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Air travel
Complaint letter
an online hit
A humorous complaint letter to the Caribbean airline LIAT has gotten wide exposure since Virgin Group chief Sir Richard Branson tweeted about it last month.
The letter, written by frustrated passenger Arthur Hicks, originally appeared in the BVI Beacon, a newspaper in the British Virgin Islands, in April. In part, the letter reads:
“Dear LIAT: May I say how considerate it is of you to enable your passengers such an in-depth and thorough tour of the Caribbean.
“Most other airlines I have travelled on would simply wish to take me from point A to B in rather a hurry. I was intrigued that we were allowed to stop at not a lowly one or two but a magnificent six airports yesterday. And who wants to fly on the same airplane the entire time? … I also found it unique that this was all done on “island time,” because I do like to have time to absorb the atmosphere of the various departure lounges.
“… So thank you, LIAT. I now truly understand why you are ‘The Caribbean Airline.’
“P.S. Keep the bag. I never liked it anyway.”
Museums
Met goes button-less
Tiny metal buttons in delicious-sounding colors like poupon, hubba bubba and piglet have served as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s admission ticket for 42 years. Now the one-inch disks have been replaced by a paper ticket with detachable sticker.
It’s all about the money — the buttons have become too expensive to produce.
“The cost has been increasing exponentially over the years,” said Harold Holzer, the museum’s spokesman. “It’s gone up tens of thousands of dollars in the last five years.”
When the museum first started using the buttons, it had about 1 million visitors annually. Today it has 6 million.
“It seems impractical to tie ourselves to an archaic, quaint — even if it’s well liked — system,” Holzer said.
The buttons made their exit on the same day that the Met is switching to a seven-day-a-week schedule. The museum — which has a recommended admission of $25 for adults, meaning visitors may pay what they wish — had been closed Mondays.
National Parks
Yosemite website gets a jump on 2014
Officials at Yosemite National Park are getting a head start on next year’s 150th anniversary with a new website with information about celebrations, events and projects.
The interactive site allows visitors to share their Yosemite stories and read about the park’s rich history. It will guide visitors to celebrations in the park and in surrounding communities.
The Yosemite Grant Act signed by President Abraham Lincoln on June 30, 1864 granted the area that is the headwaters to the Merced River to the State of California. The act is considered the genesis of America’s national park system.
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