American Airlines censoring?

Normally, i love American Airlines. In fact, they’ve been my primary airline for two years now. Of course, a message in my mailbox makes me reconsider that:

My niece and two of her friends saw the Vagina Monalogues this year at Berkeley California and became empowered, bought Pussy Power T-Shirts with the name, date and location of the play on the back of them.

Just a couple of weeks ago these three and a friend were on an American airlines trip to Hawaii. Three of the four young women were wearing their T-shirts from the play. The stewardesses would not serve them because of the T-shirts. NO water, drinks, food, meals, head-sets for the movie, nothing. The girls tried to explain but the women stewardesses would not listen. Their friend who had not seen the play and didn’t have a T-shirt was served. Other women in the area gave them some drinks, rented head-sets for them etc.

I was outraged at this. Is their anyone whom they can contact to help them with this? Also on the return trip from Hawaii, the exact same crew served them everything as they were wearing their new Hawaii shirts and garb.

Sincerely,
Margaret Garcia

The young women are more then willing to talk to someone about this. Their travel agent is upset and has contacted American Airlines but to no avail yet.

It’s frustrating that in a big corporate world, i couldn’t even fathom who they should contact to express their outrage and frustration.

trans-friendly bush??

drugs and math

A friend of mine forwarded me an interesting quote from Paul Hoffman’s biography on Paul Erdos: “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth”

Like all of Erdos’s friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdos $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdos accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up–and wrote the $500 off as a business expense–Erdos said, “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.

For those who are not familiar with Erds, he produced a wide variety of theories on mathematics (number theory, combinatorics, etc.). Of course, he’s also a pop culture reference for those interested in social networks. Erdos numbers are effectively the degree in which one is removed from collaborating with Erdos on papers. [Think Kevin Bacon game for mathematicians.]

Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com

Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com. This article shares a variety of people’s perspectives on online dating. One paragraph particularly caught my eye:

Two or three decades ago, most American couples met in high school or college, Professor Glenn said. But as more people choose to marry later in life, few social institutions have arisen to replace the role that local communities, families and schools once played.

This confirms my hunch that one of the primary roles of urban tribes are to provide people with the connections to mate. Of course, in areas where you don’t have that type of intimate network, you need to find bridges to groups through alternate means. Digital dating does this, but it’s hard to figure out what you have in common at the more fundamental levels through this mechanism. One of the nice things about schools and shared friends is that you can validate certain similarities in interesting ways.

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heard at home

One of my roommates finally joined Friendster. Her immediate response was that it was a fun collection of baseball cards of your friends. Of course, she doesn’t like collecting baseball cards…