twitchy.com
Air travel (particularly within the U.S.) has been a traveler’s nightmare for decades. Unlike those photos from the ’50s where airports looked like visions of the future and everyone on the plane was dressed to the nines and flying in luxury, modern air travel, including the airports, often leaves much to be desired. In the words of the wonderful Douglas Adams:
‘It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression ‘as pretty as an airport.’ Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk … and the architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.’
Sigh … we miss Douglas Adams.
But even through the end of the 20th century, air travel was still tolerable and efficient. We’re pretty sure the real hell started with the inception of the TSA. Like most government-mandated alphabet organizations, the TSA has proven to be utterly useless and just an endless suck of taxpayer money. Post-TSA, everything has seemed to just start careening downhill…
READ ARTICLE HERE… (twitchy.com)
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