For the record I agree with Nuke that being fat is unsightly, uncomfortable, unhealthy and sometimes embarrassing and humiliating. And it makes women wear one-piece swimsuits. I am far from being normal weight myself and every donut moves me a little further away from being moderately overweight, but nevertheless, I wholeheartedly support the Southwest’s “Customer of Size Policy“. (Yes, I know Kevin Smith purchased two tickets, but the discussion moved way past his particular case).

The Policy says:

Why ask large Customers to purchase additional seating?
We could no longer ignore complaints from Customers who traveled without full access to the seat purchased due to encroachment by a large seatmate whose body extended into the neighboring seat. These Customers had uncomfortable (and sometimes painful) travel experiences, and it is our responsibility to seek resolution to prevent this problem.

To demonstrate this point I made a diagram recreating a flight I had few years ago on an unnamed airline. After boarding a plane and taking my seat I was crushed by a person who plopped himself in the seat next to mine.

As you can see in the drawing I (depicted in yellow, filled with healthy foods) fit in the chair with ease, not really much additional room left, but not overflowing the armrests (blue). My neighbor, as you can tell, did not fit in his chair with his ass-cheeks resting on armrests and not even touching the seat cushion. While the guy’s pain in the ass didn’t bother me, his encroachment in my personal space did.

On a plane and elsewhere I use the NFL definition of the goal line to define my personal space, it’s bounded by the “imaginary vertical plane …, which theoretically extends in a great circle around the world and infinitely into space“. The recreation of my flight shows that for my money I was given only about 75% of the personal space due to me, while my seatmate received about 125% of his space for the same pay. It’s obvious that I did not receive and equal  value, and while I would’ve considered being inconvenienced by let’s say a disabled vet or an elderly person, this guy was my age and didn’t look unhealthy. Shortly into the flight the stewardess offered him to move into an emergency exit row. While I breathed a sigh of relief (or just breathed for the first time in a while), I don’t know what would’ve happened if the passengers would’ve had to evacuate.

I sincerely hope the Southwest Airlines doesn’t cave in and stand by its policy. I also hope the other airlines will follow. There is no reason innocent people should be sat upon.

The other choice would be to increase the size of the airplane seat but that would cause ticket prices to go up and if the American people were willing to pay more, the would’ve bought first class or double seat in the first place.

The solution to the inconsistent application of policy already exsists:

I am sure the rest of the flying public would enjoy watching someone trying to fit into the test seat.

Next time Kevin Smith shows up at the Southwest counter I hope they taser his fat ass. Just to get even.

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Preface:

Germany wasn’t on my bucket list. I don’t even have a list. The only reason I use it to name my travel posts is because I like the way they look on my travel page, all nicely lined up.

The original plan was to stop at Bruges on the way from Amsterdam to Paris, but the prospect of spending a day with my childhood friend, riding on an autobahn, while still adding another country to the itinerary outweighed my desire to see the exact spot where the body of a killer plopped down from the tower in that one movie. A chance to see the famous Cologne Cathedral in person and me having only a vague idea of how to make the trip from Amsterdam to Bruges and still make it to Paris the same night tipped the scale and the next morning we were on the way to Düsseldorf.

Face:

I was underwhelmed by the autobahn. Besides not having a speed limit in some places it wasn’t that much different from the stretch of I-70 between Kansas City and St.Louis. My friend drove fairly fast on some stretches, but just like here we were frequently slowed down by construction and slow drivers in the passing lane. My eye was missing my favorite highway entertainment – the billboards. It took about 2.5 hours to arrive in Düsseldorf.

Düsseldorf turned out to be a lively town with an interesting but fairly generic historic center and a large and expensive shopping district. That one restaurant downtown with a German name serves the best liver I’ve ever had. Make sure to check it out while you there.

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I wrote previously the propaganda surrounding the Soviet people at all the usual and unusual places. People nostalgically musing about the “olden days” when there was practically no outdoor advertisement in the USSR, forget about all the hammers and sickles, red banners, communist party slogans and whatever else was supposed to inspire us to keep building, fulfilling, laboring and rejoicing.
A recently posted set of photos taken by a Western tourist in the 1984 USSR has some great examples of the ubiquitous outdoor propaganda in Moscow and Leningrad. I added some translations to the photos that needed explanation and I recommend you take a minute to flip through the rest of the set in the slide-show at the end of this post.

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Recently I was watching one of the most popular Soviet comedies of all time Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future for the millionth time, recalling how almost every phrase in that movie was enshrined in the pop culture. In the movie a home-grown scientist sends a regular Soviet bureaucrat to the past where he just happens to look like Ivan The Terrible, who in turn travels back to the 1973 Moscow. In one of the scenes the fake Tsar is having a feast and the dishes are being announced as they arrive: “Black Caviar” (huge bowl), “Red Caviar” (huge bowl), “And from overseas, Eggplant Caviar” (a small drop of supposed delicacy).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPfTAX590Wg

This is a tongue-in-check reference to the Soviet food supply system where the real caviar was hard to find and was resold on the black market while so called “eggplant caviar” and “zucchini caviar” where sometimes the only items on the mostly empty shelves and were frowned upon by the Soviet people. That’s why I don’t recommend most Russian comedies to an unprepared American viewers they need to be thoroughly explained.

Needless to say that I didn’t miss these not-so-good vegetable concoctions, but when I read this recipe it sounded good enough to try.

For this recipe you will need about 3-4 lbs of zucchini, 3 medium onions, 2 large red peppers, 6-8 tomatoes, 4 oz of tomato paste, 1 pepperoncino (this lady lives in Italy, I used some pepper I grabbed in the Mexican aisle), salt,  pepper and olive oil.

Cut zucchini into small cubes, put in a separate dish and sprinkle with salt. Cube peppers and onions. Heat up some olive oil in a skillet, add chopped pepperoncino (or whatever you are using) and red peppers and saute on both sides. Remove to another dish, I used my enameled cast iron pot. Add more oil to the skillet and saute the onions until translucent; when done, move them to the pot. Squeeze the liquid from zucchini and saute in the skillet, add to the pot. Cube the tomatoes (I removed the seeds), saute them in the olive oil adding the tomato paste. Combine with the rest of the vegetables. Add salt and pepper to taste and cook on a medium heat for about 20 minutes stirring occasionally.


It’s probably a good thing that this zucchini caviar doesn’t taste like the stuff I remember from my childhood. Sometimes the memory is good enough to satisfy the food nostalgia without having to subject the taste buds to the horrible taste of the past.

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I do…

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