Posted in Travels on October 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Back on the road again.
I was at the Dallas / Ft.Worth (DWF) airport on the inter-terminal train and saw this sign above two of the seats:
It made me think of all the great needs I have and promptly sat down.
A little later I boarded my connecting flight, an Airbus 321, and I got a little discombobulated about this little guy staring at me.
Once you see a face, you cannot unsee it. He stared at me for two hours, and it became disconcerting.
Posted in Travels on October 2, 2021| 1 Comment »
Posted in Pandemic, Travels on September 30, 2021| Leave a Comment »
This week I embarked on my very first business trip since the March 2020 shutdown. I attended a conference at the Cincinnati Convention Center.
Conference attendees had to wear masks at all times in the facility, and there are always name badges, of course. They usually come with a lanyard, which are generally sponsored and paid for by one of the attending vendors and contain the company name for advertising purposes.
Here is mine:
When I picked up my badge, there were three colors of lanyards to choose from with a sign describing the meaning:
Green – I am comfortable with hugs and handshakes.
White – Keep distance and fist bumps only.
Red – Do not come close!
I picked green. There were a few friends I had not seen in two years that were huggers. I was fine with that.
Most people wore green, quite a substantial percentage wore white, and I do not remember seeing any red. I am sure there were some.
And that’s a lanyard with a message.
Posted in Travels on September 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »
We just came home from a week in Maui. We stayed at Kamaole Beach Club, right across the street from the beach. At the street corner there is a crosswalk.
When we got there on Saturday, there was this “beach bum” who sat on a wooden bench overlooking the ocean just a few feet away. He had long matted hair, wore a bicycle helmet and had a dirty pink backpack. Next to him was a cart presumably holding his various possessions.
He sat there all day long that first day, staring at the ocean without moving, at times holding a papaya in one hand and staring at it. Sometimes we’d see him muttering to himself.
He sat at the same spot every day, from morning till night, not moving. He never took off his helmet, he never removed his backpack. We never saw him come or go, but I must admit I didn’t go out late at night or early in the morning and check.
We took the picture above on the morning of the 7th day as we were leaving. This time he was standing up, motionless, looking at the ocean. We had never seen him standing, or walking, or doing anything before. The overnight low is 72 degrees in Maui, the high is 88 degrees. The trade winds keep the beach cool. So there is no need to move from that spot.
I am now back home, thousands of miles away, but I know exactly where this man is: Sitting on that bench, helmet slightly tilted to the left, dirty pink backpack on his back.
And I am thinking to myself: I have so much to do and so little time to do it.
Posted in Hikes, Travels on April 24, 2021| 3 Comments »
There are some beasts in the Anza Borrego desert.
No, this is not photoshopped. This is a real photograph of me this afternoon.
Posted in Business, Travels on September 23, 2020| 1 Comment »
Lufthansa, Germany’s largest airline and the second-largest in Europe, recently announced that it is retiring all eight of its Airbus A380 planes. Emirates operates 115 such planes, the largest fleet in the world, and it predicts the “end of the era.”
While the large planes are comfortable, they are not efficient, are too costly to maintain and to fly. Smaller widebodies, like the Airbus A350 and the Boeing 787, both with only two efficient engines, are much more economical, and being smaller, more versatile. This trend started long before the start of the pandemic, but with air travel now just being a shadow of what it once was, the fate of the world’s largest planes is sealed.
The Boeing 747 had a life of over 50 years and 1,558 were built since 1968. According to travel data firm Cirium there are about 500 747s still in service, of which only 30 are flying passengers. More than 300 fly cargo and the remainder are in storage.
Airbus only built a total of 242 A380s, about half of which went to Emirates. Airbus has already retired the plane.
I have never flown on an A380, and now I probably never will.
I have flown only three times on a Boeing 747. One was my first ever flight when I was just 18 years old. The second time was in England in 1989, on a short-hopper from London to Manchester. Yes, a commuter trip of less than an hour on a 747. It was full of commuting businessmen. And the final trip was in 2012 on British Airways from London to Chicago, and I reported about it here.
To put this into perspective, I am a very frequent air traveler, and I have flown constantly since my youth at a rate of 100,000 miles a year or more. With American Airlines alone I have logged more than 2.5 million miles, and that’s just one airline. If in all these thousands of flights I have only THREE flights on superjumbos, and if I am a good example, it’s not surprising that the era of the large planes is over.
Farewell, A380.
Posted in Travels on January 6, 2020| 1 Comment »
Landing in Los Angeles this afternoon, I had a great view of the new SoFi Stadium under construction in Inglewood.
This is the future home of the Los Angeles Chargers and Rams. It will open in the summer of 2020.
Already, it is scheduled to host the Super Bowl LVI in 2022, and the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2028 Olympics.
I am wondering what is happening to the real estate values of the housing developments to the right of it?
You can check with Wikipedia page for more information.
