I hate flying. I really, really do. Tomorrow I’m in the air for less than three hours, yet I’ve already had a weeks worth of nightmares, a couple of panic attacks, and lots of dread. It’s stupid — normally I’m a rational, tough kinda girl, but something about airplanes turns me into a spineless goober, seeing omens everywhere and nearly ripping my armrest off the seat at the slightest noise during flight. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that I really, really like the non-airborne parts of travelling, I would probably just stay home forever in my Kubrickian paranoia.

So, aside from having a couple of gulps of liquid courage at hand before boarding, I decided to put the old axiom “knowledge is power” to the test and try therapy through research. Below is the litany of sites, either fun or educational, I discovered in my searching:

AirlineMeals.net: “the first site dedicated to nothing but airline food”
AirSafe: statistics galore
Fear of Flying message board
Real-time U.S. Airport Status
SeatGuru: “the source for airplane seat information”
rec.travel.air newsgroup
Aviation Safety Network

Anyway, I’ll be back on Friday, so send lots of calm flying thoughts to me this week, okay? Thanks.

Save My Show!: writing angry letters to network executives over the premature cancelling of your favourite show has become a popular passtime as of late. (Oh, Futurama, how I will miss your wacky charms..) But why wait until a program is near death to register your support for it’s survival? At Save My Show, you can vote for your favourite shows at any time, making it a fun way to kill two minutes, and yet still completely irrelevant to studio honchos… if they listened to you in the first place. Bastards.

Ah, the beginning of another work week, and my mind has turned to the serious question that I’m sure everyone must be thinking: what effect will Winona’s conviction have on the stock market? (Please note: The Stock Market is totally wack. Totally.)

The Complete Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge for Fantasy Role-Playing Games. Rolling dice has never been so exciting. (Oh wait.. it still isn’t.) (from quiddity)

I’ve seen a number of sites that take on the challenge of summarizing a movie in the shortest form possible, but this might just have them all beat: The Four Word Film Review.

This all reminds me, on the weekend Mr. Pith and Vingar asked if I might like to join him in a viewing of “Jackass: the movie”. I responded with a four word film review of my own – “I don’t think so” – which only narrowly edged out the most emphatic but less poetic, “Rather poke eyes out.”

Count Duckula: underappreciated 80s classic. That is all.

In preparation for a mini-road trip last week I packed one of my few remaining cassette tapes, a little mixed thing taped off the radio and labelled “Best of 1994″. I was expecting to come across some forgotten gems that I hadn’t heard in years, but somewhat to my surprise all the stuff I liked in 1994 is generally same stuff they play today. Non-acoustic Nirvana? Check. Greenday’s Dookie? You bet. Offspring when they were still on the Epitaph label? Aww, yeah. So now I can’t decide if 1994 was the pinnacle of good music, or my generation is just old enough to be in charge of “modern rock” radio stations everywhere. I’m either so hip, or so old. What a dichotomy.

Anyway, my trip down memory lane is assisted by the BBC’s nice little 1994 retrospective, and this overly-serious GenX portal. Oh, to be young and bitter again.

Moon Resort and Casino — if you visit one website this year about a fake vacation destination on a rock in space, make it this one.