Your mid-week, martini-worthy photo image

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Doris, babe, don't look at us. We don't know, either.







So, just relax and we'll pour you some Montefiori Cocktail performing "Lazy Busy"

Singing the tarmac blues

As ones you have just recently returned from a vacation that involved 4 separate flights we feel the pain of those who have been stuck on the tarmac for hours at a time because of flight delays.

And just as we can sympathize with those stuck in a crowded, stuffy cabin, we can also see how the inevitable government intervention into this inconvenience can and will actually make the problem worse.

The nation's recent onslaught of flight cancellations is a harbinger of what passengers can expect from airlines looking to avoid new multimillion-dollar fines for leaving people stranded on grounded planes in bad weather, according to federal data and aviation experts.

The government announced in December it would fine airlines $27,500 per passenger for long tarmac delays — or $2.75 million for a 100-passenger flight.

Cancellations cost far less than a huge fine, especially since seats are routinely prepaid and airlines save fuel cost.

These fines were a result of something called the Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights enacted by the FAA designed to protect passengers, however when one starts extending bills of rights beyond what is in the constitution, the law of unintended consequences kicks and and you have airlines cancelling flights and leaving passengers in the lurch which is cheaper than having passengers stranded on the tarmac for more than 3 hrs.

This rule does not go into effect until April 29th but airlines such as JetBlue have already begun cancelling flights just to get into the swing of things (those learning curves can be a real bitch, sometimes).

All this is a shame and could've been avoided if the airlines had just followed BwD's advice and rolled out the cart in order to serve up some of these to tired and cranky passengers

Quickies

Strange and dare we say, intentionally misleading MSNBC article titled, “Bush administration ignored clear warning” regarding the financial crisis and provided only the following to make its case: “Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories,” California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job." Alrighty, then.

Maybe it’s their bad teeth. Simon Warr, the chairman of the British Lap Dancing Association, hoping to dodge some licensing difficulties had this to say with a presumably straight face while at a legislative hearing and being questioned on the specific intent of lap dancing: "All right, the entertainment may be in the form of nude or semi-nude performers, but it's not sexually stimulating."

And now it is time for the airing of grievances. Tree not up, lights not up - Yeah, for whatever reasons (well, we know a couple) we just aren’t feeling the Christmas spirit this year. Call it Fatigue fatigue. So in lieu of the traditional how about a little Festivus? Cyber Tuesday shopping here.

After reading about a diverted flight from San Salvador to LAX that sat on the tarmac in Ontario for 9-1/2 hours on Sunday because of fog at LAX we were reminded of some soul-searching the airlines did to combat the problems of keeping the passengers onboard the plane during extended tarmac timeouts. All this navel-gazing accomplished nothing as the airlines and some goofy passenger bill of rights ignored the obvious.



Folks, chilling out the natives isn’t really all that difficult when common sense logic and fermentation are applied. How this wasn’t even brought up as a possible solution was baffling.