“Flights delayed or canceled, you say? Let them take private jets!” — Scott Kirby, CEO, United Airlines
No, he didn’t say that. But he might just as well have. Oink, oink.
When pigs fly (in private planes)
Category: Capitalist swine
Delta Farce
“If you’re traveling this summer, you better hope that you don’t need help from an airline.” — Mac Schwerin, “Somehow, Airline Customer Service Is Getting Even Worse,” in The Atlantic.
And yet people wonder why I refuse to fly the unfriendly skies.
Last evening Herself and I — from the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport and The Duck! City, respectively — were watching her scheduled departure time shift from 6:35 p.m. Minneapolis time to 8:13, then 10 … and finally right off the clock entirely. Mickey’s big hand gave us the finger. Canceled. Sorry ’bout that.
According to FlightAware, the Delta aircraft headed her way from Maine was delayed more than four hours before finally taking off just before 6 p.m. Duck! City time — whether it had been in Maine all that time is anybody’s guess, as is where it was actually headed once it left the Pine Tree State — and for a while there it was looking like she still had a chance of getting home by stupid-thirty Tuesday morning.
But nix. No wheels up for you, toots. Go stand in line with the other poor saps to learn nothing useful from a Delta agent. Word on the concourse was that all Delta flights for Tuesday were already full up, and there might not be a seat available until Thursday. Yikes, etc.
So I book her a room at the nearby Hilton Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport … after which she decides to rent a seat on a Southwest flight to The Duck! City via Phoenix leaving at 5:35 a.m.
This means being at the Minneapolis airport by 3:35 a.m. for check-in, so there’s no point in cabbing it to the Hilton for a $200 wash and brush-up and then heading right back to the airport for another beating.
So I go to cancel that room … only Hilton won’t let me do it online for some mysterious reason known only to the servo-bots running the Hilton website. So I have to call and speak to an actual human being. How 20th century of them.
Happily, the obsolete meat-things prove friendly, efficient and helpful — tip of the Mad Dog Rivendell cap to Alicia working the front desk in Minneapolis — and the room is canceled without penalty, leaving Herself at liberty to wander aimlessly through the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport dragging Old Pinkie, her battle-scarred, doughty rolling suitcase, which Delta did not send to Tierra del Fuego, Ukraine, or the Event Horizon in orbit around Neptune.
Now, some might say that looking to Southwest for salvation is like hailing a passing shark to take you from the Titanic to that iceberg over there. And I am one of them.
But at least those pirates finally got her and Old Pinkie off the deck and into the air. If only to Sky Harbor. Happily, they have Hiltons in Phoenix too.
• Editor’s note: Yes, I read about the weather nightmares, traffic-control problems, and the overheating cable at Ronnie Raygun Intergalactic Airport. Thousands of flights delayed or canceled. And like Mac Schwerin I appreciate the complexities of arranging air travel. (“Delta flies something like the population of Sacramento every day, on average.”) But still, you’d think Someone in Authority might empower the boots on the ground at the Delta counter to grab a hot mic and shout, “You’re all fucked!” rather than making their customers queue up to get the same message one at a time.
On the wings of a dove
The Duck! City is something of an aviary all of a sudden.
I’ve heard a couple hummingbirds buzzing around (haven’t actually seen one yet). Quail I have seen, and heard. Finches are hitting our feeders like the working press swarming an open bar.
And we have the usual dove nesting beneath the overhang by the front door.
Speaking of our feathered friends, it seems E. Lawn Mulch must’ve gotten lonely in those Twitter offices he’s worked so diligently to empty. His latest attention-getting ploy is to do a flyby on newsletter platform Substack, which has announced plans to launch the latest Next Twitter Thingie, called Notes.
Captain Free Speech — who croaked his own newsletter platform — has apparently gone all Twitter Über Alles on Substack, forbidding embedded tweets in Substack posts, links in tweets to Substack articles, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
According to Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post:
On Thursday, Substack writers discovered that they were no longer able to embed tweets in their Substack posts. Writers who tried were met with the message, “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts.”
On Friday morning, Twitter began blocking users from retweeting, liking or engaging with posts that contained links to Substack articles. Users also could not pin posts containing links to Substack to the top of their profiles. On Friday evening, Twitter began marking links to Substack as “unsafe.”
Even Substack’s corporate Twitter account was restricted, with users reporting that they were unable to retweet or quote-tweet the handle’s posts.
