In the comments to this post from yesterday, Roger Ritter tried some different search terms on Ready.gov.  Searching for “pistol” returns a very interesting result.

Maybe someone there does have a sense of humor after all?

While I was vegging out over the weekend I caught an episode of Airline on A&E.  For those who haven’t seen it, it’s one of those ‘reality’ shows where they follow the day-to-day activities of Southwest Airlines and some of its passengers.  In this case a woman became irate and caused a scene when the airline wouldn’t let her grandmother on the plane with her medical oxygen.  She claimed to have planned the trip months in advance.  If she’d really been that prepared she’d have known that oxygen containers are not allowed on passenger flights.  Southwest in particular has no provision for medical oxygen (see here).  If a person can’t travel without oxygen, that person can’t travel on Southwest.  Other airlines can accomodate medical oxygen, although as far as I can tell none of them will allow a passenger to bring their own container (either in the cabin or as checked baggage).  It makes sense, since you’re dealing with a pressurized container in a low-pressure environment (airline cabins are pressurized, but not to normal sea-level; they tend maintain a pressure similar to 7000 or 8000 ft. above sea-level).  A quick check of American Airlines shows that you have to notify them in advance and they charge $100 per flight leg (see here).

I felt sorry for the Southwest employees because they were being abused pretty badly by this woman over something they can’t change.  Maybe I’m just a nervous traveller, but I always check this kind of stuff ahead of time.  I’m continually amazed at people who make a stink over something that they could have avoided if they’d done the tinest bit of research.  All this woman would have had to do was to call the airline and ask about the oxygen. 

Anyhow, I probably wouldn’t have written anything about it, except that I came across this article today.

Aircraft with dangerously low levels of oxygen could cause major respiratory problems for passengers.

Scientists have issued the warning after studying cabin pressure and associated oxygen levels for 300 hours on 80 domestic and international aircraft.

A respiratory scientist at Concord Hospital in Sydney, Leigh Seccombe, said oxygen levels may be too low for people with lung and respiratory illnesses to travel safely, even though aircraft met current safety standards.

In the study, to be presented at the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand’s annual congress in Sydney next week, patients with minor lung and respiratory diseases could not get enough oxygen in a simulated aircraft cabin.

The woman on the show tried to call the doctor to get a release so she could fly without oxygen.  I guess it’s a good thing that the doctor refused.  If she’d been successful in bullying the doctor into releasing the grandmother to fly without oxygen and she’d died, I bet she would have sued the doctor and the airline.

My mother has been contemplating getting a new car for quite a while, since she’s been driving a 1995 Ford Thunderbird.  It’s a nice enough car (and it’s got plenty of power), but it’s starting to show its age.  She had been gravitating towards the Ford Focus for a while, so I figured that she’d probably buy one.  When I arrived home on Friday night I noticed that her Thunderbird was still in the driveway, although she wasn’t there.  At first I thought she must have gone to work with her husband (they work at the same place), but later I noticed a set of keys on the kitchen table that had a tag attached that gave the model, color, and stock number for a new Focus, so I surmised that she’d gone ahead and purchased the car.  A little while after that I received a phone call from a salesman at the Ford dealership in Tyler who said he was ‘following up’ with her on the Focus.  Since it wasn’t the same dealership as the keys, I told the guy that she’d already bought one.

Later I learned that the reason she didn’t use the Tyler dealership is that the salesman outright lied to her.  She had gone in to look at the Focus and the salesman had a ZX3 model in stock, but she wanted the four-door.  The salesman told her that there wasn’t any other model of Focus available.  Fortunately, when she expressed interest in the Focus I showed her the Ford website where you can see the different models and compare them.  So she was armed with the knowledge that this guy was lying and she left.

She ended up going to a smaller dealership that was closer to home and where she was treated much better by the sales staff.  They didn’t apply pressure and the salesman made the effort to get her the color she wanted.  This is one of the things that I use to help identify a good dealership.  A lot of dealerships want to move whatever they have on the lot, buyer’s preferences be dammed.  I think the dealer in Tyler must have had some ZX3’s he was trying to move and was going to do whatever he could to dump one of them on my mother.  By doing so, not only did this dealer lose a sale, he lost a customer for life (more than one, actually, since I will now actively discourage anyone I know from going to him), while the other dealer gained my mother’s good will as well as mine.  If I was going to buy a Ford, I would definitely consider this dealer over the one in Tyler.

Sometimes businesses are so focused on the bottom line in the next day or week that they make choices that destroy their long-term viability.  There are only so many people you can lie to before word gets out.

Some obnoxious prick, calling themselves ‘Narco Abiss’ (who gave the email address [email protected] and who appears to be connected via Pacbell DSL ( adsl-66-127-57-133.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net)), has been commenting on some of my old posts by simply copying the entire post into the comment.  He didn’t bother to add any commentary.  I consider that obnoxious behavior, so I’ve deleted the comments and banned that IP address.

What a wonderful welcome home after returning from my weekend trip to East Texas…

My flight got delayed due to the weather here at DFW, so I decided to try out the wireless access in the terminal.  It’s $6.95/day for a one-time use pass.  That seems a bit steep, and I likely won’t do it again. 

