(Road Warrior Stocking Stuffer? Caffeinated sugar-free mints. See last item.)
–Who’s counting? I know I sound like a broken record on this, but reporters really ought to be paying more attention to mounting flight cancellations. All the media ducks are quacking over Kennedy because they’re being told to by the authorities, but it’s O’Hare where the mess has been piling up for the last month every time bad weather smacks the Midwest. Yesterday, there were 398 cancelled departures and arrivals at O’Hare. Of the 1,904 flights that did take off or land there, 1,487 were delayed — 1,006 of them by 45 minutes or more. Stats as usual from Flightstats.com. [Update: As of 8 p.m. Eastern time tonight, just about half of the 890 flights scheduled for Boston departures and arrivals had been cancelled.)
–Is there no dumb-ass local police stunt that small-town papers won’t treat credulously? As security expert Bruce Schneier points out , this is a very good way to alert thieves that you have something possibly worth stealing in the car.
–What in the world accounts for all of the gushing reviews of the movie “Waitress.” Saw it last night on DVD, and my report can be paraphrased from the reaction of Dorothy Parker, dismayed at the infantile cuteness in a Winnie-the-Pooh book she was reviewing: I fwowed up. O.K., the pies in the diner were pretty. But Jayzus, was no reviewer even remotely troubled by the sweetly-presented in-office affair between the sorowful pregnant waitress and her gynecologist? In most jurisdictions, the district attorney and the medical board both would have had a term for this bum: sexual predator. (I know the writer-director, Adrienne Shelly, was tragically murdered just before the movie was released. Doesn’t make the movie any more tolerable, though.)
