The Dumbest Thing I Heard Today...

...was on NPR of all places. I was listening to the news when I heard the announcer say the stock market had stopped its downhill slide....

First, if anyone can make that prediction with certainty, what the hell are they doing working at NPR. Second, how can anyone say the market has stopped a downhill slide based on a single day's results.

I expect that kind of editorializing from CNN, not from NPR. The market was up. That's all that needed to be said. Anything else is mere embellishment and not worth my donations.

End rant.

Here Come the E-Mail Attacks

Rightwing BS Alert!!!! Got this one from a friend today:

The following is the 2007 winning entry from an annual contest at Texas A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term. This year's term: Political Correctness.

"Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."

Googled it every way I can. No such contest in Aggieland and the originating web site (or the only one that has a reference to the quote) is ARC Air Discussion Forums, a site that appears to be something to do with aircraft manufacture or maintenance with a heavy suspected right bias. It's full of ad-hominem attacks but that's to be expected.

Let the games begin.

If You Fly Southwest (a little off topic)

Southwest Airlines is a great carrier. They're no-frills and in my case, they fly where I want to go. I pretty much abandoned Frontier for them. But here's an interesting little artifact of the Southwest web site:

When you try to book a flight logged into the site with your Rapid Rewards number and your password, it doesn't show you all the available flights, nor does it show you all the available fares. And the fares it's missing are, strangely, the low ones.

I discovered this yesterday trying to book from Denver to Houston. I logged in and looked up a frequent trip I'd saved and half the flights were missing, as were all the low fares. Confused, I ended up booking the trip on Frontier thinking the rates weren't available from Southwest. When my S. O. told me to check Southwest again today, I did so without logging in. All the flights and fares were there! I then tried again with my login and the saved trip - same results as yesterday. Puzzled, I took out the frequent trip and tried "straight", still logged in. Still fewer flights, although the low rates were there.

It didn't cost me much, ten dollars or so, to switch to the other carrier. It costs us a 70 mile round trip twice, though, since Frontier flies into Bush Intercontinental rather than Hobby. I'd rather have flown Southwest and will fly them in the future but I won't be logged in when I look for the flights.