Anyhow, the security checkpoint wasn’t too bad, although it was annoying.  They were giving us the choice of taking off our shoes and running them through the X-Ray machine or getting ‘additional screening.’  They were specifically targeting people who were wearing sneakers/running shoes.  That annoyed me because I specifically chose to wear mine because they don’t have any metal in them. 

Surprisingly, they didn’t make me boot up the laptop, although they did run it through the X-Ray scanner.

When you check your bag you now have to take it from the ticket counter over to the screening area.  The TSA guy asked me if I had anything that would go ‘boom or bang’ in the bag.  I thought he was asking about aerosol cans or something, but he was really asking about firearms.  I guess he though it was a clever way of phrasing the question, but I suspect it would be best to keep to clear and unambigous language as it would prevent confusion.

After much deliberation and spending money to get ideas from an advertising firm, the City of Keller has named the new aquatic/recreation center The Keller Pointe.  Not only is the name stupid and pretentious, but the graphic is cheesy.  It looks like an advertisement for some kind of dance company or something. 

Instead of being stupidly froofy the city could have saved a little money and just called it the “Keller Aquatic and Recreation Center”.  That name is not only descriptive, but they could have gotten it from me for free.  Personally, I don’t think I’ll be calling it “The Pointe”.  I’ll probably just call it the “Aquatic Center” if for no other reason than to avoid the embarassment of having to explain that stupid name to people from outside of Keller.

It was sad, but not unexpected, to hear that they found the body of that young girl who was abducted in Florida.

This part of the FoxNews article really caught my eye:

A state Department of Corrections official said Thursday that a probation officer had asked a judge on Dec. 30 to declare Smith in violation of his probation because he had not paid all his fines and court costs.

Probation official Joe Papy said Circuit Judge Harry Rapkin declined to find Smith in violation, which could have returned him to jail.

Why do we give these people so many damn chances?  He’d been arrested multiple times and was only given jail time once, the rest he kept getting probation.  If that judge had listened to the probation officer (who just happens to be the person who is closest to the offender), perhaps none of this would have happened.  Of course, with this type of offender, it may have just delayed the inevitable.  We’ll never know for sure.  What I do know, however, is that someone should have gotten tough on this guy a long time ago.

I saw one of those loud, obnoxious, tractor-pull-announcer car dealership commercials this morning.  I usually tune them out, but I couldn’t help but notice the message in this one.  It was a “buy one get one free offer”.  If you purchased a new Expedition or Explorer they’d give you a used 2002 Escort (or was it a Focus?).  Of course it was a used car, but I think it says a few things about the car market that they’d do this.

I always hear the enviro types whining about SUVs, but the evidence suggests that they’re being ignored (good!).  The high margins available in the SUV business show that these are what people want.  That a dealer is now giving away econoboxes with SUVs further shows that the market is outshouting the enviros.

The market has spoken and it has told the enviro weenies to STFU.

You can count on the clever folks at Despair, Inc. to understand the true nature of Valentine’s day.  This year they’re introducing their Bittersweets line of candies.  These are a line of those chalky little candies with a set of more realistic sayings on them than you’ll find on the ones in the stores.  Some examples:

• TABLE FOR 1
• DIGNITY FREE
• SETTLE 4LESS
• CALL A 900#
• U+ME=GRIEF
• UP YER MEDS

Interestingly, Despair, Inc. is a Texas company.  Dr. E.L. Kersten,  the founder and COO of Despair, Inc., is located in Dallas, with the main operation being in Austin.

If I wasn’t already avoiding them because they don’t have a low-carb option, this would probably be sufficient reason to shun Taco HellBell:

The frigid winds whipping across lower Michigan a couple of weekends ago did nothing to warm a Taco Bell manager’s cold heart.

He fired 17-year-old high-school junior Holly Cook—for daring to put on a coat.

“It was so cold that my hands were going numb,” Cook told the Lansing State Journal, describing her shift at the Charlotte, Mich., fast-food restaurant’s take-out window on Jan. 25.

The problem, explained her manager, Mike Swank, was that she wore her own coat, not one of the Taco Bell-logo coats the store kept on hand for cold days.

…

But Cook hadn’t counted on an undercover visit by what’s known in the trade as a “mystery shopper”—someone sent by the restaurant chain to check up on franchises.

The inspector cost the restaurant 28 points out of a perfect 100, Cook said Swank told her.

Still, Cook told the newspaper, “I couldn’t believe they fired me.”

It’s this silly corporate insistence that their logos be on everything in sight that leads to stupid things like this.  Marketing idiots get so fixated on their “corporate identity” that they forget that there are real people involved in these things.

But then, if memory serves, Taco Bell isn’t exactly known for doing the right thing (I’m referring to a case nearly ten years ago when a Taco Bell employee was fired for going into the parking lot to give aid to someone who had been assaulted—the aid being in violation of company policy never to go outside;  unfortunately, I could not find a good link to this).  Anyhow, it’s not like their food is anything special.  All they had going for them was being cheap.