Posted in Travels on January 3, 2020| 1 Comment »
I have done my share of flying. I have also had some scary landings, but nothing like this one:
Pilot lands plane sideways in heavy crosswinds at Bristol Airport 👏✈️ pic.twitter.com/ReZK5yMyZ5
— The Sun (@TheSun) January 2, 2020
Posted in History, Travels on December 18, 2019| 8 Comments »
The Missouri State Capitol building has been under renovation for more than a year. The dome has been wrapped up for construction that long.
Yesterday, during a visit to one of the state office buildings, I was lucky to be there during exactly the time when the statue was installed again after being gone since November 2018.
This is the historic bronze statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, perched 238 feet above the entry of the building. It took a 550-ton crane to raise the 10′ 4″ statue, weighing 1,407 pounds, on this bitter-cold day in Missouri.
I was there for a historic moment.
Posted in Art, Painting, Travels, tagged Kauai, Painting of Rooster on December 7, 2019| 4 Comments »
Kauai, oil on canvas, 12/19, 20 x 20
If you want to know why the title of this painting is Kaua’i, here is the story.
We spent Christmas 2018 on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i. One of the things we noticed immediately was how many feral chickens and roosters there were everywhere on that island. Where do they all come from and why aren’t there any on the other islands? Here is a post with a picture of chickens in it.
The hurricanes Iwa in 1982, and then Iniki in 1992, destroyed many domestic chicken coops. This released the chickens into the jungles. The domesticated birds then mated with the wild red junglefowl that was brought to the islands by the Polynesians hundreds of years ago.
The current feral chickens have no natural predator, so they are procreating at a prodigious rate.
There is no way that you can travel to Kaua’i and not notice the ubiquitous chickens and roosters. There is no way you can spend a night on Kaua’i and not be woken up at 4:30am by a rooster outside your window. They are everywhere.
Kaua’i is roosters, and roosters are Kaua’i.
Posted in Commentaries, Crack-Ups, Economy, Travels on December 7, 2019| 2 Comments »
The traditional meal in Japan for Christmas is KFC – Kentucky Fried Chicken. And not just fried chicken, but the brand, KFC? How did that happen?
メリークリスマス
The above says me-rii-ku-ri-su-ma-su written in katakana, the Japanese alphabet used to spell foreign words.
me-rii-ku-ri-su-ma-su, when you say it out loud, means Merry Christmas.
Japan is a nation where only about 1% of the population is Christian. So Christmas, historically, was fairly meaningless. In the post-war years in Japan, everything western became fashionable, and the country imitated the west wherever it could.
The first Kentucky Fried Chicken store opened in Japan in 1970. Shortly after it opened, the manager, Takeshi Okawara, overheard a couple of foreigners in his store talk about how they missed having turkey for Christmas. KFC didn’t have turkey, but it had chicken. What’s the difference, right? So Okawara thought fried chicken would work just fine and began marketing his Party Barrel as a way to celebrate Christmas.
Within a few years, the Japanese corporate office for KFC started advertising クリスマス に わ ケンタキイ (Kentucky for Christmas) and a tradition was born. Japanese now think that everyone in the west eats KFC for Christmas. It is huge in Japan. One third of the annual sales of any KFC store is done during the Christmas season. 3.6 million Japanese families treat themselves to a KFC meal during the Christmas season. To get a Christmas dinner at KFC, you have to reserve it weeks in advance.
Okawara went on to become the CEO of KFC Japan in 1984 and ran the company through 2002.
So, as this example proves, if you want to get rich and famous, start a tradition based on a religion.
I wonder what the two customers who mentioned they missed turkey for Christmas in that store in 1970 would think if they knew what they started by that innocuous remark? What if they had been Jewish instead and asked for Gefilte Fish?
Posted in Travels on December 6, 2019| 1 Comment »
Minnesota Farms [click to enlarge]
Posted in Travels on November 3, 2019| 1 Comment »
Today, on my way to Orlando, Florida, with a stopover at Dallas/Forth-Worth, I had an excellent view of the entire DFW airport in clear weather – which is very rare. Usually, flying into DFW, you come in from the distance and never see the whole airport in one view.
DFW Airport [click to enlarge]
DFW is also the 10th largest airport in the world, and the 4th largest in the United States, by passenger count.
Here is a list:
Posted in Travels on October 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Today I got a great view of Niagara Falls from 30,000 feet.
Niagara Falls [click to enlarge]
And for those of my readers, who have never been there and won’t know what they are looking at, here are a couple of labels:
JFK Addresses AFS Students at the White House – 1963
Posted in Commentaries, Cool People, Feelings, Political, Travels, Wisdom, tagged AFS, AFS International, AFS Students at White House on February 17, 2020| 5 Comments »
Back on July 18, 1963, as the AFS [see below] students who had spent their high school year in the United States, were preparing to go back to their countries, they got to visit the White House. JFK talked to them.
It would be another 11 years before I had the privilege to be chosen as an AFS student. I arrived in the United States two weeks after Nixon’s resignation on August 20, 1974. Our group did not get to visit the White House when we went home in July of 1975.
All my life I have been proud to have been an AFS student and to carry the mission forward of spreading peace in the world, one person at a time.
It’s gotten a little more difficult in recent years.
[AFS stands for American Field Service, today the largest and most famed high school student exchange program in the world]
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