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Is There A Such Thing As 'Travel Addiction?'
Discouraging young adults from traveling is apparently becoming kind of a thing, isn't it? Last time it was predatory safety companies trying to convince single women that traveling alone will get them raped and killed, but his time it's a Huffington Post travel consultant giving kids a Don't Let It Happen To You lecture; "It" in this case being an airport-heavy lifestyle that takes them away from The Really Important Things In Life.
The article oozes with awkwardness, from artificially opaque jumbled writing to moments of forced bluntness, and phrases like "a tip of the fedora" (because if you're going to speak to the young hipsters, it's important to be ironic!). There's some corporate branding going on behind the scenes—the author is a Travel Website "punk marketing" specialist and the CEO of the "only independent PR firms that’s actually fun to work with"—but that's an issue better left for another time. We'll even concede that the article has some valuable moments, reminding its audience to keep petulant "pay attention to me" travel demands to a minimum because no one cares.
There's a dangerous underlying hostility to travel, though, that runs through the entire piece. It's not much more sophisticated than "kids these days are just so crazy and naughty and they never appreciate real life" tsk tsk'ing. It even has soccer mom phrases like "Ms. BlackBerry or Sir iPhone." But it's more than enough to raise our ire:
Tags: Germs / Travel Gear / Travel Gadgets / Stupid Ideas / Travel Health / → All Tags
What Type Of Traveler Packs A Hand-Held UV Germ Scanner?
If you love getting out of the house but hate the "other people exist" part of traveling, there are a number of things you can do. Our recommendation is an mp3 player and a really good set of noise-canceling headphones. Failing that, books and earplugs work pretty well on airplanes. But there are certain parts of the world where interacting with other people's germs is unavoidable. Getting rid of all of them is impossible, you know.
But that isn't stopping travel companies from marketing hand-held UV lights, like the $79 Nano-UV Scanner, to germphobic travelers. There's a well-defined and well-justified use for UV bulbs in disinfecting water when you're camping—though there are easier ways and you better know what you're doing—but campers aren't the ones being targeted here:
Tags: Stupid Ideas / Denver Travel / Balloons / Colorado Travel / → All Tags
Balloon Boy Story Deflates In Face Of Possible Criminal Charges
For the hour or so that the nation stopped on Thursday, dying of anticipation and worry for the boy that supposedly had floated off from his family's backyard in a homemade balloon, we were entertained, titillated, alarmed...but most of all we were duped. It was declared over the weekend, after authorities spoke with the Heene family and after the boy, Falcon, made the statement that "we did this for the show" during an interview with Wolf Blitzer, that the whole incident had been a hoax to gain publicity.
Publicity for what? Well, a reality show of course, although one that doesn't exist and probably never will if felony charges are filed as promised. The Heenes, a storm-chasing family that regularly conducts science fiction-y experiments (hence the balloon) and has been featured on several dramatic episodes of Wife Swap had been shopping around a reality show following their family life; a "Jon and Kate Plus 8," but more like "Richard and Mayumi Plus 3 Boys Living Dangerously." So dangerously, that everyone believed that Falcon was indeed inside the balloon, only to later discover that he was hiding in a box in the garage's attic at home.
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Travel Mug Solves Age-Old 'How To Avoid Getting Tongue Burns' Problem
The travel mug designers at Jolex have developed a new travel cup that promises to solve one of the central dilemmas in coffee drinking: what to do during that delicate period when the coffee is still scalding hot but you want to drink it anyway. The trick is usually to get just enough but not too much plasma-temperature coffee on your tongue. Experienced coffee drinkers can pull this off while driving, doing makeup, and blogging into their smartphone. The rest of us just look comical, jerking the cup back and forth trying not to get burned.
The new Brugo coffee mug, which uses an innovative design to cool off the coffee one sip at a time, is made for the rest of us.
