Flight attendants and other members of the United Airlines team are all spiffy in Navy blue with new working apparel. Considering the recent flap about Cap'n Crunch showing only two stripes when a USN skipper would have four, the UAL employees are satisfied strutting around as real cool two-stripers.

According to AP, some hotels are taking those itsy soap pieces left behind by departed guests and sending them to a recycling plant. They’re melted together, sanitized and processed into fresh bars to be donated to families in poverty areas around the world.

A recent example is the Stonewall Resort in West Virginia. The hotel’s plan is to send the used soap to the nonprofit Global Soap Project processing center in Norcross, Ga. Global Soap Project representatives estimate that more than two million bars of guest-used soap are trashed every day by U.S. hotels.

According to Yahoo Travel reports, chances of being ripped off in Europe are highest in Barcelona, Paris, Rome, London, Amsterdam and Naples. Other world cities on the street crime list are Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Capetown, New Orleans and Las Vegas.

There was no mention in the report of Asian cities with the same problems. From our experiences and reports by friends and associates, we’d guess Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo, Hanoi  and Beijing.

These days a favorite street crime against tourists is called Apple Picking. It’s more prevalent than purse-snatching, because distracted visitors hold their little phone/photo boxes up to their ears without paying attention to surroundings. They make it easy for thieves to just grab and run.

Ever since people in covered wagons took six months to make it from the East Coast to California, they’ve been trying to make the journey a bit shorter. By train, the schedule is about 40 hours. Today, by passenger jet, it takes about four hours.

Now, a company named ET3 predicts that within a few decades, a way to do it by an underground vacuum tube system will take you coast-to-coast in just 3/4 of an hour! ET3 calls it the Evacuated Tube Transport, a 4,000 MPH train that’s blasted through by magnetic levitation.

The whole concept sounds like something a magician would conjure in a stage act, or a super big one of those old department store message suction tubes. The ET passenger system would be made up of a line of six-person capsules in rows within the tunnel vehicle.

Even more ambitious, when the tubes can be constructed to extend under oceans, a trip from California to China could happen in just two hours, and even less from New York to London! When it becomes an entire world network of tubes, it will certainly revolutionize long-distance transportation, as well as shipping, as never before.

Can you imagine telling your family you’re tubing to Beijing for Sunday brunch, and will be back home in time for dinner? And then tubing for a midnight snack in London?