As a native Austinite, I brace for the annual descent of SXSW madness upon my hometown with a bizarre combination of excitement and horror. When 100,000 people pour into the hippest streets of your city, stumbling around all the bars, venues, and restaurants you've loved since high school, the feeling it induces is a lot like bringing your favorite toy to school for show and tell, then having to watch while all your friends play with it at recess.

Thanks to winter weather closing half the airports in the America, we headed out of South Station for Baltimore by Amtrak a few weekends ago. Train travel, in case you’d forgotten, is wonderful. Slower than planes sure, but from your total travel time you get to subtract the treks to and from airports, the hour (minimum) sitting in a waiting room at your gate listening to CNN blaring unwelcomely at your back with no representative of your carrier in sight, and the seeming eternities sitting on the stuffy plane on runways.

CONFESSIONS OF A SMUGGLER
20 years ago
February 5, 1988 | Nancy Roosa wrote of her experience as a smuggler in Asia.
“The offers were almost too good to pass up. For simply carrying items from Hong Kong into Thailand or Taiwan, as we did, handwritten signs promised US $50 to $100. Even more common are ‘milk runs,’ where a group of milk-fed innocents are led by a smuggler on a five-to-six-day trip through Customs of three countries: South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, carrying items that are limited, prohibited, or expensive in each country.