But you still will be made to suffer for it.

US Airways has decided that charging $2 for a soda that goes for 50 cents retail at the supermarket is pretty dumb, and is discontinuing the practice.

It’s a good start, but it won’t gain them any of my business if I can help it.

Flying to me is the quickest way to get from here to there if you’re going more than 500 miles. Anything less than that, and it’s usually either just as fast or faster to drive, and it costs a heck of a lot less. And I get to skip the coming and going cavity searches.

To be honest, I hate to fly. With a passion.

It starts with the booking process, where you get told that it costs $300 more to fly from any convenient airport than it would if you drive 2 hours to get on a 1 hour flight.

Then you go to check in for your flight. You show up 3 hours early so that you can stand in line for the 1 or 2 agents that staff the desk. After you look at the 3 unmanned desks for an hour, you finally get your boarding ticket and give up your check baggage. Of course, you have to pay for that check baggage now, so you give up even more money.

Then you go through security, which I won’t complain about. Anything that is done to make sure some whacko hasn’t shoved explosives into a body cavity before getting on my flight is OK with me.

After an hour or so in the security line, you make your way to the gate. A good percentage of the time the gate you were told to go to was just an educated guess, but the airline will be helpful and put up another educated guess on the information boards located within the terminal.

Eventually, you’ll find the correct gate, and settle in for a long wait. Remember, you came in hours early for your flight. But I hope you brought a book, because you’ll be here a while waiting for your plane to arrive. You may have been at the gate an hour before your scheduled departure time, but the airline has no problem getting the plane to the gate much later than that. About 50% of the time, your departure time will come and go with no plane in the gate and no explanation from the ground crew.

Eventually your flight will be called, and you will line up to get on-board. You are now cattle, and will be treated as such. As soon as you give them your ticket, they own you and they know it. You will be repeatedly told to hurry up and get on the plane. You will be shamed for actually bringing a carry-on bigger than a notebook, and will be threatened with even more fees if your carry-on is too big for the overhead storage.

Once you get settled, the airline will admit that it sold too many seats for the flight, and will start “suggesting” that someone give up their seat in exchange for the possibility of flying out at some later date. If no-one goes for it, they will start threatening to jettison us ungrateful slobs unless someone takes one for the team. Any other industry that sold more product than it had to sell would be brought to trial for fraud. Apparently the airlines have some deal for this.

Then you take off. They crank up the cold, dry air conditioning, so you cough up a little more money for a blanket to ward off hypothermia. If you’re smart, you bought some food for the trip, because unless you can live on a few grams of peanuts you’re going to be weak from hunger when you land.

Eventually you will land. Hopefully it will be at an airport. To paraphrase Carlin, I prefer to land at an airport, because those cornfield landings tend to mess up my schedule.

You may have to go through all of this again if you’re catching another flight since it’s just too much work to have direct flights anywhere anymore. But for the sake of this argument, let’s say you’re done flying for today.

You get off the plane, and hopefully can decipher the signs that point you to the correct exit and place to get your luggage. Mostly, I continue my cattle instinct and follow the herd. Hopefully, there’s also a restroom close by too. While the airline does provide a head on the plane, unless you’re under 4 feet or already have scoliosis, you’re not going to be able to use it without making a huge mess all over yourself.

Once you find the correct carousel for your luggage, you begin saying decades of the Rosary in hopes that your bag is there and in one piece. If it’s not there, or if it’s damaged, you get to go through the exquisite experience of trying to get the airline to admit that you ever had a bag, and then getting them to figure out where it is and get it to you.

And you get to go through all of this again on the return trip. Wheeee!

Believe it or not, you paid for this.

So I’m not impressed that an airline is not going to charge me for a soda. I’ll be impressed when these cretins learn how to treat me like a human being and give me good value for the hundreds of dollars I give them to get me from place to place. Until then, I plan on driving myself everywhere I can and laughing when the airlines whine about declining revenues.

Army Emergency Relief (AER) is the primary charity created exclusively for use by members of the Army. It receives almost all of its funding through paycheck donations from soldiers.

When a soldier has an unexpected financial emergency, such as emergency repairs to a car or the need to travel to their homes for funerals of family members, they are supposed to be able to go to AER for either a grant or a no-interest loan.

I contributed to and utilized AER when I was in the Army. Once a year, I would be “asked” to sign a form allowing AER to take money out of my paycheck. There was quite a lot of pressure to get 100% of any given unit to contribute, even if it was only a one-time $20 contribution.

