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Ghost of LL

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Posts posted by Ghost of LL

  1. Cross-posting from the oyster thread, but the Hampton Inn on Franklin Street is up a very short back stairs from Eventide.  It might as well be the hotel bar.

     

    This is where I’ll be for the next four days, if anyone wants to pop in and hear some hot takes.

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    IMG_9099.thumb.jpeg.291ee492a9499d3df30bda9a618521d8.jpeg

    • Hook 'Em 3
  2. Ok—for those of you looking for a recommendation in Portland, the Hampton Inn is a short walk up the back stairs to Evantide. It might as well be the hotel bar. And for the next four days, that’s where l’ll be hanging out from about 9:00 to midnight.

    • Hook 'Em 2
  3. On 8/25/2025 at 6:31 AM, AnTiM said:

    Jerry Jones is the Elon Musk of the NFL.  I was fortunate to attend SB XXVIII when Johnson had them on top, hard to believe the damage that a rich moron can do.

    I think that is entirely wrong and fundamentally misguided.

    I have the benefit of viewing this drama from the perspective of a non-Cowboys fan.  I was a Cowboys fan in the early 90's for those two Super Bowls, but hiring the Football Antichrist killed it for me.  Moving the team to Tarrant County put it in the ground.  Marrying a New Yorker shoveled dirt on the coffin (Go Giants!).

    But regardless of whatever time I may support, the purpose of the Dallas Cowboys (and the New York Giants and the NFL as a whole) is to make money for its ownership.  It's a business.  That's it.  Its purpose is to sell shit to people who will buy it.  Winning football games is generally helpful to meeting that purpose.  But as Jerry Jones has demonstrated, it's not at all necessary.

    @Iceman is entirely right in his assessment.  Jerry Jones is the most successful owner in the NFL.  He alone was responsible for driving the NFL's revenue stream over the past 35 years.  The team is now probably worth more than 100x what he paid for it.  That's not really due to any other ownership group; it's not really due to Roger Goddell's leadership.  It's largely due to the changes Jerry Jones pioneered, advocated, and implemented.

    The Chiefs have more recent success than the Cowboys.  But the Hunt family owes Jerry Jones a huge debt of gratitude for making that franchise what it's worth today.  And do you honestly think that Clark Hunt wouldn't trade Jerry franchises tomorrow straight up?

    Has Jerry damaged the on-the-field product?  I mean, yeah--maybe.

    But when viewed through the perspective of the Cowboys as a money-making venture, maybe not.  Because what we want more than wins is drama.  And Jerry has delivered drama.  It's the best show in the NFL.  Hell--it's the best show in professional sports.  Again--I'm not a Cowboys fan.  But damned if I don't listen to Cowboys talk on the Ticket because it's entertaining AF.  

    Jerry has entertained the Metroplex (and really, all of America) for 35 years.  You want wins?  Go cheer for the fucking Eagles.  But if you want to be entertained, there's nothing better than this fucking circus.

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  4. This reminds me of Easter Egg hunts my grandmother's house.  Like you, we did them outdoors with real eggs.  And more than once in the hunt for the eggs we'd find a lost egg from the previous year.  It was . . . not safe for human consumption.

    My grandmother was a child of the Great Depression.  As such, she didn't fully trust banks.  She would hide money all over the house--under the mattress, in empty Blue Bell half-gallon cartons in the freezer, in her jewellery box (because thieves aren't going to be looking in the jewellery box).  But she'd also hide it in containers out in the yard.  After we found the first $1,000 in a coffee can in the backyard, we got a metal detector out and found another half-dozen coffee cans.  But I guarantee you she had some in cigar boxes and other non-metallic containers back there.  There are probably still thousands of dollars buried on that property backing up to Walnut Creek.  

  5. 59 minutes ago, Disco Strangler said:

    Historically in favor of US economic support for Israel.  Now, I hope we never give one more American dollar to the country.  They can stand or fall on their own and defend themselves without our help.  I expect that new generations of US politicians coming up will feel the same way and Israel's status as our ally will shift dramatically in popular opinion.  The next generation of US citizens and their representatives will have a much starker memory of the country's current actions than they do of their grandparents' memories of what happened in WWII.  

