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Ghost of LL

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Ghost of LL

  1. Oh, my god--are they now going to run it all the way up the Champs Elysees? Because that's going to take a half-hour.
  2. Oh, shit--the cauldron is Notre Dame. They're going to light that fucker back up and watch 'er burn again!
  3. These speeches are interminable.
  4. The fact that nobody has claimed credit undermines the "protest" theory. The whole point of protest is to raise awareness of a cause. But if you don't claim responsibility, then nobody's awareness is raised as to your cause. That indicates that the purpose was the disruption itself, not the communication of any message. And that implies that there may be further acts to come. The other thing that points in the direction of Russia is that it was not designed to kill or maim, but only to severely disrupt and inconvenience an event from which Russia has been banned. If this were al Qa'ida or some other terrorist group, they would've placed a bomb on the trains. But this just damaged infrastructure. It's an act designed to come just short of what would bring about a declaration of war.
  5. And I'm totally here for it.
  6. Ok--real talk, and please explain it to me like I'm 5: what makes J.D. Vance a bad pick as a running mate? You can't count the couch shit--we could've made that up about anyone. Now admittedly, maybe it wouldn't have been as believable if one said it about some people. I mean, it's a lot more funny, believable, and gross when it's J.D. Vance rather than, say, John Cornyn. But still, . . . As for his lack of charisma, he's still probably better than DeSantis. And while he may hate cats, at least he didn't kill the family dog unlike Kristi Noem. And his political positions--shit like putting tracking devices on women of childbearing age--isn't that just pretty standard Republican fare these days? I guess my point is that all of these people are fucking weird and noxious. J.D. Vance just seems like he's kind of league average for that party.
  7. As a matter of fact, . . . .
  8. Did nobody else feel that one?
  9. It's fucking Boeing. They can't get enough airplanes. So it's not that they can't make IAH work. It's that they don't make as much money out of IAH as they can make flying those planes out of DCA or BOS or FLL.
  10. No way a great general like the late, great Hannibal Lector would lose to a black guy.
  11. I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no fucking way Donald Trump has the first clue who Hannibal is.
  12. @Macklemore, is that true?
  13. Well, unless you think that she hired a bunch of new prosecutors who were much better courtroom advocates--a possibility, I concede--the only way to accomplish that is by dismissing a bunch of cases that didn't have the evidence to support a conviction. And isn't that something everyone should approve of? I mean, I don't do crimes . . . just go with me on this one for a minute . . . so wouldn't I want a DA who I knew wouldn't proceed with a prosecution that doesn't have the evidence to support a conviction? And wouldn't that be doubly true if I were a member of a minority group that is disproportionately targeted by law enforcement?
  14. I'll also compliment AA on their baggage handling of late. They've always put this "Priority" tag on your bags if you're Platinum or above. But until the past year or two, I never noticed it making any particular difference. But the past several times I've flown and checked bags, my "Priority" bags have come off the conveyor within the first ten bags. And that's a pretty nice perk.
  15. You know--I just went through my camera roll, and I don't think I have any. I'll have to ask Mrs.LL. She was one of those women who you honestly couldn't tell how old she was. She could've been 50. But she also might've been 75. I just don't know. Which might be a credit to her plastic surgeon. But did she have plastic surgery? I really couldn't tell. And then you'd chat with her, and she might just be dressed in a white shirt and jeans. All very casual and stylish. But then you looked closer, and you figured out that the shirt probably cost $2,000. I mean, it didn't have a designer name plastered all over it to let you know it was expensive. It took a trained eye--and Mrs.LL has a very trained eye. Just a fascinating person.
  16. No, they're not. You'll see ticket-splitting between a federal and a state election. Someone might vote for the Republican candidate for president and then the Democratic candidate for governor. But for two federal offices? That has never been that common, and it has become downright rare. The idea that 10% of voters in Arizona are going to split their ticket is downright absurd--I don't care how good or bad the Senate candidates are. The only explanation that I can come up with is that these are polls of registered voters. There's no likely-voter screen on these polls. And so you have a bunch of people saying "Trump" on the presidential election but "I don't know" on the Senate election because they're (1) disengaged and (2) uninterested in the Senate race because they know goddamned well they're not going to vote. That's just a hypothesis. But regardless of the reason for it, I don't for a minute believe that the Democrats are going to sweep these Senate seats and then turn around and get swept in the presidential election in those states. It's just impossible.
