Julie sent me this joke this morning. Hilarious.

“Hi, honey. This is Daddy. Is Mommy near the phone?”
“No, Daddy. She’s upstairs in the bedroom with Uncle Paul.”

After a brief pause, Daddy says, “But, honey, you don’t have an Uncle Paul.”
“Oh, yes, I do and he’s upstairs in the room with Mommy right now.”

***Brief Pause***

“Uh, okay then, this is what I want you to do. Put the phone down on the table, run upstairs and knock on the bedroom door and shout to Mommy that Daddy’s car just pulled into the driveway.”

“Okay Daddy, just a minute.”

A few minutes later the little girl comes back to the phone.

“I did it Daddy.”

“And what happened, honey?”

“Well, Mommy got all scared, jumped out of bed with no clothes on and ran around screaming. Then she tripped over the rug, hit her head on the dresser and now she isn’t moving at all!”

“Oh my God!!! What about your Uncle Paul?”

“He jumped out of the bed with no clothes on, too. He was all scared and he jumped out of the back window and into the swimming pool. But I guess he didn’t know that you took out the water last week to clean it. He hit the bottom of the pool and I think he’s dead.”

***Long Pause***

***Longer Pause***

***Even Longer Pause***

Then Daddy says, “Swimming pool? Is this 486-5731?”

I’ve given up, as I’m sure most of you have, on pretty much every airline out there. The past decade has seen air travel go from a generally unremarkable and convenient mode of transportation to some cantankerous form of voluntary and expensive imprisonment. Wait, strike that, they still feed you in jail.

Today, in what is the latest in a never-ending string of new fees and surcharges, Delta Airlines announced plans to introduce a fee of up to $50 for booking award travel. At least they have the decency to wear their reasoning on their cuff. They’ve called it a “fuel surcharge.” The article in today’s New York Times states that the cost of jet fuel has gone up 83.6% in the last year. It’s no mystery that the airlines are drowning in the cost of fuel.

But, I still have a problem with it. Obviously every company has a right to make a profit, and certainly they have an obligation to not lose money. But reward travel is supposed to be a loyalty promise the company makes to their customers. But once you start chipping away at that promise piece by piece, it destroys it entirely.

Ten years ago I booked an award ticket from Portland to Hong Kong. I went to the Delta ticketing office downtown and booked the trip with a real person standing in front of me for a total of $13 in taxes. Last year I booked a Delta award ticket to the UK over the phone for something along the lines of $40. This year, when I was attempting to book Julie’s and my Delta award tickets over the phone, they wanted to charge me a $25 booking fee, $70 in taxes, $25 for using a partner airline, lord knows how much in baggage fees and, had we waited until August to book, an extra $50 in fuel fees. It probably would have been closer to $200 a ticket. I was able to deftly navigating the system and get that number down to $53 per ticket, but it took a tremendous amount of working through loopholes.

Now, I realize $200 is a fraction of what an international ticket would cost - but a lot of these fees don’t really change depending on how far you travel. The fees can easily add up to 30% the price of a short domestic return ticket. That’s pretty pathetic.

So I guess the days of airlines rewarding you for your loyalty are done. If you’re lucky enough to find an available award flight to your destination, it will probably never add up to more than a discount. The Times also suggested that Delta will unveil a new award ticket structure on top of all this.

Cash ‘em in while you can, folks, cause your miles will keep getting shorter every day.

Exciting news everyone! Julie and I just booked our tickets to Japan. I’ve never been, but she’s lived there so it’ll be really special being shown around. We fly from Miami to Kansai on the 13th of November and back to Miami on the 23rd. Of course, with these tickets being purchased with air miles, we will also being visiting the fine cities of Atlanta, Detroit and Newark at various points en route. However, we fortunately won’t have to spend more than a few hours in each of those places. Anywho, those are all the details that exist right now. I’m sure there’ll be more to follow once we start putting a plan together.

