How I Spent My Vacation

Official 9/11 hoodie.

Tourists are complaining that at the Auschwitz Museum in Poland, water misters have been set up to help cool the visitors waiting in long lines, sometimes for hours, because it's been so hot there. The whiners say the misters are reminiscent of the gas showers that the Jews (and others) were forced to take. They say it is insensitive. Seems to me that if you are visiting a former death camp but don't want to be reminded of how people there died, you might want to reconsider how you spend your afternoon.

Crazy as it sounds, memorials to horror are quite popular; people "on vacation" have been flocking to them for years. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum gift shop, where you can buy a key ring to remind you of the 2,753 people who went to work one day and then had airplanes crash into them, causing many to jump to their deaths rather than be burned alive, is always overflowing with tourists.

Here's a thought: Some savvy developer could make a mint on some other places that might be fun to visit, like the Clutter home in Holcomb, Kansas, site of the massacre of a family of four that inspired Truman Capote's masterpiece, "In Cold Blood," Jeffrey Dahmer's Milwaukee apartment where he murdered and dismembered a host of victims between 1978 and 1991, and Jonestown in Guyana, South America, where 909 people committed mass suicide by drinking a poisoned brew made of grape Kool-Aid. (It might have been even more but grape is the worst flavor. )