Clothes call dings Southwest, again
The airline will apologize after making a Largo man change his shirt.
By STEVE HUETTEL, Times Staff Writer
Published October 5, 2007
Southwest Airlines created a public uproar, then issued a public apology last month after crew members told a young San Diego woman that her miniskirt and tank top weren’t appropriate attire. The message to employees from Southwest president Colleen Barrett: We’re not the fashion police.
Oops, they did it again.
On Sunday, Joe Winiecki of Largo was sitting in the last row of a Southwest jet in Columbus, Ohio, ready to take off for Tampa when an airline supervisor instructed him to change his sexually suggestive T-shirt, turn it inside-out or get off the plane.
Winiecki argued that the airline was violating his right to free speech and objected to changing in front of other passengers. When the supervisor insisted, backed by a burly pilot and security officer, he changed into a different shirt rather than risk missing work the next day.
“It’s really disappointing in this country when I can’t travel from Ohio to Florida with the clothes on my back,” Winiecki said Thursday. “Who’s to say what’s offensive and what’s not?”
Southwest prohibits “lewd, obscene or patently offensive” clothing. But three hours after inquiries Thursday by the St. Petersburg Times, a spokesman said the airline made a mistake and would apologize to Winiecki.
“It was inappropriate for our employee to approach Joe,” said spokesman Chris Mainz. “We don’t have a dress code. Only in extreme situations would we want to address this to our customers.”
He cited three examples: indecent exposure, extreme vulgarity and clothes with threatening language.
Winiecki’s shirt, purchased on a cruise in St. Thomas Virgin Islands, uses sexual double entendre to promote a fictional fishing tackle shop. The largest lettering reads “Master Baiter.” Winiecki said Southwest crew members on a flight from New Orleans last month told him “that’s a great shirt and laughed about it.”
A peristent irritant
Southwest isn’t the only airline struggling to draw the line on what’s acceptable behavior inside an aluminum tube packed with people at 30,000 feet.
Customers have complained, for example, about sitting beside travelers watching R-rated and pornographic movies on portable DVD players.
But what passengers wear, or don’t, has been a persistent irritant since U.S. airlines were deregulated in 1979, opening airline travel to the masses.
“I’ve been in first class and seen people put their bare feet on the bulkhead,” said Terry Trippler, an airline expert who owns an Internet travel club in Minneapolis.
Like Southwest, most airline have rules - called the “contract of carriage” - that ban travelers from going barefoot, smelling too bad and wearing offensive clothing. They leave enforcement up to employees in the airport or on the plane.
American Airlines employees removed a passenger off a plane a few years ago for refusing to take off a shirt depicting two nude people having sex.
Southwest kicked a woman off a flight in Los Angeles in 2005 over a political message on her shirt. It carried pictures of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a phrase similar to the title of the film Meet the Fockers.
Remember Kayla?
The issue moved into the national spotlight last month with the story of Kayla Ebbert, a Hooters waitress and college student. She showed up for a Southwest flight in July wearing a denim miniskirt and a summer sweater over a tank top.
An employee objected and asked her to change or leave the plane and get new clothes. Ebbert was allowed to fly after agreeing to alter her outfit. Her story ran in a San Diego newspaper column, then she and her mother appeared on NBC’s Today show.
She sparked a debate that lit up Internet chat boards and blogs, with some defending Southwest for upholding decency onboard and others labeling the airline that once outfitted flight attendants in hot pants as aging and out-of-touch.
Winiecki, 39, a radiographer at Bayfront Medical Center, says Southwest employees didn’t object to his T-shirt when he checked-in at the Columbus airport, cleared security and waited at the gate.
A bit of advice
Southwest needs to make the rules more clear to employees and customers, said Henry Harteveldt, travel analyst for Forrester, a technology and market research company.
“If they don’t have a dress code, there’s clearly an employee communications issue there,” he said. “They shouldn’t have people arbitrarily saying, ‘You can’t wear that.”‘
Happy Valley declares end to nude gardening
Rights - The City Council responds to neighbors’ complaints with a tentative nudity ordinance
Thursday, October 04, 2007
PETER ZUCKERMAN
The Oregonian Staff
The nude gardener of Happy Valley should at least put on underwear.
That’s what the City Council decided this week in tentatively approving an ordinance that makes it “unlawful for any person to expose his or her genitals while in a public place or place visible from a public place.”
If formally approved later this month, the law will apply when children younger than 13 are around or when “the exposure reasonably would be expected to alarm or annoy another person.”
Violations carry a $1,000 fine per exposure.