    It's not just "memories of what happened in WWII" that historically justify our sponsorship of Israel.  There were certain Cold-War realities that made it advisable.  Syria, Egypt, and Iraq were in the Soviet camp during much of the Cold War.  Israel served as a necessary Western counterweight in the Levant.

    But the Cold War has been over for more than 30 years.  And while we still want to restrict Russian influence in the Eastern Mediterranean, Isreal isn't exactly the best vehicle (or even a good vehicle) toward accomplishing that.

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  6. 15 hours ago, WBT said:

    stfu dude.  Yeah this Stanford team you've been watching all night needs to call timeout so they can march the field in 20 seconds.

    I mean, yeah.  But at the same time . . . you didn't want to give your offence even the opportunity?

    You know and I know that if Stanford gets the ball back on its own 25 down 3 with :20 left to play, the sequence is going to be Incomplete; Incomplete; Sack.  So it probably doesn't really matter.

    But isn't there a 0.01% chance that one of those incompletions is actually caught and he dude runs at least into field-goal range?  And isn't that better than the 0% likelihood of winning that you have with taking those TOs with you to the locker room?

  7. 1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

    There was a pretty cute gal from Ballinger I flirted with hard in college.  Tried to connect, and it just wasn't happening.  Later that semester, started dating the gal who I ended up marrying.  Early December, we became a real-deal couple.  Days later, Ballinger gal called ME (1) to tell me she was having a little Christmas party at her condo, and (2) she'd really like me to come, as her date.  Had to let her down.

    That's the way I roll.  Breaking cute Ballinger gals' hearts.

    Kinda dodged a bullet, though.  She and my wife actually knew each other, and ran in the same circles over the years.  Turns out, she was kinda weird.  Don't know if that was her, or the Ballinger coming through.

    Shortly after @DDD Dad and I finished with a bunch of Ballinger work, I hit it off with an entirely different really cute Ballinger gal on a Southwest Airlines flight.  Sadly, I was (and am) married.  But damn--she seemed really fun.

    • Fuck Around and Find Out 1
  8. 10 minutes ago, utee94 said:

    Oh, wah, my life was so hard, flying for free all over the world, including Hawaii...

    :)

     

    I'm sorry.  If my little story contained a "woe was me" tone, then I wrote it poorly.

    Flying all over the world for free was fucking amazing.  I virtually grew up on airplanes.  To this day, I can recite the gates to which Southwest assigned its flights at Love Field (San Antonio flights went out of Gate 1; Amarillo and New Orleans flights went out of Gate 2; all Houston flights went out of Gate 4 (Gate 4A at the top of the hour; Gate 4C at the bottom)).  And I loved fingering through the OAG guide to plan out contingencies in case we got stuck in fucking Kansas City.

    So yeah--nothing hard about my youth.  And I'm going to miss the OAG, which was a reminder of it.

     

     

     

    But still--crawling into a suit in a bathroom at HNL was some bullshit.

  9. 23 hours ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

    If any of you miscreants are in South Austin, I’m meeting some friends after church and about to plow through a Mexican martini and 2 carne guisada burritos at Maudie’s Hacienda.  I’m wearing a Whataburger baseball hat and some queso on my shirt.

    The new salsa verde at Maudie's is pretty damn good.  But it pisses me off that they're charging for salsa.

    Oh well--I'll fucking pay for it.

  10. 22 hours ago, Chips O'Toole said:

    Struggled to finish a lesser opponent off again.  In total control until the (bullshit) VAR PK call, then we were on the back foot for the rest of the game. Houston had 2-3 more great chances as well. 

    I don't think we did much after Rubio and Sanchez were subbed out.  

    Bukari was absolute magic on the second goal and should have finished one himself in the second half. Biro had a hell of a game as well.  

