Here is a screenshot from the form you fill to join the El Al Frequent Flier club. The form has the usual fields (take my word for it, you to whom Hebrew is Greek), but the one that drew my attention is the Title field preceding the first name. This uses a drop-down box, which presents a very comprehensive set of options: there’s Mr and Mrs, There’s Dr, there’s Prof and Rabbi (hey, this is El Al), and there’s even Adv and Judge. But the one highlighted in the screenshot is – get this – Lord.
Which is really amusing… for one, El Al is Israel’s airline and we have no Lords in our system here. Nor do we have a flood of British nobility flying in and out all the time; I’m sure some Lords may fly El Al on occasion, but hardly enough of them to justify such consideration. In any case, if we have Lord, why not Earl, Baron, Marquess, Viscount, or – more useful – a plain generic Sir? And why stop at British noblemen – surely a traveler might be a Graf, or an Alderman, or a Fellow of the Royal Society?
And, while they’re at it, what about Lady?
I was in a building where someone decided to give the signage a modern look, and I saw this sign outside a restroom. The people have this angular look, with slanted heads – why not? Anything for effect…
But it does occur to me that the guy on the wheelchair with the nonagonal wheel (yep… look it up!) will have a rather bumpy ride. There’s a reason why the inventor of the wheel chose to make it round!
I never dreamed I’d be blogging a post with the word Eyjafjallajökull in its title…
Anyway, this volcano is belching again, and airports are closing again – and one can’t help but wonder at the shoddy maintenance practices of these Icelanders. I mean, it’s not like they don’t know a volcano needs to be properly maintained; it’s well documented in the literature:
“He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes; and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “One never knows!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.”
- The little prince, ch. 9.
From what we hear Iceland uses its geothermal energy extensively, whether or not they use it for heating breakfast… you’d think they could do the preventive maintenance part too!
When will they ever learn?…
I was busy putting the basement in order and found a box of much used Lego pieces going back to the kids’ childhood, and in it I found – as is – what you see in the photo.
Of course there are Lego kits today for anything from Rocket ships to Medieval castles, but Zaphod Beeblebrox?!…
We have a McDonald’s in downtown Jerusalem (of course!), but within spitting distance of it there is another kind of fast food restaurant, one that is dear to the hearts of the city’s old time residents. It is the Ta’ami restaurant.
Ta’ami is a tiny restaurant: one room, opening right onto the sidewalk in Shamai street, with a few tables inside. A working man’s eatery, it has no “wait to be seated” rule; in fact, you walk right in and sit on any free chair – not table: unrelated customers are expected to share the same table. No fuss, no niceties, but wonderful food, starting with Hummus that many say is the best in the land (and many others violently disagree; Hummus connoisseurship tends to run to high emotions).
So why is this a fast food joint? Well, here’s how this works: you go in, spy an empty chair, and as soon as your behind hits it, the waiter is at your side, rattling a list of dishes (though most regulars know what they want). You order, and in a minute or so your food is placed before you. No time wasted. But it goes beyond that, thanks to the legendary founder of Ta’ami, the late Mr. Albert Majar, whose photo adorns the wall. Albert came from Bulgaria around 1950, and started his family-run restaurant soon thereafter. His techniques of customer management were famous and cherished in our town. He’d go around the tiny hall and urge the clients to eat faster, to make room for more people to eat. His favorite phrase, “Swallow, don’t chew!”, became so famous that it is now the restaurant’s slogan. He also used to compact tables by switching people from table to table in mid-lunch, thereby freeing contiguous seats for people who came in groups. And so business was brisk, profits presumably grew, and a legend was born.
Not exacly the way they do it at McDonald’s… but what Hummus!
Was looking up RosettaStone, that Rolls Royce of computer-based language teaching tools. They have a nice web site with demo videos and all – very handy. And they had a video there promoting their system, and as it zipped past something seemed wrong. I rewinded a bit and there it was: my native Hebrew language, in a pattern that made no sense at all. It took a second to resolve: they had the hebrew word for Succeed – written backwards, left to right.
Of course it’s not uncommon to see a Windows program mess up the text direction of Hebrew (and, I suppose, other RTL languages) – after all, Redmond is not in Israel – but you’d expect a Languages school to catch this blooper…
We were in a large drugstore in Germany, when I noticed that all the shopping carts had a large magnifier lens attached to them, like this:
The magnifiers were fitted in a sturdy and elegant holder, designed to allow the carts to be stacked in a row as usual.
This was a new one for me… and it took me a moment to figure out the reason: these guys wanted their clients – even the elderly with their imperfect vision – to be able to read the fine print on the medicine packages.
I admit I was impressed that they care!
I was visiting the Intrepid museum in NYC (an aircraft museum housed in a retired aircraft carrier – a real treat!) and they had, as a bonus, a fifites-era submarine, the USS Growler, moored alongside the carrier. So I had to see that too (of course).
Submarines are always amazing from a design standpoint, given the intense constraints they have to accommodate. There were many complex pieces of machinery below deck, but one of them struck me with its simplciity. It was a “Ship clinometer, Type II – Heel”, and I snapped its photo for you.
“Heel” is the inclination of a ship sideways, and this device tells the submariners how far their vessel is heeling away from the vertical. No need to explain how it works, of course… it’s a cousin of the humble (and equally useful) spirit level we have in our toolboxes. I imagine that today more sophisticated instruments exist, bristling with electronics and digital displays; but actually, this pair of curved glass tubes must’ve done just as good a job – the Growler carried nuclear missiles, and I’m sure its designers preferred its captain to know which way was up…
We saw that Newark Liberty International airport has some serious problems keeping its electronic signs straight… here, and here. Well, here’s a third and (for now) last installment.
This is the baggage claim area at the Continental domestic terminal where I landed coming in from San Francisco.
See the nice colorful sign identifying this baggage carousel, number 8, as the one where luggage from flight CO449 is about to appear.
See the nice empty belt on carousel 8.
See the nice people thronging carousel 7 further back.
They’re retrieving their luggage, newly arrived from flight CO 449 from San Francisco.
How nice…
We saw how the electronic boards at Newark Liberty airport made the ridiculous omission of adjusting for the Daylight Savings move. Evidently this is not an exception: something is very wrong with that airport’s electronic signage.
These guys have an “Airtrain”, an internal elevated light rail system for moving between terminals. The train has two parallel tracks, and there are electronic signs at the stations to indicate which is which. Thus, the sign in the photo indicates that the train on the left goes to terminals A,B, and Parking areas 1 through 3; the other train goes to P4 and to the train link to NYC.
Except that they also had a backup system. They placed a uniformed woman with a loud voice that announced repeatedly: if you want to go to terminals A, B, and P1-P3 you must take the train on the right. The signs, so convenient and visible, were displaying the wrong information.
You’d think the lady, who was no doubt equipped with a cellular phone, could set the error straight in a jiffy by calling some control room; but that didn’t occur to anyone. And after all, who are you gonna trust: a computerized board, or a well-meaning person of your own species?
