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“Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast.”

Maciej Cegłowski takes readers on a culinary tour of Antarctica.

Cegłowski’s latest essay, “Gluten Free Antarctica,” is part of an occasional series on his adventure cruise to the southernmost continent. It’s brilliant: dryly humorous and insightful, like all of his writing.

Cegłowski is a multiple threat: Talented speaker, writer, software developer and entrepreneur. He developed the social bookmarking service Pinboard.in (motto: “Social Bookmarking for Introverts”). It’s a lean, high-performance clone of the del.icio.us bookmarking site from the 2000s, which was acquired by Yahoo and got bloated and slow. Eventually, Pinboard acquired the Delicious (as it was then called).

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TSA lines grow to 3 hours, snake outside the terminals, with no end in sight

Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing:

The TSA gambled on millions of wealthy Americans opting out of its pornoscanner-and-shoe-removal process and signing up for its Precheck policy, which allows travellers to pay for the “privilege” of walking through a metal-detector with their shoes on, while their laptops stay in their bags.

It was a gamble that they lost. Americans have stayed away from the process in droves, but the TSA had already committed to cutting staff in anticipation of much lighter queues at their checkpoints. Instead of lightening, the queues have got longer, as the US economy has recovered and low fuel prices have kept the price of plane tickets down.

The TSA is now warning travelers to expect very long security lines this summer (Denver Airport warns that its TSA queues can take three hours to clear), as it scrambles to train more staff. In the meantime, whole airports’ worth of people are missing their flights, sending the airport managers and airlines into rare public displays of temper against the agency, calling the lines “unacceptable” (American Airlines), a “fiasco” (Brent D. Cagle, interim director of aviation for Charlotte Douglas International Airport) and accusing the agency of lying when it cites crowds as the reason for lines (Denver Airport).

Cory also notes that long lines for services used to be the symbol of Soviet oppression.

I quibble with the characterization of Pre customers as “wealthy.” I use Pre. I’m just a middle-class guy who travels a lot on the company dime. I’m only wealthy in the way that middle class Americans are wealthy on the global scale. If I traveled only one or two times a year or less, and had to pay for it myself, I would not buy Pre. Indeed, I suspect business travel is where TSA is getting its Pre revenue.

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Cory Doctorow has a fine rant about hotel rooms with confusing lightswitches and plumbing

The quest for the well-labeled inn. [Boing Bong]

I can usually figure out the plumbing fairly quickly. Unlike Cory, virtually all my travel is inside the US, which I expect makes a difference. I’ve never had to deal with a freakshow shower like the one in the photo he posts..

I share Cory’s frustration with lightswitches. I just want to turn out the light and go to bed; I don’t want to go on a goddamn treasure hunt trying to figure out where the switches are.

Not mentioned by Cory: Hotel rooms with inaccessible electrical sockets. This is the 21st Century – we need plenty of electrical sockets to plug in our gadgets, and we need to be able to get at them without moving the furniture. You know what we don’t need? A clock radio. It’s not 1980 anymore. We use our phones to wake us up. If you put in a clock radio, you might as well also include a candlestick phone and Franklin stove.

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I booked my hotel room for Cisco Live…

I booked my hotel room for Cisco Live. The hotel is a little expensive, but it’s also inconveniently located, got bad reviews, and the photos on TripAdvisor are uninspiring. So there’s a tradeoff there.