WhichBudget.com is a searchable destination-by-destination database of 116 budget airlines serving 874 airports in 124 countries. Warning: this site may get you so excited you can’t sit still.

Want to find a cheap flight from, say, Vancouver to Hawaii in November? WhichBudget points you to WestJet, where you can do the round trip for about $500 before taxes. (Checking Travelocity, similar non-stops on the major airlines were already sold out for my randomly-chosen dates, although you could beat the fare if you were willing to route through Chicago.)

How about, I dunno, Los Angeles to Timbuktu? This took a little poking around and a bit of past experience, but in ten minutes I found connections on Point Afrique between the Malian city of Mopti and Paris, which you can skate to from Los Angeles via Ireland’s Aer Lingus. (Once in Mopti, most folks take the slow boat up the river to Timbuktu.) Total airfare, with a little planning: roughly $1500, round trip, before taxes. To Timbuktu.

My guess is you’re more likely to go to Hawaii. But just saying.

PS: if you’re concerned about the safety record of airlines you may not be familiar with — or, y’know, the whole zipping along seven miles up at 600 mph in a tin box thing anyway — AirSafe.com has the lowdown on whose tin boxes tend to go up and down as intended.

Now that the inevitable crackdown has begun, with Buddhist monks being rounded up and protesters shot in the streets, if you’d like to follow what’s happening in Burma a little more closely — even after the next American celebrity gets in trouble with the law — bookmark Burma Digest.

 

I’m not expecting many reviews of Who Hates Whom, since it’s just a small impulse-buy paperback, but I’ve just learned the New York Observer will have a kind review in Monday’s issue. Here’s a chunk:

Bob Harris is a brave man. Armed only with his irreverent sense of humor, boldly declaring his lack of expertise, he charges into the thick of the globe’s myriad simmering wars, coolly cataloguing the gripes of each antagonistic sect and faction. The result, Who Hates Whom—Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide (Three Rivers Press, $11.95), is hilariously relaxed about all the hate out there. See, for example, his remarks on the 2006 Tehran conference on the Holocaust: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited the world’s leading crackpots for a shindig of wrongitude…"

For the record, that first sentence makes me uncomfortable, but I’m including it so I can also make the following point:

I am most assuredly not brave, and neither is Who Hates Whom. Not even close. Like way so very not.

Bravery would be writing a book like Who Hates Whom in about two-thirds of the countries it mentions.

Here’s where the Japan chapter will eventually wind up.

私は謝る!

これらの単語に関して、それらは無意味である!

(笑い声。)

ありがとう!

Told you.

The excised chapter on Fiji and its never-ending coups will go here.

Great rugby in Fiji, btw. Big fan of William Ryder, even though he can’t play defense worth a flying, er, Fijian.