Vacation was very nice, thank you, and it’s been a rather hectic week since I got back.
For the record, Delta Airlines sucks ass. For one, their planes are old and rickety. On one flight, the in-cabin movie projector didn’t work. On another, there was not water in the bathroom or galley. The overheard reading lights were dim and flickery, and the over-wing emergency exit door didn’t really seem to fit right. Second, the food on a four-hour flight consisted of crackers, fake cheese spread, a microscopic box of raisins, and two Oreos, packaged in a generic plastic wrapper with “ENJOY!” on the outside in big blue letters. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to find in some 1970′s dystopian visison of The Future. Finally, the flight attendants were rude, and completely ignored anyone who pressed the Call button. Perhaps all this suckage is due to the fact that Delta is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, but still—I’d expect better from a non-budget airline.
I finished Buddenbrooks and the Hendrik Hertzberg collection. Both were good. I had started Buddenbrooks once a few years ago, but didn’t get very far; turns out it was the translation that was to blame. This one is the John E. Woods version published by Vintage, which I would highly recommend. At some point, I’ll have to check out his version of The Magic Mountain as well. The Hertzberg collection was also quite a good, although the last section of the book gets a little tedious. It’s a whole series of columns about the merits of proportional representation, which, while it seems like a good idea, does not make for scintillating reading. The rest of the book, however, is great—if you’re looking for entertaining, balanced, and well-written a center-left view of politics over the last thirty years, it’s worth checking out.