chrishitchcock.com

footagenotfound:

Chris Jeon, 21, doesn’t really fit in among the rebels. Reporters found the American kid in the middle of the Libyan desert, wearing a basketball jersey and converse sneakers. One of the rebels handed him an AK-47 and after toying with the safety, Jeon fired a couple of rounds in the air. Jeon, a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, doesn’t speak Arabic and he also knows little of warfare.

WHOA WHOA WHOA…hang on here, I have a few questions about this whole thing:

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The NPR article was pretty short, but the whole thing is packed with great tidbits.  I liked this part:

But he decided he would spend his summer vacation fighting with the rebels. He bought a one-way ticket (in case he got captured, he didn’t want to lose another $800) to Cairo, then worked his way into Libya.

I imagine he’d have bigger problems then the loss of $800 if he got captured.

I didn’t know that private rail cars like this even existed.  The one mentioned in this article looks pretty posh.  

From the article:

If they are an expensive hobby for train buffs, private rail cars are good business for Amtrak, which pulls an average of 35 private cars monthly.

Amtrak charges $2.10 a mile to pull a private car — each additional car on the same train is another $1.60 a mile — plus about $100 for overnight parking at most stations. A one-way trip between New York and Washington adds up to about $470 in Amtrak fees, and Washington to Chicago costs about $1,600. That doesn’t include crew costs or the $500 to $1,800 that car owners typically pay each way for railroads to pull their car from a storage yard to an Amtrak facility.

…

Amtrak collected about $2.5 million in revenue from private rail cars in fiscal 2010, and the service operates at a profit, said Amtrak spokesman Steve Kulm. Revenue exceeded costs by about $660,000 in fiscal 2010, he said.

It would be quite an experience to travel from NYC to Chicago like a turn of the century robber baron.

I guess I’m not the only one flummoxed by the fact that his name is spelled differently depending on what news source you are looking at.