Category Archives: Travel

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on beer, breweries, airlines, airports, collusion, and selling out

So the airlines are supposedly colluding on price, eh? Who would have thought? I did. But I’m just some guy who flies regularly. I’m not a big shot at the Justice Department. But my Guests and I just did a brief half-hour of research to confirm what we’ve always suspected. It will undoubtedly take the Justice Department five months and $18M to do what I just did.

Kindly observe this tale of two airports: Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport & Manchester–Boston Regional Airport.

So I went to Priceline Senόr Bancό de Rόbber Bill Shatner’s website to fly between these two locations. I chose 10-12 November to:

– Eliminate the possibility of last minute flight booking disparities

– Non-holiday week

– Not on a Friday or the weekend

– Random boring normal week

Manchester to Phoenix NOV

And, hmm, I get $347 with Delta and United, and American / US Air is within 7%. So why are Delta and United charging the exact same price? So I figure, okay, maybe Bill’s got an inside Star Trek deal in place with Delta and United. So I journey directly to the Delta and United websites to get it straight from the airline’s maul.

United 348

United gives a figure of $348 or $1 off Shatner.

Delta 355

Delta’s $355 or a whole $7 more than Shatner.

Just to further investigate I strolled over to Southwest and no points for guessing how much they charge for this flight.

Southwest 348

Yeah.

So of the four major airlines (all now under Justice Department investigation) three of them charge the exact same price. The other is a whole 7% more expensive. I see. Yeah.

So is all of this just a coincidence? That $348 is just how much it costs to fly from Manchester to Phoenix and none of the airlines can mess with that price?

Put another way, none of these airlines seem interested in providing a price different from the others, so they could, like, make money. You know, compete with the other airlines for your business to make a higher profit than the other airline. Capitalism, competition, etc?

So are the airlines colluding on price? I’ll let you decide. But the answer’s yes.

Speaking of reasons why collusion occurs, it seems presidential candidates have taken it upon themselves to conduct campaign events at breweries. Why?

– Everybody loves beer

– Get to pose with industrial looking equipment

– Meet hard working Americans not yet replaced by some dude in Shenzhen

– Everybody loves beer

bush brewery

Here we see Bush 3 at Four Peaks Brewery in Arizona.

clinton brewery

And here we see Clinton 2 at Smuttynose Brewery in New Hampshire.

I like these breweries. Smuttynose’s Robust Porter is first rate.

Robust Porter

I’ve only drank Four Peak’s Kilt Lifter when I’m layover at Phoenix Sky because you can’t get it out east yet. Good stuff too.

kilt lifter

You can get Kilt Lifter at Zinc Brasserie’s in Terminal 4. By the way, Zinc Brasserie’s is the only place you need to eat at Phoenix Sky. Don’t bother with anywhere else. I literally schedule layovers at Phoenix Sky to eat there. Place is freaking awesome. I’ve never been at Manchester long enough to eat there, so I don’t know what they’ve got.

Anyways, despite my affection for Four Peaks and Smuttynose I’m rather unnerved they’ve decided to sell out like this. Don’t you go ahead and think breweries host campaign events for free. They want payback, eventually. A phone call here, a campaign contribution there. A little access, a chance to remind somebody later when you need a favor. A concept otherwise known as collusion.

If the airlines are colluding against the law they’ve been doing it for at least a decade. And now the Justice Department wants to get involved? Honestly I’m surprised they’re actually doing something. Businesses have gotten so good at rigging the game or selling out that I’m always surprised when the consumer is handed a real victory, like when Comcast recently lost the chance to become the true giant octopus.

But I kind of expect the airlines to break the rules. They’ve been doing it since the dawn of flight. When Sarsaparilla Airways was shoving $2 bills into Woodrow Wilson’s pocket. But beer is supposed to be better than that. Beer is for us, more personal, intimate. You drink it at home, while relaxing with good television or a great book. Beyond crooked awfulness. It irks me to see them in the game this way.

Is beer the next total sell out? I guess we’ll know if Bush 3 or Clinton 2 wins, and then I stroll into my local shopette and see six packs of Robust Porter and Kilt Lifter. And they’re both the exact same price.

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it’s perfectly okay to stare at the wall and do nothing

Depending on what your cultural background is, this may not come as a shocker.  However, I grew up in a society where Seinfeld’s David Puddy was a comical guy because he tended to stare off into oblivion like a lunatic.  That was the joke, that’s it, that he just stared at nothing.

Puddy's_apartment

It also helped that Patrick Warburton did the joke particularly well.

Years ago, during one of the rather darkest moments of my life, I often found the urge to sit in a chair and accomplish nothing. This is real dark shit, where you don’t want to / can’t work, read, eat, sleep, nothing. You just want to sit there staring at a wall for twenty minutes. It’s all you’ve got.

