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First, the disclaimers.  I’ve got a few family members who work, or  have worked, for United Airlines and I have flown  on them plenty, usually on buddy passes.  Outside of a  couple  nights spent sleeping in airports, it’s generally been a positive experience.

Also, I worked myself for TWA for several years, so I know  that as pissed  off as passengers get at airline employees, airline employees get pissed off at passengers, too.   I  presume that happens in almost every job.  Waitress/Diner, Teacher/Student, Police/Public, whatever it  is.

Throughout my long life of traveling, I’ve sampled quite a few other airlines as well.  Minor differences in the food and level of  service, but for the most part, they’re all the same.  The plane takes off, the plane lands, and nobody gets jerked out of their seat and dragged down  the  aisle.

Disclaimers over.  United  fucked up real bad.  First, when you offer  $600 for anybody to take  the next flight and you get no takers, you go up to $800, or $1,000, or whatever it  takes.  Adding some frequent  flyer miles is usually popular.  Sure, that might set  a dangerous precedent, which they could maybe mitigate by overbooking by  a bit less, but it would undoubtedly be cheaper than having your stock lose $1.4 billion in  value in the space of a few hours, and the lawsuit hasn’t even begun.

Second, when you invite the police, or  airport security, or whoever  the fuck they were, on board to solve your problems, you have already lost.  That is admitting that you  can’t solve the problem through diplomacy, negotiation, or  bribery.  It looks very much (and looks are what  counts here – if it hadn’t been filmed, it would barely be news, if at all) as if UAL has declared  war on  its passengers.  That can’t be good  for business.

I have a partial  solution  to  the problem, and  it would solve a lot  of other problems on  the way.  It would reduce traffic jams and automobile accidents.  It would clean  up the air.  It would  put a bit of luxury back  into long distance travel, perhaps even elegance and romance, if done right.  I am speaking, of  course, of high speed trains.  Electric, of  course.

A train can carry far more  passengers than a plane, so they are difficult to overbook.  A train gives you more  room to spread out your  legs.  You  can even go  to  a  dining car, or get a sleeper and save on hotel bills.  They are more  difficult to hijack, because they can’t change  course, or at any rate they  can’t change course to anywhere that’s off the  rails.  (Yes, I’ve seen ‘The Taking of Pelham 123.’  More than once.  It was fiction.)

I don’t think a network  of high speed, high tech, super efficient trains would necessarily put  the airlines out of business, or completely end  the era of the automobile.  But  it would  sure put the airlines, and automobile manufacturers, on notice, and make them sharpen up their game.

That would be good for  everybody.

It’s been a lovely day.  A friend, Dave, who I haven’t seen in about 15 years, that is, since he left Prague, returned for a visit.  He’ll be staying at our place this weekend, but this afternoon we just wandered around a bit, talked about how much Prague has changed (more people speak  English, more variety in the restaurants, customer service a bit better, prices way higher), and talked nostalgically about a bygone era, the early expat days of Prague.  He suggested a beer, forgetting that I  do not drink, which  is O.K., everybody forgets that, and I  suggested a joint and he declined, says he doesn’t do  that any  more and it made me think of that Ringo Starr  song.  So, we found a sidewalk cafe where he had a beer and I had a  non-alcoholic beer, tastes roughly the  same and looks very  inconspicuous.
We walked some more.  Some things do not change.  The river, of course, still runs in  the same bed and all  of the bridges are still  the same.  The trams still run along the same tracks.

We went to a poetry reading at a tea room that hadn’t existed while he was here, although there had been poetry  readings.

It was sort of a different concept in poetry readings, and everybody was expected to read from some other poet.  I recited The Sneetches from memory because I’ve read it  to  classes  so often I do have it  memorized.
Dave knew at least one of the people there, and soon met many more.

At the end, he said he felt the Prague scene was as vibrant as ever.  I feel very good about that.

