I’ve done this once or twice when flying with large non-discount airlines and it all worked out fine, but it’s bad advice if you’re flying a discount airline in Europe or Asia. Those guys live for fees, and gate-checking a bag is typically more expensive than checking it the normal way. And if your bag is a millimeter…

Where the hell were you six hours ago?! I’m in Europe and I’m old, so it’s already bedtime!

That said, all airlines should have something in their booking system that checks your expiration date against the visa rules for any country you are travelling to and then provide a warning to indicate you need a new passport. It really wouldn’t be that hard to implement.

Yeah, but you’d only check that website if you think there’s a rule you don’t know, like if you knew there was a pre-expiration but didn’t know how long.

Two summers ago I traveled all over Europe on one-way plane tickets. Never had a problem. Sometimes I had a ticket book on another airline to another country book already, but not always.

It’s not our government’s policy.

Well for one thing, if you don’t know that this is an issue, you don’t know there are requirements you should be reading.

People primarily use passports for travel, so printing an expiration date that isn’t reflective of when the passport can actually be used to travel is not only useless, it’s misleading.

I’m literally just asking them to print a nonbinding date in the passport, how would that matter to the international people.

That’s a ... bizarre complaint. I have a passport with extra pages because I travel a lot for work. My wife got her passport renewed last year without extra pages. The two passports look and feel so identical that I actually asked her if she got extra pages when we were traveling together a couple of weeks ago. It…

Clearly you don’t understand how racism works.

Lemons also get dirty when the bartender touches them with bare hands

Actually, subway poles are pretty clean, bacterially speaking. Yes, there is a wide variety of bacteria on them, but probably not so different from what is on, say, your computer keyboard (especially if you’ve been shaking hands with lots of people). And shiny metal surfaces are not very hospitable environments for…

One other thing you should mention, at least for European and Asian discount airlines, is that that they almost always will check the size and weight of your carry-on, and if it isn’t up to snuff they will make you gate-check it — and charge you a hefty baggage fee to boot (typically much higher than if you pay for a…

Isn’t it? Why aren’t you in jail? And more importantly, why isn’t the guy who brewed the pumpkin spice beer in jail?

Wow ... maybe I’m being snobby, but I see so many things here to dislike! First of all, the shaker is insulated — how do you know when your drink is cold enough (i.e., when to stop shaking)? And who needs an insulated cocktail shaker anyway? How long are you leaving your drink it?!

Wow ... maybe I’m being snobby, but I see so many things here to dislike! First of all, the shaker is insulated —…

I’ve lived in France for five years and never heard of the nose-blowing thing (and I’ve observed people of all social classes doing it in public).

Like at least one other here, I call mine a bag, but then I call my wife’s purses bags as well, so I think I’m in the clear on gendered language.

I had to laugh at your opening, I visit San Jose frequently and my first question when I get there is generally, “When can I leave?”

One of the big things that finally pushed my wife to Linux was that she knew Windows updates were important, but the Windows 7 update software ate all of her memory for awhile after she turned the computer on, then the actual updates would grind away in the background and keep reminding her to reboot after they were…