Smug

I watched the newest South Park the other night. In this episode, Stan tries to convince every one in South Park to buy hybrid cars, since Kyle's dad has moved the family to San Francisco where they can be with more "progressive" and "intellectual" people instead of the backward thinking rednecks of South Park. However, the result of everyone in South Park driving hybrids was that a layer of pollution called "smug" developed over South Park as a result of the self-satisfied garbage all the hybrid drivers were spewing out of their mouths into the atmosphere, and this layer of smug threatens to merge with smug layer from San Francisco and the smug cloud from George Clooney's acceptance speech. This would create a smug cell that threatens the entire town.

Anyway, after watching the episode, I thought "I know a place like that!" And it's called university!

Think about it. University students are very smug and self-satisfied and probably love the smell of their own farts. They love being the so-called leaders of tomorrow. Just look at all the faculties. The Arts students think they know what's best for the world and they have a lot of well-meaning ideas about global development and political policy that don't work out well in real life. Engineering students think they rule the world. Medical students are in the life-saving business...how could you not be in complete love with yourself? Science students believe that they know better than everyone else on stuff like global warming and wish the rest of the world would just wake up. Actually, the only faculties that get a pass are agriculture and education, and in all fairness, they don't have a whole lot to be smug about. Hell, it was even smug of me to pretend like I was above it all by writing this post!

Anyway, I went flying today finally. I went to Calgary, and this was by far my longest flight. My previous longest flight was 2.8 hours and this one was 3.3 hours. I must say that Springbank Airport in Calgary is quite hard to find when flying in from the north, and even when it's right in front of you, it's still hard to find. I thought it was a pig farm at first, just because they have long metal hangars all over that airport and they look like barns. This is what happens when you try to consolidate all your air traffic to a single airport. I hope the same thing never happens to Edmonton City Centre airport...what a waste of a beautiful facility that would be!