Pickle fork. If it has an actual useful purpose it involves smacking things with it, not the claimed purpose of removing tie rod ends. Use one of those little screw presses instead, it works 10 times better and doesn’t tear the boot.

I don’t actually care what you do as long as you’re not standing there blocking the aisle because the bins are full, when I’m trying to board.

Cycle Gear is great when I need something in a hurry, or when I need a tire mounted, or for things like helmets that I need to try on. You’re right, though, the stores always look like they’ve been arranged by the Random Stocking Fairy.

This reminds me that a lesson I learned while working for a small, struggling company was that “we’re having trouble with our supplier” almost always means “we have Net 30 terms and we haven’t paid them in six months.”

True, I only flew in there once. The customs checks delayed me enough that I don’t remember any bag delays. ;)

I mean, it happened to me once, in like 2008. That wasn’t enough to put me off checking bags forever, I guess.

I’m not asking you about the show itself. The show demonstrated what you’d expect — that if you starve people and force them to exercise until they collapse they’ll lose weight. What the studies afterward found was that it was nearly impossible to keep the weight off, because the result of all that was that people’s…

They’re pretty rare, but it’s a free country, so by all means keep trying to stuff a giant rollaboard into the overhead bin. Just don’t drop it on my head.

Have you seen the Biggest Loser follow-up study? It’s pretty sobering. Your body will downregulate your metabolism more for every pound you lose.

45. My knees are mostly OK. I didn’t sign up for high school football and thus avoided the kind of knee carnage that happened to most male members of my family.

So do the ramifications of an emergency evacuation in which you’re required to leave your carry-ons behind. I suppose you could stuff everything in a cargo vest you wear on your person, just to be safe...

I’m not saying it’s not inconvenient, I’m just saying I think people vastly overestimate how often it happens. Maybe because it was such a popular sitcom joke in the 90s.

What I’ve heard from actual fat people is “I try to buy a second seat, but the airline decides it’s a no-show and shoves a standby passenger into it. Then I’m the bad guy somehow.”

I find that’s pretty rare -- most seats just don’t recline that much anymore -- but hooking the bag handle with my foot usually works out well.

Just make sure the ground crew puts a tail stand in place if you’re gonna board from the rear. ;)

Oh man, once you get into the airlines and accessibility you’re opening a whole can of worms. They’re exempt from the ACA. Disability advocates have been asking for years for the airlines and FAA to get together and certify wheelchair restraints.

Yeah, for short trips I’ll often take a small carry on and then my regular suitcase, then gate-check the suitcase so I don’t have to mess with carrying it on the flight and through any layovers. It’s a great hack for avoiding having to pay baggage fees, since they *always* end up making the “the overhead bins are…

I feel like the myth of lost luggage greatly exceeds the reality, at least these days where there’s computer tracking. In 20 years of flying I’ve seen it *once* and it was because they swapped my bag tag with another person’s at the counter. (If I’d paid slightly more attention I’d have caught it.) We had the ‘lost’…

For most people being fat isn’t controllable either, other than with surgery. It turns out that evolution trained our bodies to relentlessly conserve body mass in any way possible. There was a study done on “Biggest Loser” contestants that found that their metabolisms were permanently reduced by the starvation diets…

I call BS. I’m 6'0" and I routinely stow a decent-sized laptop bag under my seat. It’s easier to get to in flight that way.