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Never Touch The Stuff

Food & Drink, Travels

I have a theory that people only eat airline meals out of boredom — anything to relieve the tedium of a long flight — because I absolutely cannot imagine another reason for subjecting your taste buds to the bland, horrible pablum that passes for airline “food”.  And I cannot fathom why any airline would offer meals on a flight lasting less than three hours anyway, but they do.

So you can imagine my disinterest when yet another survey came out to see which airline offered the “healthiest, most nutritious / calorie-conscious  / whatever” meals on their flights.  Apparently, Alaska and Delta are at the top while at the bottom (to nobody’s surprise) comes Spirit Airlines (motto: “We invented cheap ‘n nasty travel, and we never forget to remind you of the fact”).

What amazes me is not that cheapskate Southwest Airlines (“Get where you’re going via five stops”) comes near the bottom of the list, but that they offer any food at all.  As far as I’m concerned, Southwest passengers should get free water and maybe a small pack of nuts, and count their blessings — and ditto people who fly with Spirit and all the other “budget” airlines.

As most of my travel is transoceanic ergo long-haul, I always make sure to take my own food on board, which has two features in my favor:  firstly, I can eat anytime I feel hungry and not when the airline thinks I should (e.g. 15 minutes before touchdown, the idiots), and secondly, I’m always assured that I’ll be getting food which I love to eat and is not nutritionally suspect (unless I decide to make it so, see below).  I have no dietary restrictions other than voluntary ones, so I can take pretty much whatever I like.

The only problem I have is booze, which dehydrates me anyway, and coupled with the regular dehydration of high-altitude travel therefore gives me a real chance of a painful gout attack.  So I never drink booze while flying — which kinda sucks, but waddya gonna do? — and instead, I take a couple of empty quart bottles through airport security (150ml? go fuck yourselves) and fill them up at a water fountain before boarding ($5 for a pint bottle of Dahani? go fuck yourselves, x 2).  I know, I often complain about how much I hate the (non-)taste of plain water, but I figure that I can endure pretty much anything for eight or so hours, and water isn’t the worst of those, by any means.  Additional note:  the last couple of times I flew out of London’s Heathrow, there was a promotion inside the secure area-stores which offered a free 500ml bottle of Evian with purchase of the Daily Telegraph, an excellent bargain because it provided me with in-flight water and gave me something to read while eating my pre-flight meal of a Full English breakfast / fish ‘n chips (depending on time of day or mood).

I divide my on-board food into three categories:  food, snacks and self-indulgence;  and I take one of each kind every time I fly.

The travel food is simple:  meat. Specifically, it’s 1lb of South African biltong (never American jerky because it’s too sweet and tastes like crap anyway).  I know, biltong is generally nosebleed-expensive no matter where you buy it, but a pound lasts me for both outbound and return flights.  Also, biltong (unlike jerky) is made of steak, so it’s quality meat.  Sometimes I’ll take some droëwors (another South African delicacy, pronounced “drew-uh-vorce”) which is spicy dried sausage, and I buy it and the biltong at a little shop in Grapevine.  That takes care of the protein, which is really all one needs to keep fed for 8-10 hours anyway.  (Warning:  both biltong and droëwors are highly addictive if you develop a taste for them.  I grew up eating the stuff, so I’m screwed.)

My travel snack is likewise simple:  salted cashew nuts, kept in a resealable plastic bag.  I love the damn things, and a large bag is seldom far from reach at home anyway.  (I know, they’re not as good for you as almonds, but I cannot stand the taste of almonds.)  I take nearly 2lbs of cashews when I travel simply so that I don’t have to buy them for the return flight — go ahead and see how much cashews cost in the U.K. and Europe, and you’ll see why.  Sometimes, if I remember to buy them ahead of time, I’ll also take some dried cherries, just for variation, or else I’ll buy a banana at one of the airport shops, if available.

My self-indulgence is even more simple:  a large bar of chocolate.  (I know, I know, don’t scold me.)  I have over the past three years managed to if not conquer my addiction, then at least tame it.  And if ever there’s a time when I can justify spoiling myself, it’s when I’m flying in a cramped coach-class airline seat for ten hours.  No jury would convict.  As for which specific chocolate, I leave the choice till the day of, or the day before my flight, but it’s generally drawn from Nestlé’s Aero, Milky Bar or Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.  All are available at the World Market just up the road or at the Grapevine shop en route  to DFW, so it’s an easy purchase.  If I’m going to England, then I’ll forego those choices (because I can buy them Over There for the return trip), and take instead a bag of chocolate-covered cherries from Central Market on the outbound flight.