A number of Substack writers are very much not amused, among them Matt Taibbi, who announced that “beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter. …”
Judd Legum, Matt Swider, and Laura Jedeed were likewise critical, with Jedeed telling The Verge that she sees subscription bumps “every time Musk does something stupid.”
“I think people realize Twitter is dying and they want to keep hearing from me after it falls apart,” she says. “He’s driving traffic my way by being stupid but, like everything he does, it’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”
Hey, dude’s still laying eggs. The smelly brown ones. Anyone promoting an online presence anywhere other than Twitter should probably invest in umbrellas and air fresheners.
Rock ’n’ roll
I’ve done a number of questionable things for money, but the only one with any staying power was journalism.
Earning power? Well … not so much. Especially after I left the newspaper to hang out my own shingle back in 1991.
Still, like crucifixion, it gets you out in the open air. Here’s your rock, there’s your hill, what’s your hurry?
I finally left that rock at the bottom of the hill about this time last year, and I can’t say I miss rolling it. Both rock and hill had shrunk over the years. But so had the pay. And the people who owned the hill at any given moment still seemed to think they were doing you a favor by letting you roll that rock.
“Well rolled indeed!” they’d exclaim as you reached the summit, gasping for air. “Sign here. And here. And here. And here. Yes, payment 30 days after publication as specified in the contract. Did we mention we’ve rewritten the contract? No? Well, we have, in Cretan Linear B this time, and I’m afraid we can’t cut you a check until you’ve scrawled your X on that old bottom line.
“Oh, dear, rock’s rolled down the bloody hill again. Be a dear and fetch it, won’t you? And do have your attorney or shaman or whomever look over that contract. Ta.”
Lacking professional support I eyeballed that contract myself and came away thinking the rock looked pretty good right where it was. It still does.
Doesn’t mean I’ve quit rolling rocks altogether, of course.
Many years ago, between paying trips up and down the hill, I acquired my own tiny mound on the Innertubes and in my spare time nudged the odd pebble up its gentle slope. Strictly for giggles, mind you; if I were to charge admission it would feel like work.
I think I started blogging on AOL in the mid- to late Nineties; for sure I was doing my own self-hosted thing on a succession of small-time ISPs by 1999. The Wayback Machine has a capture from December 2000 that shows a visitor counter which started tallying the rubes a year earlier.
So, yeah. I’ve been at it for a few years, and I’m not giving it up. Not this year, and not next, Dog willing and the crick don’t rise. The bells and whistles come and go — the cartoons, the videos, the podcasting — but the blogging remains.
Who knows? It may just be The Next Big Thing.
But even if it isn’t, my thanks to all of yis who have gathered upon the hill — and who keep gathering, against your better judgment — to watch Your Humble Narrator perform his one-man, dinner-theater production of “Bowling with Sisyphus.”
I know, it’s only rock ’n’ roll. But I like it.
McShrooms
The Suits have come for your ’shrooms.
Jesus H. Don Juan and St. Castaneda preserve us! Is nothing sacred? Is there anything global capitalism will not besmirch with its grabby little hands?
Coming soon to a strip mall near you: a chain trippery called Mescalito’s. Try the gluten-free non-GMO vegan Peyote Burger with a side of Zoom ’Shrooms and a Cabron Lite® CBD lager!
Sorry, we haven’t had a drive-through window since a VW van full of hippies got caught in an M.C. Escher-King Crimson feedback loop at our Taos location and wound up circling the joint like hairy zopilotes until they ran out of gas.
So much for being a Trippist monk, growing your own revelations.
Oh, well. I guess even Mother Church has to buy the wafers and wine from someone.
In other news that makes you wonder who’s taking what:
• What’s this shit? The state of California has slammed the lid on San Francisco’s plans for a $1.7 million public toilet in Noe Valley. Is that a steep price for a one-holer? Does the pope shit in the woods? Noe thank you, please. Apparently there are some crappers down which not even California will flush the taxpayers’ dollars.
• Holy shit! Is Pootie-poot really contemplating a false-flag “dirty bomb” attack that would justify his use of nuclear weapons to pull his nicely roasted lil’ chestnuts out of the fire in Ukraine? If we’re going headfirst down that glow-in-the-dark loo, I’m gonna need some ’shrooms, stat.
Mad Blog Media 