Author: Dick

The flight to Houston from Baltimore-Washington this afternoon seemed like it was kind of dragging on a bit. I couldn’t really tell because I don’t use a watch except for my cell phone and it was turned off.

Clouds had kind of obscured the view on and off. I did fly over what I believed to be Talledega Motor Speedway, the venue my friend Ross and I visited a couple of years ago for a NASCAR race.

Looking at the Continental route map inside its in-flight magazine, I figured we would be flying over northern Mississippi shortly, making our way back to Texas.

After awhile, sitting in a port window seat, I looked out and saw what I thought to be a rather large lake. I kept looking at it, saying to myself: “Jeez, that’s a hell of a big lake.” Soon I saw a couple of noticeably-sized islands in the lake while what seemed to be a city of moderate size appeared onshore. Down there too was a pretty good piece of paved airport and it was then I realized that we were flying over my old Navy stomping grounds of Gulfport, Miss.

During my couple of years stationed at Gulfport, I never made it out to the barrier islands sitting between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I understand that they took a pretty big hit with Hurricane Katrina. But they looked beautiful from the air. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the photo above, as it is a U.S. Geologic Survey photo.

It kind of shocked me, I don’t know why, to see the U.S. 90 bridge at Bay St. Louis from the air and to realize that it was still washed out from the storm. I looked at the Mississippi Department of Transportation Web site — which is really quite good — and it reminded me that both that bridge and the Biloxi Bay bridge remain out of commission.

Soon I saw out my window what I figured to be the Rigolets, the waterway/swamp connecting Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain. Driving back from Gulfport once from New Orleans I took Hwy. 90 and drove through the Rigolets, a kind of wild swamp ride. We also flew just north of New Orleans and over Lake Pontchartrain. After seeing it from 30,000 feet, the times I drove over it on its bridges didn’t do the lake’s size any justice.

By the time we flew over the Atchafalaya Basin I was kind of wondering where the hell we were going. I don’t know, perhaps flights from Washington, D.C., to Houston take that route but I thought it was kind of odd and it certainly wasn’t the same way we flew up to BWI.

At some point in time we flew out over the Gulf, which really is pretty cool to see from the air. There certainly seemed to be a lot more oil drilling platforms just off the coast than I had ever imagined.

By the time we made our descent to Houston we were in thick clouds. The plane literally came out of the clouds when it was about to put its wheels down.

Not a regular flier, I still somehow managed some frequent flier perks from past flights and thought it wasn’t too shabby to be one of the first to board the plane after first class passengers. The downside was that the flight was full to the gills and I was stuck back in my window seat on Row 21 upon landing. We had pulled up to the main Continental terminals at George the 41st airport and knew I would have to take a shuttle over to the puddle-jumper planes, one of which just might still be there to take me to Beaumont.

But the flight from BWI had indeed took about 30 minutes longer than scheduled. I asked the captain going out of the 737 if we had flown around storms. He said: “Something like that.” Since I had only 10 minutes to get to my flight, I didn’t stick around to quiz him.

Remarkably, I got to the A terminal about five minutes from our scheduled departure. But, no one had even left the terminal yet for the plane. The weather had caused delays. Eventually, we got on a shuttle bus to drive out to the little twin-engine Saab turboprop. Then there was a line of all sorts of airplanes, most bigger than ours, waiting to take off.

The weather report for the 25-minute ride back to Beaumont didn’t sound very promising with overcast skies and gusts up to 30 mph. And, it was a bit rough. But we arrived, again surprisingly, on time.

My only real problem on this Friday the 13th was that one of my checked bags didn’t come back with me. Hopefully it will catch up with me soon. So I guess this didn’t qualify as a real Friday the 13th. Of course, I still have a few hours to go on this day.

An afterthought — I know it isn’t good to edit after I have published something. I have done this a few times now on this particular piece. But the truth is, it is difficult for me to edit something online whether it be using blogger or writing something with Word. Perhaps I am just one of those dinosaurs who is used to seeing things on paper. My half apologies.

During my past two weeks commuting on the Metro subway from Bethesda to Washington, I have been fortunate enough to miss really crowded rush-hour crowds. Not so today. I squeezed onto the Red Line at Union Station but after a couple of stops was able to grab a seat for the rest of my ride. The train was pretty packed all the way from D.C. out to Bethesda. And I said, oh how glad I am I don’t live here.

My class wraps up tomorrow and I am flying back to Beaumont via Houston around noon on Friday. It only occurred a couple of days ago that I actually know a few people in the metro D.C. area. I e-mailed them. Unfortunately, Jackie is in New Zealand and Mary has to work. I will likely be returning sometime later this year, provided all goes well with my work.

