Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: October 2008 Archives
Some might
feel that complaints about anything by First Class passengers are, well, somewhat
beyond the pale. After all they get actual food (using the term loosely) and
free booze (pursuant to the dictates of the flight attendants) and they require
no arthroscopic knee treatments after a five hour cross country flight (unless
they are professional football players). And I kind of agree with that. But
dammit, something has to be done about the Wee Brie.
For the uninitiated,
on the occasions when they offer free foodstuffs to First Class, the meals always
come with a Carr's Water Cracker and a prepackaged wedge of an alledgedly
cheeselike product called Wee Brie ("Just
Like Cheese But Not"). This I believe constitutes the appetizer portion of the
meal. Wee Brie is an abomination to all that is good and fine in the world. It's
ostensibly a cheese food product which usually means that it contains no actual
dairy products or even anything that has been exposed to rennet. The taste is
bland to the point of making that kindergarten paste one used to snack on in
one's youth a culinary highlight. And the consistency is, as Mary noted, not
unlike bathroom caulk. In brief, Wee Brie is awful.
Why, in a
world filled with upwards of two hundred cheese varieties in the
So I call
on American Airlines, today, right here, right now, to dispatch the Wee Brie to
the deepest, darkest recesses of the whatever den of iniquity that birthed it
and switch to a natural and tasty cheese as soon as humanly possible. Failing
that, just give me another packet of pretzels.
A deep, dark and shameful secret. I possess a manbag or as I like to refer to it - a manly bag. Mary prefers the former descriptor. Then she cackles and asks if I'm using skin moisturizers or if I'd like a pedicure. My testosterone levels plummet just thinking about it.
So why the manbag? Well, for years I lofted around a masculine backpack to carry all the stuff one needs while exploring exotic locations like
I kind of see her point. It annoys her that I'm always bumping into people with the pack since I can't really see behind me. I thought about putting on a flasher with the back-up beeper sound that forklifts use, but Mary thought this might be even more annoying than occasionally slamming into strangers' foreheads with the heavily laden bag. So I went online some time ago and searched for the perfect messenger bag, which is completely different from a man purse.
Interesting note a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal (CEO's Are People, Too!) about the fall of the Australian dollar against the American dollar. Seems it's down to 1 AUS = 0.65
Four months ago the Australian dollar was close to parity with the American dollar. Now it's down to the lowest level in four years. So you can party Downunder like its 2004. If you can afford the airfare and you don't mind the eighteen hour flight, that is.
Well, the $19.28 per night promotion that Leading Hotels of the World was running crashed and burned, igniting a small orphanage across the street as well as an adjacent pet shop while flaming debris scorched a crowd of people who were lined up to give blood for Wall Street Melt Down refugees. Very sad.
I mentioned the LHW promotion last week. At the time I pondered whether or not the entity running the promotion had learned from past disasters and lined up enough servers and such to handle what I was sure was going to be a substantial amount of traffic. Of course, I thought, nowadays everyone knows that these types of promotions are huge and no one wants the kind of black eyes given out when they badly underestimate demand. So I was wrong. Welcome to my world.
Apparently, people who tried to enter online found access blocked for a couple of hours before the whole thing was pulled down and put to sleep. Then e-mails were sent out to interested parties to allow them to try again via an e-mail method. Some backing and filling and later that night the whole concept was put in a straightjacket, heavily dosed with Thorazine, and locked away in a secret bunker deep beneath the
As of this writing the whole promotion is now postponed, presumably until the Internet is replaced by microscopic laser communicators lodged deep in our hippocampus. Or is it hippocampi? Yup, I looked it up - hippocampi.
