fil-ter

Faced with an annual loss for the first time in two decades, Ryanair, the European budget airline, confirmed on Tuesday that it plans to start charging passengers for the luxury of using the toilet on its jets.

… The Daily Mail reports that Ryanair plans to “scrap all of its airport check-in desks” later this year and charge passengers for the privilege of checking themselves in online.

… Dan Milmo of The Guardian notes that when Mr. O’Leary first proposed the toilet charges in February, his own press officer warned that he “makes a lot of this stuff up as he goes along.”

Most Americans are very polite, particularly outside of the big cities. However, outside of the big cities, everyone owns guns. Inside the big cities, almost everyone owns guns. Let’s be polite together!

(via reddit)

Kjartan, my guide in Iceland, basically liked to eat everything, with the exception of seal. “Seal is terrible,” he would say, “it is oily and when you eat it the oil runs down and drips off your chin.” I mentioned this to Salik, who couldn’t have disagreed more. “What? Seal is the very best meat you can eat! Perhaps only polar bear is better!” he said, adding, “and that oil is high in omega-3. It’s good for you!”

… On our last day, just when I thought strange eating was over, Salik surprised me with his favorite meat of all — braised polar bear. Now after the handwringing that I did about eating whale, you might think it was even harder to eat polar bear since they are endangered — far more than Minke whales, which are plentiful.

This all sounds delicious. Also check out: Iceland Part 1 and Part 2. (via kottke).

Check out his Icelandic dish:

That brings us to the ultimate Icelandic gastronomic specialty: rotten shark. It is rather problematic as a food source: the flesh has large concentrations of urea. [It] reeks of urine. If that wasn’t enough, it also contains a neurotoxin called trimethylamine. So you just can’t eat it. Unless, of course, you rot it first!

Some rather desperate Icelander discovered the following process:

Take the shark, cut it up, and then bury the pieces in the ground for 2 to 3 months (these days, they use large plastic bins to hold the shark). Then dig up the rotting shark meat and hang it up in an open-air hut, allow it to dry slightly, and continue the internal rotting for another 4 to 6 months. Kjartan took me to one of these huts. The stench was unbelievable, a combination of rancid urine and rotting fish.

To serve, the mahogany exterior is cut away and the white flesh is cut into little cubes and distributed to every grocery store in Iceland. Even the minimarts attached to gas stations carry it.

After the big build-up and the visit to the disgusting shark-hanging hut I had my doubts. … So I went to my shark tasting with a bit of trepidation, but in reality it is not half-bad. The texture is like very firm sashimi. I expected it to be slimy and falling apart but it isn’t. I would not call it delicious, but I did have second and, yes, even third helpings.

Some good information on why the American train system is so pathetic.

The American passenger rail—once a model around the globe—is now something of an oddball novelty, a political boondoggle to some, a colossal transit failure to others … In 1960, U.S. rail travelers logged 17.1 billion passenger miles (the movement of one passenger one mile), the standard measure of a system’s reach; by 2000, that number had fallen to 5.5 billion, just one percent of the total travel between U.S. cities that year. (Of course, over this same period, airlines’ passenger miles increased 16 times; even intercity buses’ service nearly doubled.) Most of this decrease was seen in the 1960s, as highways and air travel took precedent both in travel plans and in government subsidies. Since its ill-fated formation as a quasi-public, for-profit corporation in 1971, Amtrak has seen only meager growth and loses billions of dollars annually.

The reasons for Amtrak’s bad reputation are totally damning—its service is neither practical nor reliable. Impractical because most of the time, it’s cheaper and faster to drive or fly. Unreliable because more often than not, the trains are really, really late. There are stories of 12-hour delays on routes that would take six hours to drive; of breakdowns in the desert; of five-hour unexplained standstills in upstate New York. Then there’s the mother of all Amtrak horror stories: a California Zephyr that stopped dead on its tracks for two full days, victim of both an “act of God” (as corporate legalese wisely defines a landslide on the tracks) and gross staffing negligence.

… The company, too poor to own nearly any of the rails that it runs on, operates on borrowed infrastructure, using tracks owned by private freight companies who are legally bound to let Amtrak roll on their rails, but little else. Meaning that when a freight train needs to get by, Amtrak waits. Thus the delays, which begin to pile up.

I didn’t understand how messed up the structure of Amtrak really was. It seems like they have the worst of both worlds:

… [Amtrack] is entirely owned by the U.S. government, funded at the government’s discretion, and has its leadership appointed by the president and subject to Senate approval, it still has a mandate to achieve profitability and financial independence. In essence, it is a private company wholly owned and operated by government bureaucracy.