Hello all. I’m finally home. Finally, finally, finally. I’ve been on the road for the past month, and I thought I’d never say it but I’m glad to be back in Miami. You know that song, the one that goes “I’ve been to Reno, Fargo, Minnesota…”, well that’s how I’ve felt recently. I flew out to Philadelphia, DC, Boulder, then to Portland, up to Seattle, Kennewick, Eugene, back to Miami for 5 days and the to San Francisco, Sacramento and finally Fresno. Thursday night, from the Seattle airport on my way home, I watched the sun dip down behind the Olympic mountains and I was relieved to be going home and sad to wave goodbye to the west coast for a while. But, I’m sure I’ll have more whirlwind crazy trips out west soon. Anywho, so after all that travel, all I brought you back was this lousy photo. Alright, I’m off to catch up on errands and such. Adios!

Hilarious adj. /hɪˈlɛəriəs, -ˈlær-, haɪ-/ The notion that one can continue to trail in the popular vote and delegate count, while loosing pledged Super Delegates and making quasi-rational arguments for seating the Florida and Michigan delegates, as a means to receive the Democratic nomination. She sure is one Hilarious Clinton.

Got this from the Consumerist.com. Thought it was pretty cute.

Holy mother of all things sacred, this has got to be the worst promotional video ever - not to mention how horrid the product itself looks. And Beamz? Even the name is fugly. Who would make such a thing? Even Sharper Image didn’t sell crap this bad. Anyway, I dare you to watch the whole video.

The Consumerist reported about an Absolut ad that’s running in Mexico. And because of it, not too surprisingly, a few Gringos have their panties in a knot. For clarification, this ad is referring to what was once the US-Mexico border prior to 1848. It doesn’t astonish me at all that some Americans find this distasteful, but I find swipe pretty hilarious. With all this American Mexico-bashing and these grotesque exhibits of xenophobia, I think it’s pretty called for. Regardless, the ad really doesn’t matter north of the border. It’s a Mexican ad for a Mexican target audience, and I imagine the Johnson family in their gated community were rightly left out of the discussion when this was getting brainstormed.

Reminds me of this ad that ran in Oregon:

Speak to your target audience, and learn to take a joke.

I realize it has been a good eon since the last post - my bad. Hope all’s been going well in your world. I have to say it’s been an eventful month round these parts. So, kinda like I did the last time I fell off the face of the earth, here’s a breakdown:

• I am doin new stuff at work. I am no longer an assistant buyer; I’ve been switched over to the planning side and am an assistant for the NE region (Boston, NYC) - cool stuff.
• Julie and I went to Costa Rica a few weeks ago. I realize I still haven’t sorted through the photos, and I apologise for that. I guarantee you, though, that there are some good ones. Stay tuned and I will post them - I promise.
• My two good German friends (formerly Crispin interns), came back to Miami for a nice long visit. So, we’ve had a chance to relive some good times, which includes a bit of BBQ and some Purple Rain at the karaoke bar.
• Also, several good friends of mine from college came out for a spring break vacation. It was great to see them - too bad the visit was so short, though!
• I’m headed to Portland for a long weekend starting this Thursday. After a year of being away, I’ve managed to get home 3 times in the past 4 months. That’s not too shabby. I’m looking forward to seeing family and friends, and having someone else pump my gas for me.
• I’ve gone geektastic recently. I updated my Blackberry OS so that I can exchange data over its Bluetooth connection (this means I can download traffic data on my TomTom). Exciting, I know. I’ve also got the phone set up as a tethered modem on my laptop, so I can surf from anywhere without paying for WiFi (because paying for WiFi is stupid). I’ve jailbroken my iPod touch and installed a VNC client so that I can access my home computer’s screen from anywhere with an Internet connection. Oh, and if you’ve jailbroken your iPod too, you should definitely install MobileScrobbler - which gives you a Last.fm interface on your iPod. Way cool. Is there more? You bet your tuches, but I’ll spare you the rest of my geekdom.

That’s about it. I’ll try to be better about posting. I swear.

Well, needless to say I’m a bit shocked and disheartened to read about Governor Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with a prostitution ring. Actually, I’m pretty angry about that. Spitzer was definitely someone I respected (despite the fact he spells his name with only 1 “L” and 1 “T”). What I did find interesting, however, was how the New York Times filled its entire account of the matter with references and citations. Like good old fashioned NYT investigative reporting, it reads more like recipe than a story - in stark contrast to the last sex scandal they “broke.” Of course, there’s no way to compare the McCain and the Spitzer stories. But, you better believe they had to have been pretty damn sure of the sources before they went to press with this one. Sigh. Thanks a bunch Eliot.