When I had to go to AER for a loan to fly home from Germany when my mother became ill and wasn’t expected to survive, they handed me a re-payment contract and an Army form to have the payments taken directly out of my paycheck before they handed me the money for the tickets.

AER always got their money, but they provided something we all needed, so we contributed and made sure we repaid our loans.

Tonight I read this. Apparently AER is holding onto over $200 million that was donated by soldiers in order to provide emergency relief for other soldiers.

Before I read this article, I didn’t even know that AER gave grants. I thought everything was done by loan. Goes to show how well they advertise what they offer.

I knew several soldiers that ran into financial emergencies that weren’t their faults. Usually it was something like an emergency medical procedure for their wives or children that the Army couldn’t provide at the on-post hospital, and wouldn’t pay 100% for at the off-post hospital. If they couldn’t pay the bill themselves, they would usually be referred to AER by the commander. I’d say that about 50% of the time, AER would turn them away, and the soldier, who made less than $15,000.00 a year mind you, would have to work out something with the hospital to repay bills that regularly ran into the thousands of dollars.

Over the years, I and a lot of my fellow soldiers became quite cynical about giving money to AER. Most of us gave a small one-time cash donation to stay out of trouble, but refused to give a month-to-month donation.

AER should return this excess to the soldiers who fund it. It’s inconceivable that a charity for soldiers could refuse to give out so much money to the soldiers who are its major donors.

Everyone is familiar with the horrific case of a pet chimpanzee attacking a woman and horribly injuring her. Reports are coming out now that the chimp had bitten at least one person before, and now people are asking how this could have happened.

Hello? A wild animal bit someone, noone did much of anything about it, and now another human being has been horribly maimed. And the people in the area have the absolute nerve to act surprised?!?!?!?!

The lady who owned the chimp basically treated it like a child. She cooked steak for it, gave it wine in a stemmed glass. She bathed with it and cuddled with it in bed. If that doesn’t give you a whole body shiver, then you need to go talk to someone. She’s been keeping a wild animal as a pet for a decade and a half, and noone has tried to get her into a psychiatric facility?

What exactly did she have to do before people stopped commenting on how cute the chimp was and sent in the nice men with the butterfly nets? Dress him up in a Star Trek costume and send him to the grocery store alone?

And now I read this. Some creep decided to rob a couple of Girl Scouts who were selling cookies outside a grocery store. This waste of good protoplasm waited until these children were done selling their wares for the night, then took $250 from them.

Another example of someone who should be locked in an overused porta-potty and left in the hot Arizona sun.

Ever notice that it’s a stairway to heaven, but a highway to hell?

Seems to me these two just pulled into the passing lane on that highway.

Saw this over at Tam’s site.

It’s an extremely kewl animation made from the graph of home prices over the past 100 years. I wish there was one to show the big drop in the last year.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-2757699799528285056&hl=en&fs=true

Kentucky recently enacted a new sin tax on tobacco and alcohol. It’s easy to get new taxes on stuff like that, so they went for our vices.

Now, one of our elected representatives has suggested that the revenue from the tax on alcohol should only be used in counties that allow the sale of alcohol.

You see, even though prohibition has been gone for over 75 years, a lot of areas of Kentucky still don’t allow alcohol sales in any form. Interestingly, a lot of distilleries of bourbon are located in dry counties. And all of these dry counties, which do not contribute to the revenue from alcohol sales, get a fair share of the funds from these taxes

Anyhoo, it seems fair to me that if you make it a point to not allow the activity that raises revenue, you shouldn’t get money out of that activity.

What say you?

Well, it’s been a pretty good weekend.

Friday night was spent just relaxing. After I took Girlie Bear over to her mothers house for the weekend, Irish Woman and I spent a little time talking and then hit the sack early. We’ve both been on pager support this week, and we were bushed.

Saturday, we spent the morning doing a lot of housework. With us burning wood in the fireplace more, the house needed a good dusting, scrubbing, and airing out. Irish Woman went to get her hair done, and Baby Bear and I met her for an early lunch afterwords.

Saturday night one of the kids’ aunts came over and sat with the baby while Irish Woman and I went out for an actual adult dinner at an actual sit down restaurant. We very rarely get a babysitter, and dinner was wonderful. Hint to Louisville diners: If you want to be seated at 7:30, make 7:00 reservations. We capped off the evening by visiting two of our friends for a couple of hours.

I got Irish Woman flowers delivered at her office and a nice card for Valentines Day, and I payed for her day at the stylist. For me, she got me a new Wii racing game and found two of the Wii Wheel attachments. We played it a bit this afternoon, and had a blast.

