Burt Reynold's Finest Five Minutes
I watched that racing movie on the plane - Driven, starring Sylvester Stallone. You know the one, where they race thru the streets of Chicago in CART cars? (CART is like Formula One, minus the glamour, the expense, the big manufacturers, sponsors, and racing talent).

Anyway, Burt Reynolds plays a wheelchair-ridden hard-ass racing team boss. I'm sorry to say it's his finest role. Which tells you two things:
- The exact altitude of the peak of Burt Reynold's acting career (lets just say you wouldn't need oxygen to scale it)
- As it's in the movie Driven, very few people will ever get to see it. How sad for Burt.

Snaking queues don't cut it anymore
Snaking queues dont cut it anymore. You know, the way they make you wind back and forth along a maze of waist-height poles strung out with spring-loaded seatbelt webbing, between you and the ticket counter, between you and the cinema entrance, and increasingly, between you and the express checkout queue at the supermarket.

Ten years ago it made queues seem shorter but now we've evolved the ability to read the snaking queue - we can now estimate how long it will take anyway. That could be the first mental skill we've evolved since the ability to turn off our forebrains while watching TV.

But at least in snaky queues you get to glance at more people; from front and back, usually several times - you can't buy a better opportunity to peoplewatch.

Stand back from the damn carousel
If everybody just stood back from the luggage carousel everyone could see and retrieve their luggage easily. But no, we all crowd the thing, as if once our bags pass back thru the hatch and into the wall, they get cremated by the baggage handlers. What are we so afraid of losing, a couple of days worth of our dirty laundry and our cosmetics? And what do we save if we're even the first to get our luggage? 10 mins? Think of what we could do with that time... queue for customs...