    I went to the game Saturday through the chairity of @Brisketexan, and I was amazed by how bad the game presentation is.  They don't run any video throughout the game of the play.  For probably a quarter of the game, the videoboard is just showing a big sign that "Austin FC provides closed captioning . . . ."  Great.  But nobody is saying anything during play.  So what does anybody care of there is closed captioning?

    The replays weren't any better.  There were only a couple replays of each goal (and of the second goal, the replay came only after the ball had been back in play for about five minutes).  No replays of any fouls.  So I really couldn't tell you whether the PK call was bullshit.

    If I had any interest in what was actually happening on the pitch, I'd have been vastly better off at home.

    Fortunately, I had minimal interest--I was there to hang out with Brisket and my son.  And so from that perspective, it was a successful evening.  

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  11. 9 hours ago, Hayduke said:

    Appreciate this perspective a lot.  I enjoy a more detailed discussion of anything that sparks my curiosity, and the OAG did that because I'd not heard of it.

    I don't think I'm nostalgic, except maybe for a childhood when I was able to be more easily impressed by things like a "free" meal on a plane. Flew very little when I was young and have only experienced enough of it since to be able to see which parts of the experience have eroded over time, which is probably most of them except the high-end stuff and the presence of things that were only Jetsons material before.

    Flying is a kick in the nuts if you're not business class or above, or fortunate enough to have a single-leg trip. I'd probably rather drive from NY to LA. Free wifi ain't gonna save the experience for me, but a Kindle book and my own music makes it more bearable. I'm with you there.

    Can't say I'd rather have a bad free meal on the plane than an acceptable to decent one in the airport. But the entire flying experience seems to have deteriorated. Navigating take-out selections in the jammed, narrow concourses at O'Hare, for instance, is a nightmare that made me pick hunger over the prospect of missing a connection last year. 

    At the same time, I also remember flying to a conference around 1997 or so from Easterwood Regional in College Station. Flight was at 7:35 a.m. and I woke up at 7:10.  Even though I was six miles from the airport, I made the plane.

    If I have to venture an opinion, it's that air travel did strike me as more bearable and even humane when I first flew and wasn't horrible when I was a younger adult and flying on my own. From parking to security to picking up baggage, it's more a trial now, and a decent part of that probably is a function of aging. 

    No question on your final point, though. Except ... pics.

    So my perspective is a little different.  My dad was an airline employee.  So we flew everywhere NonRev.  But two things about flying NonRev: (1) it was standby, and (2) you had to be in a suit.

    The first point is why I'm so familiar with the OAG.  I can't tell you how many times we got stuck in some place like Boston or Denver because the flight we had anticipated getting on ended up being sold out.  So then we had to pop open the OAG in the terminal to figure out what flights we might be able to piece together to get back to Dallas.  By the time I was a teenager, my father would have two--one for him and one for me.  So we would sit there with our own OAG piecing together options.  "Ok--we can catch that Continental flight to IAH and then get the one that leaves 40 minutes later to SAT and then get on a Southwest flight to DAL."  "No--that's not going to work.  That CO flight to IAH is always oversold; check out the TWA flight through STL."

    The second point sucked, and it's why I don't share the often-expressed nostalgia for people dressing up to fly.  I can't tell you in how many airport bathrooms I've changed from shorts and t-shirt into a suit.  It really is probably a hundred.  And you could always tell the NonRevs in those days because they're the people hanging out near the gate agent wearing a suit in goddamned Honalulu.  It was ridiculous.

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  12. 3 hours ago, Hayduke said:

    Thanks, @Ghost of LL. The guide would have made sense for frequent travelers, especially if they didn't want to rely on travel agents and administrative travel planners.

    I recall some flights with my family in the '70s when I was too small to pay attention to seat size, but remember better times, especially regarding meals. Some quick AI searches say average coach seat size has shrunk from 20-21 inches wide (about the size of current first-class seats) and legroom from about 35 inches in the '60s to around 31 now and as low as 28 in budget carriers.

    Before deregulation of the industry, complimentary meals, drinks (including alcoholic beverages) and even some entertainment were the norm and airlines competed with one another on amenities. One thing that popped up said Southwest "offered a bottle of alcohol to passengers who paid the full fare."  Anybody remember that?