This afternoon, Junior Bear and I went down the street with the truck and picked up a load of wood from a downed oak tree one of our neighbors was cutting up. We’ll go back and get more at some later date. It’s nice having a working truck again.

It’s been a great weekend and hopefully this bodes well for the week.

Next weekend, a bunch of my friends and I are going to go to a local range for a mass shoot-em-up. Really looking forward to that. We haven’t done one of those in almost a year.

Great Balls of Fire!

Residents of The Great State of Texas are reporting seeing burning debris falling from the sky, and possibly making it to the ground.

Consensus at the moment is that these lights in the sky are pieces of the two sattelites that collided earlier this month.

If pieces are making it to ground, how long is it until someone’s house gets hit? And you thought tornado season in Texas was bad.

And you know that eventually the news will feature an interview with a local resident, who while being a wonderful person and an expert in his or her profession, isn’t what we would call a great public speaker. The interview will come down to “I seen it, it come down over there in that there goat pen”.

You ever notice they never ask the surgeon or lawyer what happened?

UPDATE: Opinion is now that the fireball was caused by a meteor. Still, I’m sure they didn’t get the local judge to comment on it in front of the news camera.

to vote for Dianne Feinstein? This ignorant wench should be dipped in honey and left for the bears.

This week, she decided to let slip that American Predator drones may be based in Pakistan. Remember these are the aircraft that are being used to strike targets inside Pakistan.

True or not, it’s caused quite an uproar with our semi-ally Pakistan. We’re trying to prop up that government because it’s better than the alternative. We may or may not be basing aircraft in the country that we are using to strike at targets in Pakistan. And of course, these airstrikes are very unpopular in Pakistan.

So of course, you announce your belief that we’re hitting Pakistan with aircraft based in Pakistan during an open session of your congressional committee. And then you seem shocked that Pakistan and its populace might have a problem with this.

Nothing like throwing a hand grenade in a hen house. Especially if you’re a twit from the Bay Area who should have been strangled at birth in order to save us all this trouble.

Well, finally got the time and the correct part, so I took a few minutes to put the new throttle position sensor on the truck. After getting everything put back together, the truck fired up and ran no problem.

I can’t say it’s fixed, because it still has a pretty bad power steering fluid leak, but that should be pretty easy to fix. But then again, nothing is easy.

I work on motors and such by a rule that I learned from a mechanic I knew in the Army. “No equipment is right. There are only three states for equipment to be in: broken, fixed, and !*#%’d”.

Right now, the truck is still in the ‘broken’ category due to the leak, but she runs. Eventually she’ll be fixed.

Saw this at the Survival Blog on how little time it takes to acquire goods now than it did in our ancestor’s time.

The author discusses how much less time and effort it takes to make the money to purchase some grain than it would if he had to grow it himself. He also talks about how dependent we are on powered tools and equipment to produce what we need and want.

I work in IT, and from where I stand, computers are the ultimate labor saving device. What it used to take an accountant days to do in ledgers is done in a spreadsheet in minutes. Timetables for shipping and trains used to be done by hand and took months to work out properly. Now we can schedule airlines and trains on-demand every day.

I watched some video on the news tonight about the economy, and they showed the line at an automobile factory. Even in the parts that aren’t fully automated, they were using motorized tools to lift, place, and weld the cars together. Even 50 years ago, this would have mostly been done with hand tools and non-powered lifting equipment.

On the other side of the coin, when I was a child I watched our local newspaper in Smalltown, North Dakota, literally cranked out on a hand-powered press that used metal type that was set by hand. My grandmother’s attic and garage were stuffed with 100 year old hand, garden, and farm tools. All she needed was a couple of horses or oxen, and she could have run a farm in the same way her father did at the turn of the 20th century.

I think we lose something when we fail to realize just how easy our life is today when compared to the past. A message to family in California is delivered instantly, where it would have taken over a week only 20 years ago. I can fly to San Fransisco in the space of an afternoon, where it took months to get there before the Trans-Continental Railroad was complete, and it still took a couple of weeks then.

If I want to construct something for the house, on the rare occasion that I don’t just buy it, I use power tools and store bought lumber. The shelves I built in the baby’s room would have taken a couple of weeks to make if I’d had to go out to the woods, select and fell a tree, make the lumber by hand, and then construct and trim the shelves using hand tools.

While I’m not planning on the economy or our society to collapse completely, I enjoy learning how to do things by hand. I just can’t imagine trying to keep up our standard of living if I had to grow/trap/hunt all of our food and process it, then find time to gather materials and construct everything we need.