Rev. Donald Sensing of Winds of Change (and the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church) recommends without reservation a recent book by his New Testament professor at Vanderbilt — an orthodox Jewish woman herself — discussing Jesus’s character as a faithful first-century Jew.
With a recommendation this strong, my purchase decision took about two minutes.
11 June 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: life, books / TrackbackThere’s no reason for people like me to be loyal to an airline anymore.
I’ve earned nearly 30,000 miles with American Airlines over the past six years since I graduated from college, and closer to 70,000 with Star Alliance airlines in the same time — first US Airways, then United when US’s merger talk got heavy. The *A programs have gotten me to Jacksonville, Montreal, Toronto and (this fall) Nebraska for free. But last week, United announced that it would match US in no longer crediting 500-mile minimums per segment. Had that rule been in effect all this time, I’d have earned maybe two-thirds of that total.
The AA miles? I’ve been trying to spend those for about a year. But with the current high loads, there aren’t any seats. Then Wednesday, American announced that it would both reduce domestic capacity further by 10-12% and begin charging all non-elite passengers $15 for the first bag checked.
Checking baggage so you can take a week’s worth of clothes, a change of shoes, and a full bottle of shampoo on a weeklong trip is not optional. It’s a requirement for transporting conscious human beings rather than self-propelled lumps of cargo.
22 May 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: travelAs always, by popular demand…
Driving down I-81 on Friday, I had my car decorated with all the usual VT football magnets, the product of an unplanned 45-minute break on I-64 West earlier in the afternoon. It was a nice afternoon, traffic slightly heavier than usual with cars full of happy families heading to graduation like us.
A fluorescent orange 15-passenger van from a North Carolina-based construction contractor passed us on the left. Nothing too remarkable about that but the color. But then it slowed down, drifted back to us, and the front-seat passenger leaned up against his window, waving his WVU hat, laughing and yelling something presumably stupid.
We laughed this off and drifted back. Then he braked again. Same act, same result… then H wished aloud for a whiteboard. Quickly, I pulled a sheet of paper and pen out of the side pocket. We only had a minute or so to get this right.
We sped up a little, and he braked to come back a third time. This time, pressed against my side window were two simple words:
GO PITT
Result: two middle fingers, five miles of uninterrupted laughter in our car and the best story of the weekend.
11 May 2008 / 1 Comment / Tags: life
I made it up to Nationals Park for the first time a couple weeks ago, after seeing close to 50 games total at RFK over the past three seasons. (Needless to say, the yearly average is going down given my new home — both its location and the associated mortgage. But such is life.)
27 April 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: baseball