    So generally folks were getting what's now first-class experience -- and paying the price. Even my earliest flights, paid by the military when we followed Dad to Europe, were on airlines that I think no longer exist but still seemed slightly luxurious to me and my siblings. Things have just been eroding since, although, as @tigol points out, at least the air on planes has gotten better.

    Was coming back from Costa Rica via Panama maybe 10 years ago on Copa and was stunned by a free meal and beer in coach. I wonder if they're still holding out, but kinda doubt it.

     

    Ok, but counterpoint: the "and paying the price" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.  But even with that lift, it's wrong.  If you compare the similarly priced products--a First Class seat today vs. a Coach seat in 1970--the flyer today is getting a waaaaaaay better product.  It's a product that the flyer in 1970 would only dream of.

    And for a small fraction of the price of a Coach seat in 1970, the passenger flying in Economy today is getting a product that is in some ways worse.  But in some other ways it's better.  As you point out, the Coach seat in 1970 was bigger.*  There was more leg room.  You sometimes got a meal and a drink.**

    But let's be real honest about that meal.  It was bad.  It was actually often borderline inedible.  But it was also your only choice.  Because back in 1970, airports didn't have restaurants that offered to-go meals in them.  In a standard 1970 airport, you had one bar and one restaurant, both of which were places that were owned by the best friend of the local city councilman.  They were by-and-large pretty terrible.  Ok--the one in Albuquerque offered a damned good breakfast taco.  But that was an exception.  But the idea of grabbing something from Campisi's or Chik-fil-a or Whataburger before your flight and eating it on the plane?  It was unheard of.  You were going to get the equivalent of a Stouffer's tv dinner that was either badly overcooked or badly undercooked (often both), and that was it.

    Your entertainment was going to be a 13-inch television screen mounted in the ceiling of the cabin five rows in front of you.  It would show one movie.  That's it.  You've already seen that movie?  You don't like that genre?  Too fucking bad--read your goddamned Time magazine and shut up.  Now you get wifi (which airlines are starting to offer for free).  Or you bring your iPad with you with the movies you've already downloaded.  In 1970, you couldn't have dreamed of having those entertainment options in your home, much less in an airplane.

    I get it, brother--I'm old, too.  I find myself prone to nostalgia.  But I do still have a decent memory.  And I'm going to tell you that the Golden Age of Commercial Aviation wasn't that great.***

     

     

    *The Coach seat in 1970 was wider solely as a function of the aircraft used.  The Lockheed Electra and other propeller-driven aircraft were still widely in use on domestic short- and medium-haul flights.  And those planes had a wider fuselage, which allowed for wider seats.  But if given the choice between flying on a Lockheed Electra and a 737-200, you'd never choose the former.

    The 737 family has always had a 3-3 seating configuaration in coach.  And from 1967 to today, the 737 has always had the same width: 12' 4".  So when you're comparing similar aircraft types, the seat width is exactly the same as it was in 1970.

    ** The free bottle of alcohol was a short-term promotion offered by Southwest in 1973, but it has become part of the airline's founding mythology.

    Southwest was facing a cash-crunch in 1973 (only its third year in operation).  In an effort to drive Southwest out of business, Braniff started a fare sale and offered $13 fares between DAL, HOU, and SAT.  That was half the standard fare on Southwest.

    In response, Southwest also offered a $13 fare.  But it kept its standard $26 fare and offered a free fifth of Chivas, Jack Daniels, or Smirnoff with it.  The idea was that any business traveler on an expense account would pay the higher fare and get the free booze.

     

    But one important note on this--you observe that this was pre-deregulation.  But regulation only applied on interstate routes.  The intra-Texas route was always deregulated.  That's how Braniff could start a fare sale in the first place.  So the entire story could only take place in a deregulated environment.

    *** Ok--there was one aspect of it that was fucking great, and you're omitting it entirely.  The Stewardesses.  They were hot.  Airlines could still get away with hiring only young hot women who met a weight restriction.  And because of the societal whatevers back then, they were almost (1) uniformly unmarried, and (2) interested in being married to a guy who could afford to fly.  As a counterpoint to that, I've got nothing.

