Keep on Growing

Southwest You Are No JetBlue

I flew Jetblue in the middle of the new heightened security procedures, and Southwest this past week -- so Southwest had more time to adapt to the new reality (many more people checking bags).  My experience left me an even bigger JetBlue fan, and resolved to try to avoid Southwest.  I arrived at Oakland 1 hour 50 minutes before my departure time, to snaking lines.  Since I had already checked in online, but needed to check a bag (which you can do online with JetBlue but not Southwest), I asked the curbside luggage guy whether I had to wait on the line.  He said yes.  There were no signs, and the crowds were so big I couldn't easily get into the terminal in any event.  So I waited in line for over an hour -- when I got inside the terminal, it was clear we could have just walked up to the self-service kiosks to check our bags. I ended up getting to my gate 15 minutes ahead of departure time -- for some people this is normal, but for me it's excruciating. My road warrior boyfriend couldn't believe I hadn't gone into the terminal but had accepted a Southwest employee's directions. I never will make that mistake again.

On my return, it took 35 minutes after landing before luggage began appearing. Hey, bring back Herb Kelleher! Southwest has lost its edge.

Falling in Love Again

It was almost over for me and my blackberry.  The relationship started in the late 90s at CNET, but when I left CNET and transitioned to a non-enterprise account, while I couldn't give up the addiction, it was no longer as fulfilling.  Messages took forever to get to me.  Synch-ing calendar manually was a pain. I was looking into other options, since the hot techies I know are preferring Treos these days. Then my company switched to an exchange server for mail, and I asked our tech guy Scott to move my blackberry account.  Back in love.  Instant mail delivery.  Viewing of all my emails, even those sent from my computer. The thrill is back.

"Welcome to America, Macaca"

What I most enjoyed about Senator George Allen (R-Virginia) making the above quote to a Virginia-born student of Indian descent, is not that a racist got caught in the act, but the pathetic attempt of his campaign spin-meisters to claim that Macaca (apparently a derogatory word meaning monkey) was a slip of his tongue and the word Mohawk, referring to the student's haircut, was intended.  Macaca, Mohawk.  Very believable.  Even a tongue-slipping President couldn't make that one.

Nora Ephron is a Genius

Her new collection of essays is so brilliant I can't stop reading to everyone around me (okay, Stewart, David and Portia) so I better post a paragraph so you will buy it yourself.

"Because here's what happens with a purse.  You start small.  You start pledging yourself to neatness.  You start vowing that This Time It Will Be Different.  You start with the things you absolutely need--your wallet and a few cosmetics that you have actually put into a brand-new shiny cosmetics bag, the kind used by your friends who are competent enough to manage more than one purse at a time.  But within seconds, your purse has accumulated the debris of a lifetime. The cosmetics have somehow fallen out of the shiny cosmetics bag (okay, you forgot to zip it up), the coins have fallen from the wallet (okay, you forgot to fasten the coin compartment), the credit cards are somewhere in the abyss (okay, you forgot to put your Visa card back into your wallet after you bought the sunblock that is now oozing into the lining because you forgot to put the top back onto it after you applied it to your hands while driving seventy miles an hour down the highway)....Perhaps you can fit your sneakers into your purse.  Yes, by God, you can! ...Everything you own is in your purse. You could flee the Cossacks with your purse.  But when you open it up, you can't find a thing in it--your purse is just a big dark hole full of stuff that you spend hours fishing around for.  A flashlight would help, but if you were to put one into your purse, you'd never find it."

How does she know that?  We are either the same person (I have a still-good neck but she's a better writer) or she is spying on me.  And there's so much more that I'd be violating all sorts of copyright laws. Her chapter on Parenting makes me embarrassed to have founded the magazine.