Monthly Archives: October 2006

Good News for Inexpensive Flights to Europe

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IAG:

In a move bound to drive British Airways and its Irish CEO nuts, Ryanair has launched a surprise takeover bid for Aer Lingus. The deal values Aer Lingus at 1.48bn euros (1.9bn dollars). Predictably, the spin started immediately. “This offer represents a unique opportunity to form one strong airline group for Ireland and for European consumers. We will expand, enhance and upgrade the Aer Lingus operations,” said Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O’Leary in a statement. “This offer, if successful,means both companies will continue to operate separately and compete vigorously in the small number of routes on which we both operate, currently around 17 of the approximately 500 routes operated by the two airlines,” he added.

Requiem for Johnny Apple

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Todd Purdum:

With his Dickensian byline, Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites, Mr. Apple, who was known as Johnny, was a singular presence at The Times almost from the moment he joined the metropolitan staff in 1963. He remained a colorful figure as new generations of journalists around him grew more pallid, and his encyclopedic knowledge, grace of expression — and above all his expense account — were the envy of his competitors, imitators and peers.

Mr. Apple enjoyed a career like no other in the modern era of The Times. He was the paper’s bureau chief in Albany, Lagos, Nairobi, Saigon, Moscow, London and Washington. He covered 10 presidential elections and more than 20 national nominating conventions. He led The Times’s coverage of the Vietnam war for two and a half years in the 1960’s and of the Persian Gulf war a generation later, chronicling the Iranian revolution in between.

Apple’s cuisine articles over the years were a treat – particularly when he sampled things I’d never touch. Apple visited Sheboygan in 2002 to write about brats.

MaHunt

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Fascinating:


“Life consists with wildness….The most alive is the wildest…In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Henry David Thoreau

“There are certain things that cannot be enjoyed by everybody. If everybody tries to enjoy them, nobody gets any pleasure out of them.” Robert Marshall

“Hunting partakes directly in Nature’s sacrament — transcending a vacuous voyeur to a guiding guardian.” James A. Schneider

“Everybody knows, for example, that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead. An enormous amount of some kind of motive power has been lost.” Aldo Leopold

“The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody’s nose.” A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

“Remember that with large corporations and rich individuals gobbling up property to keep everyone out and conservancies, big government and its agencies devouring land through purchase and eminent domain condemnations to let everyone or no one in, there must be places preserved for “everyman/everywoman” plus one human companion to use unbothered by his/her brethren.” James A. Schneider

“Perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.” Henry David Thoreau

Jim Schneider, a UW Grad and Drexel Burnham Lambert alum is behind MaHunt intellectually and financially.

Colliding With Death at 37,000 Feet, and Living

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Joe Sharkey:

With the window shade drawn, I was relaxing in my leather seat aboard a $25 million corporate jet that was flying 37,000 feet above the vast Amazon rainforest. The 7 of us on board the 13-passenger jet were keeping to ourselves.


Without warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence, save for the hum of the engines.


And then the three words I will never forget. “We’ve been hit,” said Henry Yandle, a fellow passenger standing in the aisle near the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet.



“Hit? By what?” I wondered. I lifted the shade. The sky was clear; the sun low in the sky. The rainforest went on forever. But there, at the end of the wing, was a jagged ridge, perhaps a foot high, where the five-foot-tall winglet was supposed to be.

Fools to the Farm

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Daniel Griswold:

A hearing in the House Agricultural Committee last week highlighted everything wrong with U.S. farm policy. In preparation for writing the 2007 farm bill, House members heard from 17 witnesses representing every possible farm lobby —from cotton to corn, sugar to potatoes, rice to eggs, and sorghum — but not a single spokesperson for the interests of the American people as a whole.


Fewer than two percent of Americans farm for a living, and only a third of those farmers receive subsidies. Yet the interests of subsidized and protected farmers dominate every farm bill discussion in Washington. The broader interests of the United States and the other 98 percent of Americans are systematically ignored.


The biggest losers from U.S. farm policy are taxpayers. From 2000 to 2005, Congress spent an average of $17 billion a year in direct payments to farmers. That’s real money, even in Washington. Most of those payments did not go to small “family farms,” but to large operations and agribusinesses, including some Fortune 500 companies. Indeed, according to the Environmental Working Group, the top 10 percent of recipients collected two-thirds of the payments on offer, and the top 5 percent collected 55 percent.


Trade barriers and domestic price supports also force tens of millions of families to pay higher food prices. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, U.S. farm programs transferred an average of $10.5 billion a year from U.S. food consumers to producers from 2003 through 2005. That amounts to an annual food tax of $140 for a family of four — a regressive tax that falls most heavily on poor families that spend a larger share of their budgets on foo

Satellite Radio Answers the Question

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i’ve not thought much about satellite radio (XM, Sirius) until a recent lengthy drive around central Colorado. Prior to satellite radio, if you wanted music while driving, the choices were:

  • an iPod with an fm adaptor, or a cable plugged into the rental car’s radio, or
  • Local radio

Hertz, perhaps via a Sirius promotion, included their service in my rental car. I was pleasantly surprised with the depth and breadth of music available (though Lefsetz says that XM is superior in this respect – and in reception quality).

Several of Sirius’s songs were a pleasant surprise: Elton John’s classic “Funeral for a Friend” and Willie Nelson’s acoustic “Crazy“, among others.

There were some disappointments, including replays (Coldplay) and the odd playing of the “Fray” in Sirius’s “Coffeehouse” program. I have to assume that they are paid to plug the Fray.

I was pleasantly surprised with the Sirius reception while driving in Canyons. The only places we lost reception were I-70’s Eisenhower Tunnel and in some deep canyons.

The satellite choices certainly are compelling, particularly given the same old, same old, played over and over on traditional stations.

Finally, I continue to be amazed at the quantity of 30 and 40 year old music played in restaurants, cafe’s and bars. Lunching on trout tacos one day, we heard Joan Baez, Steve Miller, The Who, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin among many others. Is there nothing interesting from the 21st Century?