I think you’ll agree that the above yummies constitute a compelling alternative to bland, tasteless airline food.  If you disagree with me, I don’t wanna hear about it.  And please:  I know that airline meals are “free”, and if ever there’s truth in the saying that you get what you pay for, that would be it.

Finally — and this can be important — my airline food and water supply makes me less vulnerable to long flight delays, even if overnight ones.  There’s nothing worse than being told your flight has been postponed to the next day meaning an overnight stay in the airport, and finding out that all the restaurants have closed.

It’s all part of being prepared for the worst, isn’t it?

Mandatory Solar Power

Business, Gummint

I have to confess that I’m in two minds about this development:

While there was little doubt it would happen, it’s now a done deal: California will require solar panels on most new homes. Officials at a December 5th Building Standards Commission meeting have voted for the new code, providing the last bit of approval necessary for the policy to take effect. New homes, condos and low-rise apartments will need eco-friendly power generation on their rooftops from January 1st, 2020 onward. The only exclusions are for homes that are either blocked by taller objects (like trees and tall buildings) or don’t have room for panels.
The building code is the first of its kind in the US, and may serve as a bellwether for the rest of the country. Critics are concerned this will further raise housing prices in a state where they’re already a sore point and might only offer limited energy savings. Proponents, however, estimate the technology could ultimately save homeowners money (as much as $60,000 over a 25-year lifespan). It could also lower the overall strain on the electrical grid, especially at peak hours.

I know, I know, it’s Loony California doing its little Totalitarian Green Thing and imposing unnecessary costs on homeowners (just the latest in a long, LONG line thereof).  But let’s take off the political filters for a moment and look at what’s involved.

Let’s say that for the average new home, this will add about $15,000 to the construction cost — which given the typical construction costs in CA, means about a 3% – 4% increase in cost per square foot.  We all know that initial building costs are generally far cheaper than retrofitting, so it makes sense to add the installation up front.  (In an ideal world, the state would offer some form of tax rebate to lessen the cost, but this is California, which last offered a consumer tax rebate in… okay, they’ve never offered a tax rebate.)  So unless I’ve made a huge mistake in my calculations (and feel free to do your own), the impact on the homeowner will be quite bearable.

Now let’s look at the benefits.

I’ll start off by calling bullshit on the quoted savings, because they didn’t include maintenance / replacement in the cost, and in any event, nobody stays in a house for 25 years anymore, so no, homeowners will not  see sixty grand cut off their electrical bills.  I’d also suggest that initially at least, the supply of solar panels would not keep up with the demand and instead of (say) $15,000 per household installation, the cost would balloon alarmingly, making nonsense of all the potential “savings” put forward.

But all that said, let’s consider this question:  is making the individual home less dependent on centrally-supplied electrical power such a Bad Thing?  It might make rolling brownouts and blackouts (pardon the inadvertent racism /sarc) a thing of the past, and lessen Californians’ exposure to damage caused by natural disaster:  earthquakes, mudslides etc. — not as the latter whack the houses, but in case the utilities’ properties and distribution networks are affected thereby.

And yes I know: what works in sunny Southern California will not work in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but the chances of Michigan passing such legislation are negligible anyway.  (It might become mandatory in New York State, but that would serve the NY voters right for electing those watermelon politicians into power anyway.)

Here’s how I see it.  The whole beauty of a federal republic, to paraphrase the Founding Fathers, is to let individual states be “laboratories” so that stuff like mandatory solar power collection and welfare reform can be tested in microcosm, and what works can then be rolled out through other states as they see fit.

And while I would support the hypothesis that while generally speaking, the proper course of action is to do the polar opposite of what California is doing, this might be one of the very few exceptions.

Wait A Minute

Men & Women

Ummmmm about my post of yesterday, I see this related factoid:

The number of old people being diagnosed with sexually transmitted infections is at an all-time high, figures have revealed.
Even people over the age of 90 are being treated for the illnesses, with dating apps, better health and drugs such as Viagra keeping them sexually active for longer.
Syphillis, one of the less common infections, was three times as common among over-65s last year as in the year before.
Meanwhile the number of people in the same age group contracting gonorrhoea more than doubled and chlamydia cases increased by 49 per cent.
Other infections included in the figures were genital herpes, which increased by 36 per cent, and genital warts.

