The Weekly Letter
Airliner Orville meets practically perfect Mary
I hope that you are healthy and happy. When we arrived in Switzerland after a short trip to the USA, the weather was cold and dreary. However, by Friday, it became warm and sunny. We cautiously look forward to Spring.
We enjoyed New Mexico in general and Santa Fe in particular. We found wonderful restaurants, caught up with old friends and made new friends. Nazy and I enjoyed walking along Canyon Road - a one mile stretch of art galleries. Everybody we met was friendly and helpful except possibly for the guy selling the $18,000 Panama Hat (see last week’s letter). We stopped in Albuquerque on our way to New York for breakfast with Mitra. She and Stefan are really making progress with Oxygen Tango, the very best Tango School in the world.
Since our flight to NYC involved a connection in Houston, we assumed that we’d be flying Continental Airlines. While we lived in Houston, I worked for Schlumberger; naturally oil prices collapsed. Business expense controls were tightened. Employees had to..
“.. take the lowest priced flight,” the travel division explained.
“I fly ABC,” I explained.
“ABC?”
“Anything But Continental.”
“That sounds acceptable.” [I was stunned.]
Like all of the mainstream US airlines, Continental Airlines experienced bankruptcy. Unlike most, they did it twice (1983 and 2002). Amazingly, they eventually emerged both improved and changed. They had a young fleet, a good frequent flyer program and a pleasant staff. They just weren’t quite big enough and United Airlines..
“... bought Continental.” I explained as Nazy gasped. “I know. It is sad,” I replied. “But maybe the Continental culture will survive.”
“You’re an expert on mergers and acquisitions, Dan.”
I have lived through acquisitions. I thought about Digital and Compaq. “Bet on the United culture,” I replied sagely as I handed our boarding passes to the gate agent.
“You!” the agent blustered as I walked toward the airplane.
“Me?”
“I am boarding sector 1. You have a sector 2 boarding pass.”
“But I am a premier frequent traveler,” I replied flashing my Swiss International travel card.
“Danish cards don’t work here. We have improved our boarding process.”
“Improved? You mean ‘changed’. No one else is in the gate area. Why should we wait?”
“Boarding sector 1!” The agent shouted. “You stand over there,” she pointed.
After a 3 minute delay, during which no one boarded, she called for sector 2 boarding.
“This is sooo much better,” I mumbled as I passed.
It got worse. A vintage Boeing 767 had been restored for the transatlantic crossing.
“Vintage?” Nazy asked.
“Two wings, my dear. Not Left and Right but Top and Bottom. Did you see the name painted by the door? ‘Airliner Orville’. The sister ship is ‘Airliner Wilbur’.”
“Not sister ship, Dan. It’s brother airplane.”
Although the flight was only 40% full, United offered us economy+ seats (in the front of the back section) for $195 each. (They offered these seats for $95 each when we were on-board; the plane was empty and we demurred.) United’s “personal entertainment system” used technology that other airlines retired when Eisenhower left the White House. The video screens were.
“...small, Dan.” Nazy noted.
“My iPhone is brighter,” I concurred. “And bigger.”
“A postage stamp is bigger.”
“I know. Have you seen this?” I said handing Nazy a blue handkerchief.
“No,” Nazy replied wiping her nose.
“That’s the ‘blanket’, my dear.”
“And this?” Nazy asked. “Q-tip?”
“Pillow!” I replied.
Luckily, the airplane was mostly passenger-less. Nazy and I each secured a completely vacant row. We slept (horizontally) during the flight.
Before we left, we enjoyed NYC. We had arrived at the Waldorf-Astoria late on Friday evening. A stroll through the nearby area failed to locate any mid-range restaurants so we began our culinary experience at MacDonalds.
“You’re lucky that I’m hungry, Dan,” Nazy noted graciously.
We spent the next day downtown - visiting the 911 national monument and shopping at the famous Century 21. On the way back we stopped by the TKTS booth at Times Square.
“TKTS sells heavily discounted theatre tickets on the day of the show,” I explained surveying the queue (43,232 people). “But we can probably get a quicker deal at the box office.”
We considered “Pricilla, Queen of the Desert”, but Nazy wasn’t thrilled about seeing a musical featuring men dressed as women. Continuing on, we found some really good tickets to Mary Poppins. It was a fun and ‘practically perfect’ show. Cultural challenges prevented full international understanding, however. At the break, a Japanese lady approached me.
Pointing to a tee-shirt that was on-sale, she asked: “How do you say that word?”
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” I replied - with confidence.
“But what does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean any, well, it means whatever you want it to mean.”
“Oh! It’s a nonsense word?” She turned and explained the background to her friend. “参照してください？アメリカ人は非常に面白いです” (I overheard, but didn’t understand.)
And, speaking of nonsense, we also visited MOMA. A few pieces of universally enjoyable artwork were mixed with a jovial selection of, eh, ‘other stuff’. I wondered what could be said about an enormous red painting - roughly the size of a tennis court - so I perused the associated placard. “Look at this,Nazy.” I called. “The artist says that many people enjoy..”
“Enjoy? That art is red.”
“Right. Enjoy looking at large paintings from a distance. The artist says we should take a close look.” See below: Imagine the large image as the basketball court at Madison Square Garden (mounted on a wall.) The smaller rectangles are the actual size of a United Airlines personal video screen. The top one is a digital photo of a section of the ‘art’, the bottom one shows how that photo would look on an typical United video screen.