Coin-flip booking

A new travel site called GetGoing offers a unique way of trying to snag airfare bargains.​ Via the NYTimes:

Instead of bidding, you choose two places you would like to visit (say, Miami and Los Angeles), select your travel dates and flights, then enter your credit card details. GetGoing randomly chooses one of the two trips and books your ticket, which you can’t change or cancel.

The company aims to help airlines fill empty seats, which are scarce on some routes but still average nearly 20 percent of the tickets a carrier could sell. GetGoing promises savings of up to 40 percent off published airfares, but the coin flip reassures the airlines that they are giving these discounts to leisure travelers, not business travelers who would pay a higher price because they have to fly.

It's amazing with the level of deep price discrimination in travel that most airlines still can't turn a profit. Not having reliable cost control is brutal.​

​Since my sisters live in Chicago and my brothers in New York, I may have to give GetGoing a whirl sometime. I wonder if they'll consider it a bonus or penalty if the coin flip lands their way.

Purell

The New Yorker had an interesting article on Purell in the March 4 issue. It's behind the paywall, but here are two interesting paragraphs.

Intuition is not an infalible guide to hygiene. People in a growing number of occupations wear latex gloves while they work—a good thing, seemingly. Yet gloves, if used carelessly, can promote contamination. If you handle raw chicken with your bare hands, you will probably wash them before you open the refrigerator, grab a skillet, mince a garlic clove, or meet Gwyneth Paltrow; but if you're wearing gloves you may not, because your hands will feel as clean as they did before you picked up the meat. Valerie Curtis, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has argued that the disgust we feel when we manipulate uncooked chicken livers is likely a product of natural selection: protohumans who were never squeamish about where they put their hands would have lived to bring up fewer healthy off spring. Gloves muffle the signal.​

And...​

I asked Don Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers, whether clean hands might have a medical downside. He said, "We might have a much healthier population if we adopted the kinds of condition that we see in many Third World countries, with poor-quality food and poor-quality water and lots and lots of germs. If we did that, we would have adults who were very healthy and had very strong immune systems. Unfortunately, the price that we would pay would be extremely high infant mortality. That's the trade-off." There's a popular belief that passing exposure to pathogens strengthens the immune system in the way that exercise strengthens the body. But immunity doesn't work that way, and, in the absence of vaccinations, inoculations, or genetic serendipity, populations "acquire resistance" to lethal illnesses the way the indigenous peoples of North and South America acquired resistance to smallpox. Furthermore, alcohol-based hand rubs do not exacerbate the spread of treatment-resistant pathogens, as the overuse of antibiotics does. Alcohol kills germs in a different way, by disrupting cel membranes, a process to which organisms are almost as unlikely to become immune as humans are to become immune to bullets. Indeed, according to the National Institutes of Health, the best strategy for combatting the spread of drug-resistant bacteria is "for everyone to keep their hands clean."​

So there you go. Purell away guilt-free.​

Akira Kurosawa films stream free on Hulu

To celebrate Akira Kurosawa's birthday tomorrow, Hulu has opened 24 of his movies for free streaming through Sunday midnight. However, I recommend you just consider ponying up $7.99 for Hulu Plus so you can watch them all commercial free, streaming through your choice of devices. It's worth that alone just to watch the treasure trove of Criterion movies available exclusively on Hulu Plus.

TV's greatest comedy

I've been a bit slow on the draw recently, but I loved David Lipsky's essay comparing Seinfeld and The Simpsons in the semifinals of Vulture's bracket to determine TV's greatest sitcom of the past thirty years.​ Reading the essay was so nostalgic I immediately wanted to immerse myself in episode after episode of each series again. The Simpsons is the only one of the two still on air, but the sensibility of Seinfeld was so distinct that every tweet from the hilarious Twitter account Modern Seinfeld crystallizes in my brain with perfect clarity.

I'll let you click through to find out the winner, but one choice excerpt:

So what The Simpsons immediately offered was how the world looked to extremely intelligent people in whom high school had perhaps encouraged skepticism and unconfidence. The result is a chaos of noisy, less-intelligent people holding onto authority by bullying and jargon. Cops and doctors are incompetent; the bartender keeps caged pandas. No straight men; everyone is funny. It wasn’t so much an observational show as one written by ear. When Seinfeld does a parody movie title, it’s something like Sack Lunch or Agent Zero. You nod. Pretty good, yeah, that does sound like a movie. When The Simpsons does this, it’s so exact it stops you. A romantic comedy called Love Is Nice. Homer visits an experimental lab named the Screaming Monkey Medical Research Center. The show is so tight, these jokes come within 30 seconds of each other. The comedy of the particular dialect any job and worldview locks you into; it’s something that writing staff hears too. Lisa Simpson provides timely advice to an in-crisis TV producer. “That’s it, little girl,” he says. “You’ve saved Itchy and Scratchy!” A lawyer steps forward: “Please sign these papers indicating that you did not save Itchy and Scratchy.” Hideous space aliens, impersonating the presidential candidates, are unmasked before a startled crowd. “It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system: You have to vote for one of us.” Human crowd-member: “Well, I believe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate.” Alien: “Go ahead — throw your vote away.”

What Seinfeld and David heard with special fidelity were the surprising things their heads said. The inner world, not the outer. George to Jerry: “She just dislikes me so much, it’s irresistible. A woman who hates me this much comes along once in a lifetime.” Jerry to Elaine: “You’re attracted to him because he can’t remember anything about you.” Elaine: “But that’s so sick.” Jerry: “That’s God’s plan. He doesn’t really want anyone to get together.” Jerry meets a woman — she’s more or less a female him — he can finally love, and reports, “I just realized; I know what I've been looking for all these years. Myself. I've been waiting for me to come along, and now I’ve swept myself off my feet.” A few scenes later: “I realized what the problem is: I can’t be with someone like me. I hate myself.”

Here's the guest judge's commentary on the finals, which pitted one of these two semifinalists against Cheers (which you can watch, in its entirety, on Netflix now).