Fucking Baby Boomers [sic].  The problem, and I speak as a Baby Boomer myself, is that when we were bonking like bunnies back in the late 60s and early 70s, everything was curable with a couple of penicillin jabs.  Now:  not so much.

That’s not an excuse for the above statistics, of course;  it’s just an explanation.  We Of That Generation were always a bunch of irresponsible idiots, and there’s no reason to think that we’d be any different in our jeans-wearing, grey-ponytailed dotage.  As if I didn’t have enough to worry about already;  now I can also look forward to a green, warty dick.  How lovely.

I think I’ll just go back to bed and pull the covers over my head.

Dangerous Games

Men & Women

If you can’t laugh at this tragic tale, then you have a heart of stone:

A German woman who gave her lustful 73-year-old partner a lethal dose of sleeping pills to avoid his sex games and then kept his body in the bin has been jailed for seven years.
She admitted giving the pensioner the pills in June 2017 so that he would ‘be quiet and go to sleep,’ but denied an intention to kill him.
She told the court the pensioner’s sex games had become too much for her to bear.
According to the indictment, she failed to account for the quantity Viagra and the amount of alcohol consumed by Heinz, which enhanced the effects of the sleeping pills on the elderly man’s body.

Why didn’t she call the cops when she saw he was dead?  You have to read the rest of the story.  Try to avoid waking the other people in the office with yer ribald laughter.

And for those of you using Dr. Pfizer’s little miracle blue pills:  be careful out there.

Wife Needed

Drive Time, Friends and Family

I don’t do well by myself.  Today I dropped the Tiguan off at the Eurocar repair shop to have the back brakes replaced (after only 65,000 miles — whatever happened to quality?).  The owner of the place very kindly offered me a lift home, which offer I gratefully accepted.

And then it all went pear-shaped.  You see, I always drop the deadbolt on the front door when I leave the house because I go out through the garage.

You know where this is going, right?

Yup;  the garage door opener is still in the Tiguan, ten miles away, and my front door key is useless because deadbolt.

So I sidled off to the apartment complex manager to see what could be done.  Long story short:  nada.  For security reasons, there is no universal remote for the garages, and as with the front door, the patio door is likewise deadbolted.  I am marooned for the next four hours or so, and I don’t like it.

Follow my reasoning, here:  if I had a wife, she’d be at home to let me in, with a steaming cup of consoling coffee withal, and I wouldn’t be sitting here typing on the complex’s public computer with only the lovely Claudia in the office to look at, listening to the canned “boom-tsss, boom-tss, boom-tss” background music supporting the usual helium-voiced Black chick singing crap lyrics in nigh-incomprehensible Ebonics.

Or maybe it’s Taylor Swift singing.  I’m not sure because tinnitus makes it difficult to hear anything through the World’s Cheapest Speakers echoing through the hard-floored hard-walled curtainless office complex.

This wife thing may seem to be something of an extreme remedy for the (very) occasional circumstance of locking oneself out of the house;  but there are plenty of other reasons, such as the fact that my last sexual encounter with a woman was during the Bush presidency (and don’t ask which one, either).  Another reason for me to have a wife is that I am absolutely sick of my own cooking — a man can only eat so much steak, shrimp, toasted cheese or -chicken sandwiches, coleslaw, lamb vindaloo, Jarlsberg cheese, bacon & eggs, grilled boerewors, baby back ribs, grapefruit segments, sausage rolls, steak ‘n kidney pie, ice cream, and baked beans on toast for so long before he dies of the dreaded Gastric Boredom.  Some variety, in other words, is needed.

Speaking of need, I need a drink, but of course old-fashioned hospitality has disappeared because offering a cocktail to a man in dire straits is nowadays something Only Hitler Would Do, or so I’ve heard.  If I had a wife, I’d never have that problem because anyone I’d marry would know that when I need a drink, I need a drink and that’s the end of it.

So I’m announcing today that I am now in the market for a wife, on a first-come first-served basis, so to speak.  And while all offers will be closely scrutinized, I should remind all lonely desperate needy partners that I am, to put it very mildly, a terrible prospect and you would be better off hooking up with Hitler.  Or something like that.

Unless Maintenance somehow manages to find some way into my apartment and gets me inside, in which case never mind.