At the time, I confided to a wise person that this behavior bothered me immensely. That there was something wrong with this ala David Puddy. To which the person said in response, “It’s perfectly okay to stare at the wall and do nothing.”

Boy was she right.  Even now when life isn’t as, relatively, dark I still allow myself to do this on a regular basis.  When made a regular part of your daily life, it helps to cleanse your brain.

And when you think about your caveman self, this makes perfect sense.  Once upon a time some hunter dude would just blankly stare at trees for eight hours while he awaited the forthcoming sabertooth tiger kill.

When I traveled to Sicily I heard them refer to this concept as, “The Blessed Nothing”.  I’ve never forgotten that phrase.

And yet in our high-impact-super-modern-culture we never bother to employ this cleansing.  We can’t even sit down for eight seconds without having to do: something, anything.

When I was on the road this last weekend and on long layover at the airport bar I happened to notice that of the twenty or so folks sitting at the bar, every single one was holding a smartphone.  I was the only one just sitting there slowly sipping my beer and staring at the wall.  It’s relaxing.  But taken at face value, somebody would be like, “Who’s the weirdo just sitting there without his phone?”

Even worse was the couple at the small table behind me who instead of, you know, talking to each other were just sitting there in silence tacking away at the smartphones.  I haven’t been in a decent relationship in a long, long time.  But I’m pretty sure that if all you’ve got to talk about as a couple is a smartphone, that there’s a problem at hand.

So friends, the next time you’re at the bar, or seated alone in the terminal awaiting your flight, or waiting for your friends on a park bench?  Just sit there and do nothing.  Stare into oblivion.  And see what delicious places your mind can take you.  Once you get used to doing this on a regular basis, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.  Your brain will thank you.

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airlines apparently need iPads to fly, iPhones to instruct location of on-switch

Apparently, American Airlines needs a working iPad to fly an aircraft.  Otherwise the pilots don’t have charts.  And I discovered today that it’s not just American, but multiple airlines who use tablets as their air charts.  So if the tablets break, the aircraft has no charts.

That’s just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

So if the tablet breaks while in flight, do they have to emergency land the aircraft?  If the answer’s yes, then we’re all placing our lives in the hands of some of the most breakable, fragile technology since somebody tried to use crystal glass as a medieval battlefield melee weapon.  Or, if the answer’s no, and the pilots just fly on with a broken iPad, then why can’t they just take off with it broken too?

So like, I suck at math.  So I use a calculator.  I can’t even do effective long division by hand no more.  But I’m not a mathematician.  So who cares.  But if I was an airline pilot, and I need an iPad?  Otherwise I can’t fly?  Then I’m pretty sure the pilot is too dependent upon technology and/or sucks as a pilot.

And don’t give me that nonsense that a paper chart is equivalent, that the iPad is just more efficient and is otherwise the same thing.  A paper air chart only breaks when the aircraft is in flames.  Circa 2019, some twelve-year-old-coked-out-virgin-boy from Cincinnati is going to find a way to hack the airline flight chart iPad.

We’re too dependent on technology.  We can’t do nothing without it no more.  Soon, we’ll need the smartphone to instruct us to do the following exquisite tasks:

– a new type of food arrives at your restaurant table; you’ve never eaten it before; whip out phone for directions on how to consume this new exotic treat; don’t bother trying to figure it out on your own, like it’s some kind of adventure; don’t live life, instead, do exactly as you’re told to do by others

– you no longer remember how to read a road map; road maps are you obey the verbal directions of a machine; in the event of the apocalypse, you’ll misinterpret an existing road map and drive towards the zombies’ lair instead of away from them; thus dooming your family to a lifetime banquet of brains; way to go

– you’ve forgotten how to talk to somebody face-to-face; the last time you actually saw your friends in non-text-social-media form was 2004; in fact, you just walked past them on the street and didn’t know it, you don’t even exist, nor do they

– in order to determine the time of day, you must consult your phone; one day, just for the hell of it you tried to look up at the sky to see if you could tell what time it was by the position of the sun; but you just burned your retinas as you hadn’t been outside beyond commuting to work in five weeks

– one morning, you awoke and found your phone had died; you thus no longer possessed the means to acquire news; given this, you thus naturally assumed the universe was ending, and that the dawn of a new age was at hand; and so you looted your neighbors’ homes for their worldly possessions, and declared yourself overlord of your general residential area; until you were viciously overthrown by the local authorities; but not having your smartphone handy, you were unable to determine which mental institution they were taking you, nor provide directions to the loon-van driver; for his phone had died too, and he didn’t know how to get back to work from your house