Stacy Alesi's BookBitch.com™

Happy April Fools’ Day!

If you are curious as to the origin of the holiday and where it is celebrated, check out this article, courtesy of the Library of Congress:

Scan your favorite newspapers or news websites this April 1, and chances are you’ll see some headlines that look suspicious. Read further, and you’ll probably find that some of those stories are complete hoaxes. After all, it’s April Fools’ Day.

But where do we get the strange custom of playing pranks on April 1? The short answer is that nobody knows for sure. All we know is that the custom was known in Renaissance Europe, and probably has roots older than that. Read on

Good News

File this under who knew??

Book News

I started reading King when Carrie, his first novel, came out. I read every book he wrote under his name, then the books written under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman (recommend Thinner!), and his collaborations with Peter Straub, (who also wrote the incredible Ghost Story.) I stopped with Misery, at least for several years, because it was so gripping and so horrifying that I read it in one night (as usual) but it left me feeling so uncomfortable it turned me off to the horror genre in general. I’ve read a few of King’s books since, but I still tend to avoid the horror genre for the most part.

So what I’m really saying is that King scared the crap out of me! That said, the NY Times offers the Essential Stephen King. If you haven’t read him, you really should. Let me add that not all of his books are considered horror – in fact, he writes all over the spectrum and honestly, I can say the man has never written a bad book. His On Writing has pretty much become a classic, and it’s nonfiction.

I went back to college when my daughter was in school, and there were times I had to bring her with me to class. She never minded, and one semester I was taking a class on noir books (English major – anyone surprised?) those classic pulp mysteries of the Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett era and it was an afternoon, after middle school let out, class. My professor loved that she read all the books for class, plus many more. She would come to class and sit and read. He jokingly threatened to make her take the final, then told the class it probably wouldn’t be fair as he was sure she’d ruin the bell curve. Aside from all that, one of my best Stephen King memories came in that class. She was deeply immersed in Cell, when a classmate’s cell phone went off. She jumped about a foot in the air and the whole class cracked up!

Some King books are better than others, not that he’s ever written a bad book, and many have been made into films, for better or worse. The man is an American icon, a legend, and a brilliant storyteller.

The Morning is my favorite NYT daily newsletter, and a few weeks ago they did this story about how the Whitney Museum of Art is doing storytimes on Sundays. They are trying to fill the gap since the NY Public Library system is closed on Sundays due to budget cuts.

Best story of an author visit that I’ve heard in a long time!

This is an interactive map if you click through or go here: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/17024101/

Food News

Ina Garten’s bagel slicing is so wrong it’s right

The Barefoot Contessa stirred up a bagel-slicing debate, so we gave her method a try

. . . nope, I think she’s wrong.

If only I had this talent!

Home cook superheroes J. Kenji López-Alt and Deb Perelman team up on a new podcast

López-Alt and Perelman have each amassed millions of followers online for their food insights. Now, they’ve joined forces to launch a biweekly podcast where they obsess over finding the perfect recipe. I’m loving it!

Other News

My family flew to New York for my grandson’s third birthday. This time, I found great airfare with JetBlue – we usually fly either JetBlue or Delta, depending on price. We are fortunate to live between two major airports, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, and only 40 minutes or so from the Miami airport. So it’s fairly easy to shop around, especially as New York City has three airports to choose from as well. LaGuardia is gorgeous now, and the closest airport to my son in Brooklyn, but JFK and Newark are only five miles further away.

JetBlue offers a stripped-down, no carry-on, no seat selection fare, BlueBasic, that competes with the horrible discount airlines like Frontier and Spirit, but it’s worth the extra money to fly Blue and select our seats and bring carry-on luggage on board. Usually, it’s just $20-30 or so. So that’s what I did, I selected our seats and waited for our trip.

When I went to check in 24 hours before our flight, I noticed our seats had moved. They had my husband sitting in the middle seat across the aisle from my daughter and me. I was able to switch our seats so we all sat together, and I remember thinking it a bit odd that there were so many available seats. The same thing happened on our return flight, only this time the flight was maybe half full.

We fly to New York a few times a year to visit my family, and 99% of the time, we are waiting at the gate when they announce they’ve overbooked and ask people to move to a different flight and basically threaten everyone waiting to board that there’s a good chance there won’t be room in the overhead bins. That is the norm, for both JetBlue and Delta. Only this time, a half-empty plane.

The first thing we noticed was the TV screens on the seatbacks were smaller than we are used to, and a bunch of them weren’t working. In our row, only one TV worked, and same in the row in front of us. That row was empty, so my husband moved there to a TV that worked.

The next thing we noticed was that we had legroom. Like my giant feet weren’t smushed under the seat in front of me. And finally, we noticed that the seats themselves were more comfortable, maybe a bit wider and definitely a lot more padded. I have a big butt so I notice these things! As we were getting ready to take off, the pilot came on the PA system and told us this was an old plane just put back into service, and it would be making some weird whiny noises that we may not be used to. He also said the air conditioning wouldn’t kick in until we took off. He assured us it was perfectly normal and not to worry, and he was right. Take off and landing went just fine, with some additional noises.

I’m just guessing here but I think switching to an old Airbus plane may have something to do with the Boeing plane issues? With all the problems with Boeing planes, I was thrilled that we were on an Airbus. And frankly, I had forgotten how much more comfortable those old planes were. You hear that the airlines are making the seats smaller and closer together to fit more seats in and using less padding in the seats themselves, probably to save a few cents per seat. Flying on that old plane was such a stark contrast to the many flights we’ve been on these past several years, and it was so much more comfortable. I wouldn’t mind if they flipped all their flights to old Airbuses! It felt way safer than flying Boeing, too. More and more horror stories are coming out, from employees sharing how lax Boeing’s quality control is and how they wouldn’t fly on one of their own planes, to news stories about damaged, unrepaired Boeing planes still flying. Loose bolts. Missing bolts and other missing pieces. This is scary stuff!

Speaking of flying, this is new:

See what’s fueling the return of supersonic passenger flights

More than two decades after the Concorde’s last flight, several private companies are competing to bring supersonic travel to the masses

I am old enough to remember the Concord. My father and stepmother flew it to Paris back in the day, and I think the tickets cost $10,000 per person. That is 1970’s dollars, which translates to about $78,000 today. I can’t imagine what the costs will be if these start flying regularly. One of the reasons they grounded the Concord was that when it took off, it spawned a sonic boom, and the people who lived on the flight path were subject to that noise. Now they are saying it’s quieter, and even better, there are several companies looking at building these things. Competition helps pricing so we’ll see, but it’s not happening anytime soon.

As always, thanks for reading, and stay safe.

Thanks to The New York Times and The Washington Post for allowing me to “gift” my readers with free access to these articles, a lovely perk for subscribers.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 1st, 2024 at 9:00 AM and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.