Her College Plans Are Shipshape

--Eighteen-year-old Tania Aebi has cast off in New York for what she hopes will be a solo voyage around the world aboard a 26-foot sloop that her father gave her as an alternative to higher education. The $40,000 vessel was “cheaper than a college education nowadays,” said graphic artist Ernst Aebi, 47, who said his daughter was prepared for the trip. She accompanied him and some friends on a transatlantic sail from England last year and has studied celestial and coastal navigation. “This boat can take me anyplace,” said Tania Aebi, a graduate of City-As-School, an alternative high school. Was she afraid? “I thought about it, but if I must die, I must die. I’m not going to sit around and do nothing!” Her first port will be Bermuda, sometime next month, she hopes. Then she plans to head for the Panama Canal, the Pacific and Indian oceans, around the Cape of Good Hope, on to Brazil and back to New York.

--”I have a cousin in New York and always wanted to go there, Fernando Rodriguez explained. “I wanted to go to New York because I lost three drawing pencils and feared they would punish me.” So Fernando, 13, took a bus to the Santiago, Chile, airport earlier this month, jumped a ditch, crossed the runway in the dark and managed to reach a DC-10 preparing for takeoff before he was discovered as he climbed onto a wheel. “It was so easy and I nearly managed to get on the plane!” Fernando said. Airport officials said the boy would have been crushed as the wheels were retracted on takeoff or else would have frozen to death in below-zero temperatures at the plane’s cruising height of 40,000 feet.

--Allen Funt has made a good living preying on the public’s naivete, yet he finds it a little unsettling. His years of capturing embarrassing moments on film with his “Candid Camera” have shown just how easily “people can be led by any kind of authority figure or even the most minimal signs of authority,” Funt said in Psychology Today. “We need to develop ways to teach our children how to resist unjust or ridiculous authority.” In one stunt, “We put up a sign on the road ‘Delaware Closed Today.’ Motorists don’t question it. Instead they ask, ‘Is Jersey open?’ ” In another, “A well-dressed man walks up the down escalator and most people turn around and try desperately to go up also.” The Candid Camera segments were all done in fun but the same tactics could easily be dangerous when used by someone with a larcenous streak, Funt said. “What about the scams of confidence men or spying by governments or businesses or even TV programs that encourage people to make fools of themselves for money?” Funt asked.