Sunday Supplement #2

~ Say, "Please": Reading this story will remind you of why your mother always encouraged you as a child to say, "Please".

A Canadian traveller insisting on courtesy from a member of the Customs and Border Protection guards was pepper sprayed and held in custody for three hours.

His only sin — asking the border guard to say “please” when he was asked to turn his car off during a search.

“I refused to turn off the car until he said please. He didn’t. And he has the gun, I guess, so he sprayed me,” said Desiderio Fortunato, who frequently crosses the border to visit his second home in the state of Washington. “Is that illegal in the United States, asking an officer to be polite?”

Mr. Fortunato said after he was sprayed he was forcefully taken into custody by several officers. He was held for three hours before he was released without being allowed entry into the United States. Mr. Fortunato says he was dismissed with a warning to be more cooperative in the future. Read more here...

Road Trip USA. Here's something a bit different. Two guys drive across America (from San Francisco to Washington, DC) with a camera mounted inside their car set to take photographs every 10 seconds. The resulting time-lapse video takes you speeding across California, Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Tennessee and into Washington, D.C., to the music of Michael Nyman's "An Eye for Optical Theory" (personally I would have preferred 'Born To Be Wild' by Steppenwolf, but hey, it's their road trip).

I would have also liked a few titles so viewers could get some idea of where exactly we are on the route, but it makes interesting viewing just the same. The video has been edited down from the original nine minutes running time to 4:36.

You can see a map of the exact route here...

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, enjoy the rest of the weekend.

The Week That Was #12

Welcome to my weekly collection of the Odd, the Useful, and the often Bizarre.

The Odd: ‘Yorkshire Airlines’. What with all the fuss about the way airlines are treating their passengers lately, it is good to see ‘Yorkshire Airlines’ doing the right thing by their clients, and working hard to keep them happy.

The Useful: Museum Day, Sept. 26, 2009. Did you know that in America, Saturday, September 26, 2009 is Museum Day? This means locals and visitors alike get Free Admission to hundreds of museums and "cultural venues" across every state in the Union. The Smithsonian has made it easy to find out which museums are taking part (yes, I know, all of them are), and where they are located.

You can go to its website to download a museum card, and search through a database of museums organised on a state by state basis. These include many well-known institutions like New York’s excellent Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the New York Transit Museum, in Brooklyn, both of which I visited during my stay in 2008.

Buy the way, if the museum you wish to visit is normally closed on a Saturday, check with them to see if there will be free entry on Sunday 27th, instead. Again, you can use the Smithsonian site to find out if your local museum is thus affected. Thanks to Rick Seaney for this one.

The Bizarre: Passenger fixes faulty airliner. Holidaymakers avoided a long delay to their flight home from the tiny Spanish island of Menorca, when a passenger fixed a mechanical problem with their plane. Having been told to expect an eight-hour wait while an engineer was flown out from the UK, one passenger identified himself as a qualified aircraft engineer and offered to try and remedy the fault. After the airline checked the mans qualifications, the engineer was able to fix the problem, and the plane landed in Glasgow only 35 minutes late. The unnamed engineer received a round of applause from other passengers for his efforts.

But would you want to stay on a plane, knowing that one of the passengers had fixed a mechanical problem? We’ll leave the last word to fellow passenger Keith Lomax, who said, “It was reassuring to know the person who had fixed it was still on the aeroplane.” Fair enough then. Read more here…

Friday Photo #10: Remembering September 11, 2001

Click image to view full size

St Pauls Church, New York City

Late afternoon sun casts long shadows across the gravestones of St. Paul’s Chapel, New York, while in the background, dust rises from the site of the former twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Located on Church Street between Fulton and Vesey Streets, the Chapel is opposite the east side of the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. It is the oldest surviving church building in the city, and indeed the oldest public building in continuous use in New York City.

The Chapel survived the Great New York City Fire of 1776 when a quarter of New York City (then the area around Wall Street) burned following the British capture of the city in the American Revolutionary War.

St Paul’s Chapel was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1960. Its status as such was further strengthened after the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, when miraculously the Chapel survived without so much as a broken window.

The Chapel was turned into a makeshift memorial shrine following the September 11 attacks, and served as a place of rest and refuge for recovery workers at the WTC site. For eight months, hundreds of volunteers worked 12 hour shifts around the clock, serving meals, making beds, counselling and praying with fire fighters, construction workers, police and others. Massage therapists, chiropractors, podiatrists and musicians also tended to their needs.

I spent a several hours at the Chapel over the course of two or three visits, and was intensely moved by the many artefacts, exhibits and audio-video displays that are permanently located inside the building.

The first one when entering is "Healing Hearts and Minds", which consists of a policeman's uniform covered with police and fire fighter patches sent from all over the country, and from around the world. The most visible is the "Thread Project", which consists of several banners, each of a different colour, and woven from different locations from around the globe, hung from the upper level over the pews. There is much to see and reflect on at St Paul’s Chapel, and I highly recommend a visit there during your New York stay.

As you might imagine there are many online resources and sites memorialising the attacks of September 11, 2001. Make your first stop the website of St Paul's Chapel itself, which has a wonderful audio/visual selection of many of the artefacts on view in the Chapel. Another excellent online location is the Make History – National September 11 Memorial and Museum site.

Visit the St Paul’s Chapel website here…

Thanks to Wikipedia for the background information…