Yesterday during an IM conversation about United Airlines shutdown with my friend Steve, I wondered aloud if the reason why legacy carriers are so terrible at managing the actual experience of commercial flight is because all of their tasks break down into two categories:

1) Things that can kill hundreds of people.

2) Things that won’t.

I could see a lot of office conversations at UAL going something like this:

Sir, people don’t like the food or the leg room on our planes. They also don’t like losing their luggage 25% of the time.

I’M KEEPING PEOPLE FROM TURNING INTO PULLED PORK IN AN INFERNO OF JET FUEL AND TOILET SANITIZING AGENT RIGHT NOW. I’LL GET TO THE TRUFFLES AND BELLHOPS LATER, JOHNSON."

I’m guessing when you have two daily to-do lists on your desk, the one that does not involve preventing catastrophic tragedy tends to get balled up and used for waste basketball more often than the other.

Have you seen the new American edition of Creature Comforts? If not, you should make a point of getting in front of your TV on Monday at 8pm and flipping to CBS. It is a thoroughly entertaining and oddly soothing bit of TV.

Don’t start playing Pop Cap Games’ Peggle. Doing that will require you to stop playing.

That is hard to do.*

If you’ve got some spare minutes, Peggle’s a lot of fun. It’s a buffet of bite-size levels that offer variations on a simple mechanic: fire a bouncing ball into a Pachinko-like game field. Throw in zany power-ups, lots of good audio and visual feedback, and it’s a recipe for an addictive “just one more level” game. Peggle is a PC-only game, so you Mac-only people are safe from the bottomless pit of sugar-coated gaming fun.

But be warned, at some point you will have to stop playing. And that is hard.

*But I do manage to stop. I swear.