What ever happened to the friendly skies?

Published 11:29 pm Friday, January 23, 2009

Successful air travel, the writer Paul Theroux once observed, is defined by negatives. Your plane didn’t crash. Your seat mate didn’t fall asleep on your shoulder. Your baggage wasn’t lost.

Now we can add another definition: You didn’t throw a temper tantrum that’s deemed as terrorism under the Patriot Act.

The next time you feel like mouthing off to a rude flight attendant, consider the plight of Tamera Jo Freeman, who spent three months in prison and lost custody of her kids — all for shouting a few profanities and throwing a container of tomato juice on the floor.

Rail travel’s sounding a lot better, isn’t it?

It turns out that the music we heard from Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and the two other musicians who performed at the inauguration of President Barack Obama on Tuesday was actually pre-recorded. A spokesman for Perlman says the quartet played to tape because their instruments would jump out of tune in the cold weather.

The Buzz wonders if the cold made Perlman opt to play his old $150 campfire violin — the one on which he scrawled: “This Machine Lulls Fascists to Sleep.”