I was just browsily browsing through Facebook this morning when I discovered the lovely town of Mawlynnong, in India.  Go ahead, google it.

It’s billed as  the cleanest village in India, and it truly  looks like an environmental paradise.  The main road was pristine, and tall flowering hedges lined the sides.  It wasn’t just clean.  It looked like walking through a well kept and exquisitely landscaped botanical center.  But, what did they do to get to be India’s cleanest village?  A few common sense things, that could be repeated most places.  The schoolchildren come out every morning to sweep the street.  There are little, wicker, garbage baskets everywhere, garbage is sorted and  everything organic is composted.  They use solar panels.  They store rainwater.  Every home has an indoor toilet (for India, that’s kind of a big deal).  Smoking is forbidden.  So are plastic bags.

Now, some of this stuff might not be so easily repeatable elsewhere.  The no smoking part would be seriously hard to enforce in any town big enough that people are moving in  and out without everybody  in  town knowing every thing about  them, which is most towns.  In a town of 500 people, it’s a bit more difficult to be a secret smoker.

Also, there’s the fact that a lot of the 500 people in town are related  to each other, and they all  go to  the same church.  They are christians, and cleanliness seems to be a  central tenet of their local version of that infinitely flexible faith.  So,  it’s sort of like Salt Lake City, on a much smaller scale.

I’m all for it, and I think a lot of the ideas could be emulated by other, and larger communities.  Nothing to  lose by trying.

I’ve spent the day looking through the poems I’ve written over the last 9 months or so, to see if I’ve got enough for a book.  I’m certainly pretty darned close, and there was some good stuff in there that I’d pretty much forgotten about, so it was a very pleasant day.

Smoked a couple of joints, watched parts of a couple of movies, there was quite an intense one, semi-documentary style, at any rate based on real  events, about the high wire walker who walked a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center, back in the 70s.  I enjoyed it, which is weird, because I get nervous even looking out of a window from a high floor.  Then there was one, a biopic I guess, of some woman who got rich inventing the modern mop.  I kept thinking the lead was Renee Zellweiger, except thinking they did something to make her eyes a little wider, but it wasn’t her, it was  Jennifer Lawrence.  Then the last half of that thing with Steve Carrell, where he’s got the hots for  his  brother’s fiancee.  Dan in Real Life.  That’s a great movie, but I’d seen it before.  Then the first half of an X-Men movie of which I’ve seen the last half.

It may all  seem trivial and hollow, but it meant I  wasn’t on Facebook all day, which is a minor victory.

It’s true about the echo chamber, I suppose.  Partially because I’ve defriended a few, perhaps because so many of the people I know in real  life, or have gravitated toward on facebook, are Berners, or old hippie burnouts like myself, but I tend to forget how bad it  is in  the world  outside my own head.

Helena wanted to see the news about the terrorist attack in Sweden (details still  sketchy – guy drove a truck into  a department store), so  we turned to BBC, but they were talking about something else, so we wound up on CNN, which was not a good choice.  After two minutes of the same non-information on Stockholm, they waffled on in some psuedo panel discussion about the tomahawk  missile attack and the Sarin gas outbreak which preceded  it  by two days,  which is enough to irrevocably link thme in the public’s mind, even though the connection might be arbitrary, and I say psuedo panel discussion, because it  wasn’t really a discussion at all, just four people giving two minute speeches about how right we were to finally just bomb somebody.

I’m not convinced it was a  false flag but I’m not convinced it wasn’t one, either.  The U.S. blames Assad, and maybe the Russians, the  Syrians blame the Americans, and it’s a wild circle.  Seems strange to me that nobody  is blaming ISIS.

But, the thing was, I had to  watch Nikki Haley in  her role  as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., and Wolf Blitzer singing her praises afterwards, and the full  horror of  this administration hit  me.  It is the  complete victory of the tea party, the morons who hung tea bags from their  hats and didn’t know how to spell moron.

Never underestimate.