  17. We got done last month with a three-week cruise on Silversea from San Francisco to New York via the Panama Canal. It was definitely not trashy. And we got to see @Pescado_Rojo in Cabo, so that was fun. We were traveling with the kids, and we had two suites (all of the rooms on Silversea are suites), but they weren't connecting and were a bit down the hall from one another. So about two weeks before the cruise, the agent calls me up and says, "Hey, Mr. GOLL, good news--there's an upgrade available to the two-bedroom Owners' suite for a price of just eleventy trillion dollars." And, I mean--why not? So at this point in the review, may I suggest you cue up the Vivaldi to play in the background as you read further: So here's the deal with Silversea: everything is included. Ok--pretty much everything. The drinks are included, the gratuities are included, one shore excursion at each stop is included. There are certain premium drinks that cost extra. If you want a cigar in the cigar bar, those are extra. There is one restaurant that has a $60 pp cover charge. But yeah--pretty much once you step on that boat, you can throw your wallet in the safe and never touch it again. Another thing with Silversea is the service. On our ship, the Silver Shadow, there are about 350 passengers and 300 crew members, so you have close to a 1-1 passenger-to-crew ratio. Each suite has its own butler, of whom you can ask the most absurd requests. I asked for caviar service and a fresh bottle of champagne in the room every evening at 6:00--I mean, it's included, after all--and it was done. And with so few passengers, the crew pretty quickly figures out your name and what your preferences are. It took them about two days to figure out that I was going to want a dirty Grey Goose martini with three blue cheese olives at the beginning of every dinner. By the end of the first week, they just stopped asking--it just appeared a few minutes after I sat down. As you can imagine, all this comes at a price. So yeah--that's another deal with Silversea: it's fantastically expensive. A by-product of that is that it attracts an older crowd. My kids were the only kids on the ship. And they were kind of a novelty--that ship obviously doesn't see a lot of kids. The passengers ranged from about 45 to 75, with most being between probably 55 and 70. It was about a third Americans/Canadians, a third British, and a third various other countries (a fair number of Germans and Swiss, a handful of Australians, probably six French, and a couple of Finns--the Finns were a fucking blast). With that kind of crowd--i.e., an international crowd that can afford that type of cruise--it's kind of the opposite of other cruises I've been on, where you kind of put your head down and try to avoid interacting with any of these people. On this cruise, the other passengers were fascinating. I mean, some of them were fucking wild. Olga the rich tech widow from Monterey was one of the more interesting people I've ever met. So yeah--all y'all fancy Surly-ites who don't want to deal with trashy cruise lines, . . . maybe check that out.
  18. Yep. And if the end result is that the Muslims in Michigan get Trump elected, then I hope they enjoy being deported to Palestine. I mean, for the few minutes they'll have to enjoy it before Israel fucking levels the place. I mean, Jesus--what a bunch of absolute fucking dolts.
  19. I don't imagine that list to be very long. Unlike my Johnson. [/Slider] So here's the thing about astronauts--kinda nobody idolizes astronauts anymore. At least not like we did in the Mercury and Apollo days. Except in Florida. Astronaut-worship is still a thing in Florida--particularly in that triangle between Orlando, Daytona Beach, and Vero Beach (Dodgertown!). And I don't know how many votes that gets you. Maybe none. But I do think it means that there is a penalty in Florida for going hard after Kelly in a way that there wouldn't be for going hard against, for example, Andy Basheer.
  20. And here's the other problem with the robotaxi idea--I mean, apart from the fact that TSLA isn't close to getting the "robo" part right--Uber and Lyft already have the software to dominate the actual "taxi" part of that equation. There's no opening for TSLA to implement any kind of operation of its own. And to the extent it thinks it's going to sell cars to Uber/Lyft, . . . why would they do that when Ford et al. is going to make them the same/better offer?
  21. I will go further--having Platinum status on AA and having access to the AAdmirals Club is really nice. The ladies at the Austin AAdmirals Club know me. On the occasion where I had a problem with a flight, I can go to them and they take care of the rebooking. So my experience isn't exactly standard, but I have been pretty pleased with AA.
  22. You know my favorite part? It's that somewhere here in Austin on Sunday early afternoon, a certain attorney general who knows he is about to be under federal indictment saw a news alert. And almost immediately he recognized that his likelihood of spending a significant amount of time in a federal prison increased by at least a factor of ten. That had to make for quite a downer at brunch.
  23. Years ago, I had this same experience on DL connecting through ATL. It's infuriating. And obviously by no means unique to AA. It isn't just metrics. There are other scheduling considerations, including crew time (as @Your Mom points out above). And if they run over crew time and have to cancel a flight, the DOT now makes the airline refund everyone. And I think the traveling public favors that rule, even if the consequence is that people are from time to time going to get left behind at the gate.
  24. Travis is already up nearly a foot over this time yesterday, and none of that Llano water has even made it to LBJ, much less Travis. I don't know, and it's really unknowable without running a model. It's going to take different amounts of time depending on the size of the flood (broadly speaking, it takes a larger flood more time to flow downstream). But just looking at a map and being vaguely familiar with the topography, I would guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 36 hours.
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