Tom Tallerico

“Jim: We got the idea of subtitling the Black dudes after we saw the 1975 Blaxploitation movie Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree. When we left the theater we thought it was pretty good, but we couldn’t understand a lot of the jive dialogue. The cast was 95 percent Black. So we thought wouldn’t it be fun to put a couple of those characters in Airplane! and subtitle them with idiotic white guy translations?”
― David Zucker, Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!

“I half smile as I think of the cabin crew member who, as we flew high over the open Atlantic last year, presented me and my colleague with a set of light brown swatches from a high-end British paint retailer, so we could more accurately specify the strength and milkiness of tea we wanted;”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World

“Most of my pedagogical excursions in my life have been with students (junior high through college) and the general public. Only rarely do I get the chance to talk to teachers, although I love nothing more. Apart from generally being an enthusiastic and friendly lot, they shape the conduit of our nation's brain trust. Along the way, they work in the trenches while the rest of us sit at home with a TV remote in our palm and bark out complaints about the state of the educational system. The nation's teachers are collectively underappreciated, underrespected, and underpaid, but they are not all created equal.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

“I think we have two choices in life when somebody we love dearly dies. You either close the curtains and take the pills in the bedroom, or you throw the curtains open. You plant flowers. You light candles. And you try to move on. It’s a very gradual process, and a really painful one, but there’s a will to celebrate the person—and a will to celebrate yourself for having survived. I don’t think of the tsunami every time I look down and see this watch. I think of the course of my life—the memories I have of my dad, the memories I have of Fernando. And also I think a lot about the future. The fact that it was one event, tragic and drastic, but one event in a long chain of events both happy and sad in my life.”
― Matt Hranek, A Man & His Watch: Iconic Watches and Stories from the Men Who Wore Them