Monday, September 12, 2011

Back ...

...from Cape Cod.  I've been up since about 130am home time so I won't do much mindless yapping tonight.  Just a few loose ends.
  • Looking at some Cape Cod real estate ads from about 1950, I noticed an oddity: properties are presented in terms of cubic feet, not square feet.  So a 30x40 foot house with 8-foot ceilings would be advertised not as 1,200sf but as 9,600cf.  Is this an oddity peculiar to Cape Cod (a Cape Coddity?).   What did it accomplish, and why did we/they give it up?
  • New York and Washington surely bear the  greatest scars from 9/11.  But I don't suppose I thought to consider until this week which was third: Massachusetts.  Boston Logan Airport was the point of departure for two of the four  ill-fated aircraft on that black day.   Those two also held the most passengers:  AA Flight 11 (North Tower) (92)  and UA 175 (South Tower)  (65).  AA 77 (Pentagon) had only 58 on board; UA 93 (Shanksville, PA) had only 44 (all numbers from Wiki; each number includes the hijackers on board).
  • You know what's a clever-but-elegant piece of design?  This benches that they put out of airport security checkpoints, where you can put your clothes back on.  They're low enough to sit on, high enough to use as a table. They have a kind of rattan-like covering that would discourage one from sitting there just for leisure (oh, and no back).  They don't have nay distracting little doohickies that no one would use anyway.  They do their job, and don't call attention to themselves, so even a Republican could love them. For a vagrant moment, I even considered taking a picture of one, but decided I didn't want to be arrested for treason.

1 comment:

Taxmom said...

Morbid insight I heard today was that the plane that crashed in Shanksville was a 767...from an economic point of view carrying way too many empty seats to be viable, even then.