The issue arose when neighbors complained that Steven J. Howatt, 51, refused to put on clothes while gardening, mowing his lawn or walking around his property. A mail carrier also asked to changed routes.
Howatt, who didn’t attend the council meeting, said the controversy says more about neighborliness than nudity.
If someone had spoken to him nicely, he said, he probably would have put on some clothes. Instead, one neighbor yelled profanities at him and others complained to his employer, the police, the media and the city, he said. “I’m disappointed we couldn’t work out something.”
A few Happy Valley residents wrote to the council in support of Howatt. “I hate to see more of our rights taken away because a few people are uncomfortable,” said one e-mail.
Mayor Rob Wheeler said the nudity ordinance has attracted statewide attention. “In my seven years with the city,” he said, “I’ve never seen people or the media so interested in what we’re doing.”
Windows Vista
Restless Leg Syndrome
It begins as a strange feeling in your legs that seems to get worse until you stand up and move around. Deep inside your legs you can feel burning, creeping, and crawling sensations that are hard to describe, even to your doctor. Meanwhile, you cope with your condition the best you can.
If these symptoms describe the way you are feeling, you may have restless legs syndrome (RLS), a sensorimotor condition that affects millions of Americans.
Restless legs syndrome can be a primary or a secondary condition. Primary restless legs syndrome is the main form of the disease. While no one is sure what causes primary restless legs syndrome, nearly half of the time it can be traced to a family history. There is currently no cure for primary restless legs syndrome. Secondary restless legs syndrome is caused by an unrelated condition such as pregnancy, anemia, or iron deficiency. Once the unrelated condition has been treated, secondary RLS will usually go away without further treatment.*
Living with RLS is difficult both physically and mentally and can have a major impact on normal, everyday life.
yes … I want to ride my bicycle … I want to ride my bike
‘Gay bomb’ scoops Ig Nobel award
Pioneering research into a “gay bomb” that makes enemy troops “sexually irresistible” to each other has scooped one of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes.
Other winners included work on treating hamster jetlag with impotency drugs, extracting vanilla from cow dung, and the side-effects of sword swallowing.
The awards, founded in 1991, mark achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”.
The prize ceremony took place at Harvard University, US.
Genuine Nobel Laureates handed out the much-coveted awards to the winners, who took away no cash, but instead received a hand-made prize, a certificate, and, of course, the glory of such an illustrious win.
Sword effects
Dan Meyer, executive director of Sword Swallowing Association International and an author of the British Medical Journal paper Sword Swallowing and its Side-Effects, said: “I was surprised and extremely honoured when I found out I was not only nominated for an Ig Nobel prize but that I had won it. I couldn’t believe it.”
He told the BBC News website that the study revealed that when professional sword swallowers ingested a single sword very carefully, it did not do much harm, but swallowing many swords, strangely shaped blades, or being distracted when swallowing, could cause injury.
The findings also suggested that sword swallowers should not swallow swords if they already had a sore throat, he said.
Unfortunately, said the organisers, nobody from the US military who carried out the research on chemicals that could prompt homosexual dalliances amongst rival troops (a research project called Harassing, Annoying and “Bad Guy” Identifying Chemicals) attended the ceremony because the study’s authors could not be tracked down.
Real research
The Ig Nobel Prizes were created by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), a science magazine.
Ig Nobel Prize
The Ig Nobels celebrate the unusual side of research
The awards, now in their 17th year, are intended to “celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology”.
Marc Abrahams, the editor of AIR, told the BBC News website: “When I became the editor of a science magazine, suddenly I was meeting all kinds of people who had done things that were hard to describe, and for the most part, nobody had ever heard of.
“For some of them, it seemed a great shame that nobody would give them any kind of recognition, and that was what really led to the birth of the Ig Nobels.”
Like their more sober counterpart, the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are split into several categories and all research is real and published.
Late for Work; Caught with Pants Down
Sun Media: The London Free Press: The crackdown on speeders is only in its first week, but Lambton OPP have already caught one man with his pants down — literally.
A 25-year-old Wallaceburg man is charged with careless driving after he was stopped for speeding Wednesday night and was found with his pants around his ankles, police said.
His vehicle was heading west on Petrolia Line in St. Clair Township, going 37 kilometres an hour over the limit.
Police said the man told them he was trying to pull his pants on because he was running late for work.
Self-explanatory illustration
How to NOT Pick up a Man
How to Win With Women
Harry Hutton of “Chase me, ladies, I’m in the cavalry” blog, dispels the myth that pheromones, musk, or men’s cologne attract women. According to Harry, the smell that really attracts the babes is the smell of CASH!