Just a comment about national news, in particular Don “Ignor” Imus. I don’t see why it is such news that Imus is a boorish jackass. I don’t know if he is racist but he certainly talks and acts like a jackass, so I guess he passes the duck test (if it walks like a duck … )

Imus has a pattern of making stupid remarks. The last gaffe made on his show that I remember before this latest one was made by executive producer, Bernard McGuirk. He was also involved in the ridiculous dialogue with Imus about the Rutgers womens’ basketball team.

The asshole McGuirk said upon the release of freelance reporter Jill Carroll after her kidnapping by Iraqi extremists that Carroll was the:

” … kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests, sneak into the Green Zone” “

It shouldn’t have rubbed me the wrong way because I expect this kind of stupid banter out of the likes of people who live for nothing else but ratings. But it did. Carroll wasn’t doing anything but her job, just like the Rutgers women’s team.

Within the last hour or so, NBC Universal said it will no longer simulcast the Ignorimus radio show. I say good riddance.

Space. The final frontier. Deep, dark, space.

Maybe the subway walls such as those of Washington, D.C.’s Metro are not the final frontier when it comes to advertising. But it certainly does raise the debate of whether one man’s (or woman’s) wasted space is another’s dark hole of fortune.

Perhaps the last place many would expect to see ads for giants Microsoft and Target stores would be on a subway ride to the Smithsonian. But that is what I saw Saturday on Metro’s Blue Line. It’s part of a new wave of advertising popping up on subway’s worldwide.

Zooming out of a couple of stops out of the Metro Center Station on the way to the Smithsonian stop, the train driver exhorted his captive audience to take a peak out of the left window. Outside that window, a cartoonish woman pleaded for our train to wait for her but as she somehow hilariously runs with fast but futile steps toward us it appears in a flash of a nanosecond that Microsoft wants us to buy something, anything, of theirs.

Outside the next station was a reality as presented by Target, which is, of course, anything but reality. This was a several-second movie in which it seems our subway car will be popping out of a Target-logoed bank vault. Oh hell, just watch them yourselves if you happen to be on a subway somewhere. I’m sure they will eventually get to you, probably even if you don’t have your own subway to ride. I mean, one cannot get to much of a good thing when it comes to advertising, right?

No doubt that I would be the last person on Earth to answer such a question or even engage in a debate over whether these ads are harmless, helpful, hellish or any other adjective, subjective, objective, adverb, proverb, conjunction, conjunctivitis, wall of confusion, or maybe even confounding exercise, which might or might not prove detrimental to the health and well-being of subway commuters everywhere. That is because I don’t plan to make a habit of riding subways, light rail or any type of metropolitan camel caravan be it terranean or subterranean.

It just happens I am in Washington on business and fortunately that business will conclude at the end of this week. Then, I probably won’t ride Metro or any other conveyance of mass transit until I come back to D.C. later this year for another round of training. Maybe Target will have the whole damn movie finished by then!

But I just throw this out there for all of my friends who spend their time in dark, underground locales and, no, I’m not talking about my homeless friends back in Beaumont who have to reside every now and then under Interstate 10 bridges. Do you want your subway trip to include advertising on what would otherwise be dark, wasted walls? Do you think such advertising is an abomination or prelude to the moral decay of an otherwise innocent outlet that masks itself while we slip haplessly headed toward Hell in a handbasket? Or would you not even notice it just as you never notice anything on your morning commute with your iPods, copies of “The Examiner” that the jovial hawkers pass out each morning at the Metro escalators or snuggled up in your seat with a legal brief that you were supposed to read before you left work yesterday?

You all talk amongst yourselves. Let me know next time I am in town and riding the Metro.

For the second time since Saturday, I spent upwards of between 30 minutes to an hour trying to turn something out on this page. It’s not that I am any Melville or Twain or even Paris Hilton and her ghost of a writer. But at least when I write something — whether it is worth anything to anyone else or not — I want it to show up on my blog. A so-called “high-speed” Internet service serving my hotel called iBAHN apparently does not want that to happen.

On Saturday afternoon I spent quite some time writing, only to have iBAHN’s page asking me to sign up once again appear from out of nowhere to destroy what I was about to publish on Blogger. Unbelievably, it happened again tonight. This was after having my Internet service go on and off and on and off and on and off about 30 minutes prior … I called their customer service, which by the way their phone system is structured (to be fair, not unlike many companies today) doesn’t really want to have to talk with you. But they did.

The customer service lady I talked with the second time this evening said I shouldn’t have this problem again during the rest of my stay here at Residence Inn by Marriott in Bethesda, Md. That would be through Friday. But to be honest with you, parting this place and its substandard Internet provider will be no sweet sorrow.

My advice is that if you want high-speed Internet in your hotel room, ask questions about the service before you reserve. That is, unless you don’t have a choice like yours truly. And if that hotel has something called iBAHN, run like hell, don’t walk, away from that place of lodging. You will be doing yourself and your sanity a great favor.

This friendly fellow looked as if it wanted its photo taken, so I thought I’d oblige it.

This is obviously not the best place to park a bike in the District of Columbia.