Paris

Worst of all — although there can be some pretty bad among the rest — is the travel. Specifically, the airports and airplanes. The insanely long “security” lines are now even longer, as personnel has reportedly (no one knows for sure…it’s a “security” secret, of course) been cut back due to the “sequester.” You remember, that’s the procedure by which elected and appointed officials divided up the money that pays for societally agreed-upon functions. Keeping most of what they did impossible to see, or too petty to complain about. One fewer day that the Pt. Reyes Visitor Center is open? One more day that your local post office closes early? A week longer to get a passport? (There will not, of course, be one fewer “Special Operations” team crawling through some obscure jungle to do some bloody deed. Or maybe there will be? Who are we to think we would be told?)