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.

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?

Most of our senior travelers can remember when staying overnight at the posh Palmer House in Chicago cost $25 a night. Now, there’s a kennel at O’Hare International Airport that charges $100 for wealthy pets to spend the night.

The service includes pet walks, grooming and bathing. We can only guess that wine and WiFi are extra. The airport facility, called PetSafe, is provided by United Airlines, and there are also similar lodgings for pampered pets at airports in Houston TX and Newark NJ.

If the situation weren’t so deadly serious, we could have headlined this article with: Pistole Shoots Down Knives On Planes. Previously, Transportation Security Agency boss John Pistole had suggested that passengers who carried small knives should now be allowed to board aircraft with them.

Along with other potential weapons, they had been banned since the 2001 terrorist attacks. However, due to heavy objections from airline unions and government officials, Pistole has changed his mind about allowing small knives aboard.

To sum it up as one airline pilot expressed his anger: On that terrible September 11 day, terrorists needed only small knives to destroy two New York skyscrapers, crash into the Pentagon and murder more than 3,000 people!