Y'All at Alaska Airlines,

I think it'd be best if you didn't insult our intelligence with this kind of pitch. We all know that airline service is becoming drastically depleted, and that the airlines' attitude to flyers is derisive. We all know that food options are not "exciting" and that they do not amount to being "even more" but rather sadly less. Let's be realistic. When one is entrusting one's life to the almost incredible prospect of aeronautic lift, it is unsettling, and annoying, to have one's patience tested by this kind of appeal through simulation and unreality.

Sincerely


On Sep 25, 2007, at 2:27 PM, Alaska Airlines Insider wrote:

Hello,

Exciting meal changes are in the air ... literally! We now have even more options from First Class to the Main Cabin when it comes to dining. Enjoy Northern Bites or, now, Anytime Picnic Packs, on flights more than 2 1/2 hours in duration.

Editor, NYT,

Your article, "If It’s Hip, Fast and Furious, Is It Cricket?" by Somini Sengupta, strikes me as verging on the fraudulent. In trumpeting India's victory in Twenty20, a new(ish) form of international cricket, the article does not mention, at all, that Twenty20 is merely a more telescoped version of limited-over (40- or 50-over), one-day cricket that has been played at the international level for over 30 years, and at all other levels since...oh, the 11th century.

Sentences like this: "The games ... each took about three hours, in sharp contrast to the customary five-day test match."
serve spuriously to frame the article, because that is not the relevant comparison.

For three decades, now, cricket has featured (stooped to) colorful clothing (whence the mocking description for limited-over cricket, "the pyjama game") and ridiculously exaggerated and aggressive antics ("powerfully athletic" players dancing victoriously... not to mention players' harassing of umpires with innumerable bogus and coercive appeals for dismissals of batsmen).

Much of the limited-over games' antics have expressed, and have come to be fueled by, grotesque indulgence in nationalism of which, I fear, the NY Times article is another expression. Your correspondent seems to have successfully counted on your own innocence about the game.