I hate cell phones. They make people act like #&%@ holes.

I had a cell phone once back in early 1992. There was a big flood in Los Angeles in January of that year. My car was parked in the lower-level garage of the apartment building I used to live in at the time. It didn't stop raining for days, I mean friggin days. The rainwater flowed down the mountains that bordered the San Fernando Valley with West Los Angeles and backed up behind the steel access door to the stairway leading to the lower garage.

The door broke and the entire subterranean garage filled up with murky brown water. Noah would have been proud. My car windows were open at the time (dumb I know) and my old Oki size-of-a-YC-snackbox cell phone was in the car laying on the backseat (also dumb, I know).

The image I most remember from that flood was that of my black $850.00 Oki cell phone drifting out my open window and floating down the river of water like a turd. I've not bought once since. Besides, who needs the increased risk of brain cancer? Yeah, yeah, go ahead and laugh. People also laughed at the weirdos in the 60's who said that secondhand smoke might be dangerous.

And now that everyone has at least one, if not two, of these idiot devices, I now have to read this sentence in today's news:

High-speed Internet and cell phone service in airplanes moved big steps closer to reality Wednesday, with regulators paving the way for both offerings in as soon as two years. (USA Today)

That will be the end of pass-travel for me. It's bad enough sitting in front of a knee-jerk-defender-idiot, can you imagine if that person also was gabbing into a cell phone?

Forget it. I'm done with the whole flying-for-pleasure thing. Flying is awful, and has been since it has become affordable and electronics have gotten smaller. If I want to get somewhere, I'll walk. If I can't walk there, I'm not going.