June 2009 Archives

Well, Clear will no longer have to be concerned with being overrated. Clear is no more. It's ceased to be. It is not, contrary to popular belief, pining for the fjords. It's dead, Jim.

I'm not here to lament the passing of this company, it had really outlived it's usefulness. And without it we'll save a few shekels a year, but then we were going to cancel at the next renewal, anyway.

From Frommers today, an article with the provocative title of Top 10 Overrated Travel Experiences. Of course these are the author's picks. And you know what? I pretty much agree with the majority of the items.

 

Clear, meh. It was pretty useful in the past but nowadays I just don't see the benefit. And it never lived up to the hype as they never did get the TSA to agree to permitting Clear members to skip the shoe removal, cavity search, and other stuff. So yeah, overrated.

I've always been amused by Airborne, a product that had been marketed as preventing colds while traveling. Recently the company that sells this "immune system helper" apparently lost a lawsuit for deceptive advertising. Since then, they've also changed the package art. The new package is very similar to the old package with the major differences that the product is now identified as a dietary supplement and the happy germ-like creatures on the top of the box are now gone. Of course, the fellow in the plane in the foreground who was looking worriedly up where the germs used to be, now looks like he's beseeching a higher being before his plane takes off. All the people around him that were exhibiting various viral symptoms are now all happy campers completely unconcerned with whatever is bothering Mr. Nervous Nelly.

 

My favorite thing about the whole Airborne product concept was the catch phrase 'created by a school teacher!' I love this. It's so much more reassuring then a "immune system helper" that was created by a carpenter or thrown together by a cub scout troop in Wyoming. A school teacher! People who go into education deserve my admiration for doing something I try and avoid like the plague, like interacting with children and teaching hygiene. But really, does the fact that a school teacher developed this product imbue one with confidence? I don't think I would be as confident with flying with an airline that employed police officers as pilots, no matter how much I admire cops. But then again we are talking about a product that is the modern incarnation of the old snake oil nostrums.

In a new survey, via SeatGuru.com, frequent flyers contended that food and service on US domestic airlines did not measure up to foreign carriers. In other news, grass is still green and scientists have established that water is, indeed, wet.

 

I don't know of anyone who's flown any of the major European or Asian legacy carriers who doesn't think the overall experience is better than that of American airlines. If we're traveling to London and I had only six hundred dollars to my name and that would get me a ticket on United, while Virgin Atlantic was going to cost nine hundred dollars, I'd go and sell a kidney for the extra three hundred dollars first, before I'd fly on United. But perhaps I'm biased.

Ok, I think the following concept is both brilliant and incredibly stupid all at the same time. The best ideas are like that - atomic bombs? Jordache jeans? Deregulating the banking industry? Well, alright, the last one was just stupid.

 

In the annals of great inventions that are doomed to denigration and misunderstanding, I offer - the beer bike! Via Jaunted we find that those clever Dutch have developed a multi-drinker system of transportation where you pedal around town, getting exercise, all while drinking beer. The only concern I have is that, other than the more frequent than normal number of traffic accidents they seem to experience, what happens after an hour or so of beer quaffing? Will the bike have to stop every five minutes or so for a used beer recycling break? Where do they find all the restrooms? Does the driver have a map? It might be difficult to actually get from point A to point B, but then again, that really isn't the point is it?

 

I would so like to try this but I'm afraid my bachelor party days are long behind me. As well as drinking-all-afternoon days. And pedaling-around-European-cities-while-drunk days, too. Which I've never actually done but I'm always up for new experiences.

On our last return leg back through DFW (which is Dallas-Fort Worth airport, but we experienced flyers all use the airport codes to show off how cool we are), we ended up in Terminal C which was a different kind of hell that is strangely, much like the other hells that are Terminals A and B.

 

Fortunately, we had arrived at New Orleans International for our flight to Dallas with time to spare and decided to invest that time in a nice shrimp po'boy from Acme Oyster House. So we weren't hungry for anything when we arrived in Dallas, nor by the time we got to Colorado Springs, nor anytime for the next couple of days. But I digress. While trudging from one end of the terminal to the other, not because we had to - we just like wandering up and down airport terminals, it's a thing, we happened to pass a food court where benighted and unfortunate airline customers who hadn't dined on shrimp po'boys, had to find sustenance. And lo' we did behold something new in this world and it was: 'a bad idea'. No make that 'A Profoundly Bad Idea'.

Heard while going through the security line in New Orleans recently.

 

Woman behind us in line, when told she wasn't allowed to put laptop through X-ray while still in bag. Big duffle type bag, not new airport security friendly type bag.

 

Woman: "So, I've been doing this the same way all over the world and no one has ever told me I couldn't leave it in the bag."

 

TSA Agent: "No ma'am, laptops are supposed to be put through separately."

 

Woman: "So, everyone else in the world is wrong and only you guys are right?"

 

Exasperated TSA Agent: "I'm sorry ma'am, I can't vouch for the rest of the world, but that's the way it is here and always has been."

 

At this point both Mary and I were thinking the next thing out of the TSA agent's mouth was going to be "Well, I guess we'll now have to do a thoroughly efficient cavity search".

 

Now, I'm as unhappy with the whole security routine as the next guy but, you know, there's some times when the smart thing to do in a situation like this is grin and bear it. The woman spent more time arguing with the agents then it would have taken to just take the laptop out of the bag and let them run it through again. And finally, really? In all your travels around the world, not once has anyone told you to take the laptop out of the bag? I find it somewhat harder to believe this than say, claims that the Illuminati are out to create a New World Order and incidentally, outlaw the sale of pork rinds. Because they can - they're a secret society, man!

It is possible that Ernst Stavro Blofeld did actually get plastic surgery and resurface with a new identity. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it is - dum, dum, da, dum, Michael O'Leary of Ryanair.

 

Apparently Blofeld, erm, O'Leary may not have been joking about those pay toilets on his planes. According to USA Today, O'Leary has been quoted as saying that he's asked Boeing to look into putting credit card readers on toilet doors.

 

Oh, wait, there's more! If you buy now, we'll throw in this handy quote from Mr. O'Leary, that he's also thinking about ripping out two of the three toilets his planes normally carry because most of the European market flights are under an hour in length. Of course, the first time one of these hell planes is stuck on a tarmac for three hours because of maintenance issues, I'm betting things might get a mite bit unpleasant on-board.

 

I would normally not be so concerned for people who willingly fly with Ryanair because I would have been sure that the might and the power that is the European Parliament would prevent outrages such as these. But it's Blofeld, man! He's an archvillian! Only the British Secret Service can counter his nefarious schemes!

Observed on a gravestone in Highgate Cemetary, London:

 

Here Lies Gordon Bell

(His middle name was Ernest though he placed no Importance in it)

 

Simple and direct - I like it.

Charleston came as a bit of a surprise to both of us. I had lived just outside the city for a significant amount of my early childhood and thus really only knew that the city existed. What can I say - we moved away when I was eight, my memories revolved around the swimming pool and forts we built in the woods. Mary had never visited either the city or our forts. We were each pleasantly surprised by how much we liked Charleston. Oh, it still has weather, mainly heat and humidity, that would have deterred its settlement by anyone not fleeing religious and economic persecution or British cooking. And there is that whole starting the Civil War thing, but that could have happened to anyone. But, it really is quite an attractive place with a surprisingly vibrant cultural scene.

A new category we came up with while on our road trip is "Things That Do Not Belong Together". Our first entry was a billboard we saw on the route between Charleston and Birmingham which advertised fireworks and gas. We didn't see any indication of the longevity of this enterprise but we assumed that it was probably on the order of two to three weeks, max.