Nah, I'm an occasional cyclist in the city, and most of them are terrible. I mean, I'll go through an intersection without stopping when I can see both ways it's clear, but bikers in Philly will cross against the light at 4 vs. 4-lane intersections like Broad and Spring Garden.

Also, this:

I once spent two weeks riding around Ecuador in a guady, rattling Hino tourist bus, but I was in college, had a girl to put my arm around and beer was available in gas station vending machines, so there wasn't much to complain about. The frat boys on the trip with us insisted on playing Phish on an endless loop on the…

The problem with Philly is that street parking is jussst easy enough that it doesn't make owning a car impractical or cost prohibitive for most people. That means there are thousands of row home and apartment dwellers who have cars they might use on the weekends, if at all. I was one of those people. I've lived both…

Sure, but it's still a spot in the street where no one else can ever park, even when both of your vehicles are not there. In places like No Libs and Fishtown, it generates no small amount of complaining, if not hostility, when people build new houses with garages and driveways that take formerly communal parking spots…

I was talking about the truck jumping video, but if you're talking about the U-Haul joint on Washington in Philly, yeah, that place is the 11th circle of hell.

Aha, you're one of those garage-having Philly people. A lot of folks here feel that garages in row homes screw with the natural order of things. When you have a block of new or rebuilt row homes (you're somewhere near Passyunk between Christian and Washington, right), you're essentially taking up a parking spot even…

Hope they got the damage waiver.

It's safer if you have an engine failure in the pattern and can't make a safe emergency landing. It's safer if you get lost in IMC and run out of gas. It's safer if you get into a spin, and can't recover using standard procedures. It's safer when all the redundancies and safety procedures that pilots ordinarily use…

I think the term you're looking for is "aperture."

Gewurztraminer!

Now that's just sinister.

That's very sad. I hope that people won't get the idea that these unusual aircraft are unsafe. I flew in (on?) one about a decade ago for a story I wrote about the centenary of the Wright brothers' first flight. My impression was that it's the closest thing you can get to the very early days of flight in an aircraft…

Spring of 1997 I decide it's time to buy a car to get me back and forth to college, and my dad offers to match the what I have in the bank, so we go out looking for a simple, reliable used car. After hitting the used lots at a few dealerships, with the NADA guide in a back pocket, we find a four or five year old Geo…

Somewhere, and I'm upset to realize I don't know where right now, I have the full set of these in English. My grandpa, who worked in the motor trade in the UK and was an enthusiastic 2CV owner, brought them over to the states when he visited me as a kid. I thought I had them with my actual Tintin books, but they're…

Recorded with a potato.

Why limit ourselves to WWII aircraft?

The other version of that is the British Airways captain who landed in Frankfurt and was told by the controller to taxi to such and such a gate. The captain asked for directions from the runway to the gate, and the controller asked, "BA 123, have you never been to Frankfurt before?"

And it's cheap compared to other commuter rail. I pay $4.75 for a one-way fare to or from the equivalent of the "C" zone on the Philly area rail system, SEPTA.

Hmmm. I also remember using the rear stairs on a DC9-?? On static display at an airshow, I don't remember it being all that small. The handful of times I've actually flown in DC9s or MD80s, I don't think I really scoped out the tail exit.