Oh, it's much worse than you think

I'll boil down my travel travails as much as I can to get to the good parts...

As I already mentioned, it was my second leg's half hour lateness that caused me to miss the last flight out of Vegas to Eugene. Around midnight I was given a hotel voucher and told to be back by 5:30am for a morning Delta flight to Eugene via Salt Lake City, so with five hours to kill, naturally I went to Mandalay and played some poker.

Five hours later and $115 richer (assuming you, like me, prefer to count taxi fare as a loss) I returned to the airport. Unfortunately, I was rejected from the Delta flight because of a clerical error -- apparently my ticket number was in the US Airways format and not the Delta format. Standing in about six lines solved this problem -- but then the Delta people told me I was too late for that flight, and they wouldn't be able to get me to Eugene until 7pm or so.

US Airways told me that I could wait that long, or I could hop on a flight to Phoenix, where I would be on standby for a noon flight to Eugene. I expressed concern that, if I didn't make it onto the plane (since they're always overbooked on the holidays anyway), I'd just be stuck in Phoenix for an extra six hours, which would be infinitely worse than being stuck in Vegas with an unused hotel voucher for that long. However I was told that my chances were good. So off to Phoenix I went.

That plan, of course, sucked. I asked for a hotel voucher in Phoenix (because at this point I had been travelling for around 20 hours and needed a nap), but was turned down. I had to sleep on hard chairs in the sunlight while little kids squealed all around me. It was 100% lame.

Possible ideas:

• Pneumatic tubes. You know, like at the bank, but with people. I think that's how they travelled from city to city in Starship Troopers.


• I have a theory that we can bend spacetime by putting something really massive, like a black hole, maybe in the Midwest somewhere. That would bring the two coasts a lot closer together, but maybe only for a few nanoseconds before we all die.


• Teleportation, specifically as seen in The Fly. As in the Southpark episode in which Mr. Garrison invents a new mode of travel that operates by penetrating your mouth and rectum: "Well, it beats dealing with airline companies."

There's no easy way out

If Stallone wants me to see Rocky Balboa, he should stop putting out trailers and start forcing me to watch Slate's video slideshow of Rocky montages.

Worst assertion: "1982's Rocky III marks the franchise's descent into extreme narrative laziness", apparently because much of the story is told through montage. What's narratively lazy about paring down a story to its bare essentials and telling it -- to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger", no less -- in under three minutes? That's the narrative equivalent of one-armed pushups at the crack of dawn.

Runner-up: "This [the first montage in Rocky III] is the first indication of the Rocky series' penchant for reverse snobbery. An open display of wealth?appearing in an American Express ad, say?always portends doom. Contrarily, signs of poverty?like shadowboxing on the open road?reveal a steely resolve." I would argue that the first indication was in Rocky, wherein Rocky wore sweats and trained a lot while Apollo Creed just walked around in a suit making ridiculous statements.

Much better assertion: "Sergei Eisenstein might have invented the montage, but this four-minute scene [oddly enough, the training montage from Rocky IV] proves that Sylvester Stallone perfected it." Clearly true.

I hope they replay this

Right now NBC is showing a remake of The Year Without a Santa Claus, you know, the one with Heat Miser and Show Miser or whatever.

I'm at work, and to my right are three TVs (one for KEZI-ABC, one for KVAL-CBS, and one for KMTR-NBC). So I happened to look up when Chris Kattan, wearing an elf-green muscle suit, delivered -- if the closed captioning is to be believed -- this awesome line:

SPARKY defiantly, to Santa
"Sparky was my slave name. I'm Extreme Santa now!"

Please replay this movie, NBC. I will watch the shit out of it.

Do not trust Pup when it comes to foods

It turns out my most humiliatingly bad gamble in Vegas this year was the money I plunked down at the Beef Jerky Store for a big bag of candy labeled "Happy Plum." Pup assured me that this stuff was delicious -- sweet on the outside, sour on the inside. Sounds great, right?

Well, Pup, if you like a candy whose top Google hit is a site called Bad-Candy.com, you gotta start thinking about not recommending candy to people.

At first it tasted mildly sweet; then it tasted exactly like lots and lots of salt. I mean, like if salt could be made to taste more salty, that would be Happy Plum.

I brought it into the newsroom to trick other people into eating it. Apparently they did, and they hated it, but there's still plenty left over. It's a big bag. I should've just bought more buffalo jerky.

NYT article on marriage equality

Liaps, Pinz, and James all sent me this article about heterosexual couples deciding not to marry until gays can as well (normal heteros, not just Charlize and Stuart and Brad and Angelina).

Ms. McKay of Marriage Equality U.S.A. said heterosexuals can be instrumental in the push for gay marriage. ?It?s a very powerful decision to stand up against discrimination in a system where you benefit,? she said. ?There?s no more powerful way of saying, ?I object.? ?