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  13. 19 hours ago, pops said:

    Damnit. Air travel used to be magical.  Now it's a fucking greyhound with people literally dressed in pajamas.  

    We were required to wear coat and tie for air travel with my college golf team.  I miss those days.  

    It's still magical if you want to pay the amount that people routinely paid for air travel in the era when "air travel was magical."

    The average cost of a flight from JFK to LHR in 1970 was $550.  Adjusted for inflation, that's $4,500.

    If you want to spend $4,500 for a flight from JFK to LHR, it's going to be magical.  You're likely going to be in First.  You'll walk right up to BA's First counter and a very lovely agent will check you in within five minutes.  Then you'll walk right through security with no line directly into the Chelsea Lounge where they'll pour you a glass of Laurent Perrier Grand Siecle.  Then you go to your plane and your lay-flat seat.

    That's a fuckton better than the shitty coach seat that you would've gotten for the same price back in the Golden Age of Commercial Aviation.

    19 hours ago, Hayduke said:

    Never heard of it, which surprises me a little because my very long education and work experience are rooted in communication and touch a bit on tourism/recreation. I'm guessing this is is a publication whose primary audience was travel professionals, especially corporate folks and agencies. And folks who had to pay attention to transport logistics for other reasons. 

    Ran a cursory search for more info but didn't get far, so I'm wondering if any of y'all would care to elaborate. Genuinely interested in why this is so meaningful.

    The OAG Pocket Guide is a master schedule of all airline flights.  It comes in four regional versions--one for North America, one for Europe, one for East Asia, and one for South & Southwest Asia.

    Inside, it lays out by airport every destination to which that airport has nonstop flights.  The flights are organized by departure time and identify the departure time, the arrival time, the equipment, and the airline.  So the entry for Austin would look like:

    AUSTIN, TX

    Albuquerque, NM

    0645  0805  738  WN

    0915  1040  73G  WN

    etc.

    It's an easy reference guide for anyone who does a lot of traveling to immediately see what flights are available between any given city-pair.  With the internet, it's obviously pretty obsolete.  But before all airlines were on sites like Expedia, it was the only place that had a comprehensive listing of all the available airline options for whatever destination you wanted to go to.

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  14. 4 minutes ago, BrickHorn said:

    Seems pyrrhic at best. “Haha! Israel is discredited in the eyes of the world. And all it cost us was our homes, our lands, and our lives.”

    I think their rejoinder would be that after a decades-long siege, they didn't have much left to lose.  Gaza was slowly being strangled.  Israel has speeded up the process, but it is a process that Israel started a long time ago.

    And if that's the price to pay for fundamentally undermining Israel as an independent and hegemonic state, then it was a price worth paying.

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  15. On 8/4/2025 at 12:28 PM, Ted Lange said:

     

     

    Among Sun Tsu's many instructions for warfare was to "know yourself and know your enemy."  If this was Hamas's plan from the outset--adn I think there's plenty of reason to believe that it was--then Hamas is demonstrating that it knew its enemy.

    It's a pretty serious indictment of Israeli leadership, culture, and society that it is living up to Hamas's expectations of how it would react to October 7.

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  16. On 8/4/2025 at 9:16 PM, HenryJames said:

     

    Don Bacon thinks he can retain his seat in Congress by being truthful and representing his district, and I just think that's the most adorable fucking thing I've ever seen.

    On 8/6/2025 at 2:37 PM, The Dog said:

    “Don’t make this a political post.”

    TAXES ARE POLITICAL YOU STUPID BITCH

    image.thumb.png.23672aeeb11ed7c8a7d2a198fda9128e.png

    Goddamn it's expensive to be stupid in America.

    1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

    shocker.  History is going to look back on this as a horrifying ethnic cleansing genocide and America just sat there and watched.

    That's not true.  America stood up and actively assisted in this horrifying ethnic-cleansing genocide.

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