Good morning Happy 75th birthday to the Golden Gate Bridge, which opened in May 1937. It has become one of the world’s most instantly recognizable bridges, and is approaching its two billionth vehicle crossing sometime very soon. Although having the longest span in the world when built, it lost that title in 1964 to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and nowadays is the ninth longest suspension bridge, with a 4,200 ft main span length. The longest [...]
Good morning It is a strange and semi-random process, deciding what to write about. I started off Thursday this week with some half written materials for publication today, and then during the morning, stumbled across a strange news item. At first it seemed worthy of a single short paragraph in today’s compilation of stories, but as I struggled to distill the nonsense implied in the story down to a single short paragraph, I realized that [...]
North Korea has been in the news quite a bit this year, first with the death of their leader and the succession of his son; and more recently, when our leader went to South Korea and up to the DMZ where he gazed across to North Korea. This quick view from afar was enough for Mr Obama to issue a ritual condemnation of North Korea as a backward country 40 years behind the times and [...]
Good morning Anna and I are now back from our time in the Orlando area, and – as promised – here is a huge newsletter and lots of other articles to compensate for the very short one last week. Last week’s hotel stay was a helpful reminder, of sorts, to be stranded in a hotel with appallingly slow and sometimes totally stopped internet service. We take these things for granted, and plan our business lives [...]
I’ve been in the Orlando area for the last week, driving as far afield as Tampa and Melbourne. During my travels, I’ve noticed that regular unleaded gas sells for a low price of about $3.75/gallon, no matter whether it is in the Melbourne area, Orlando, or Tampa area. Some places would sell for another 10c or so a gallon, but consistently, within close on a hundred mile radius of Orlando, the low price was around [...]
Good morning As I mentioned last week, I’m in Florida at present, struggling to pay for the costs of several days at the Disney World complex with my daughter. There’s one interesting aspect to the costs of visiting Disney, and that is how one gets locked into being only at Disney rather than at other attractions in the Orlando area too. Ideally, I’d have liked to spend a day at Universal Studios too, but the [...]
Good morning I had mildly commented on the computer system changeover for UA/CO last weekend, and suggested you keep on top of any issues that might be arising. I tried not to indulge in any greater fearmongering because I thought that surely this changeover would have been massively tested and trialed and would be routine and user-transparent. Boy, was I wrong. But if you’re not a subscriber to Joe Brancatelli’s excellent newsletter, and/or if you [...]
Good morning Sometimes I like to open these newsletters by mentioning an anniversary date that falls during the week. This week, I’ll instead refer to the pending demise of another of the major names in US aviation history – Continental Airlines. Continental was formed in 1934, originally trading under the name of Varney Speed Lines, an airline operating in the southwest. It was renamed Continental in 1937 after being bought by its long-time CEO, Bob [...]
After many decades where the US was almost the only country in the world not to have an international tourism promotion budget, the country finally last year got a new organization up and running, an organization billing itself as ‘a public private partnership with the mission of promoting increased international travel to the United States’ and calling itself ‘Brand USA’. Until then, international promotion of the US was done on a more or less uncoordinated [...]
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