Argentina

Argentina has announced that they will be jailing hoarders, as bread prices skyrocket. They need 6 million tons of wheat, they produced nearly 10 million, and yet they still have a shortage.

Note also that the real inflation rate is more than twice the officially admitted rate--although saying the true inflation rate can also get you jailed.

Fortunately, That Could Never Happen Here.

Battle of Sybota

Ryan hosted a game of Trireme, playing the Battle of Sybota. It was disappointing not to have Josh there, but he understandably didn't want to give up a day's work; and we did get eight guys and a fun battle. AAR at the link.

Independence Day

Spent much of the morning and early afternoon chipping tile off the backsplash, preparatory to putting new tile on--hopefully before Gwen arrives from Australia ! Diana and I took both kayaks out for an hour in the afternoon, then the three of us went to the beach for fireworks. Josh and I finished the day with a game of Command & Colors: Napoleonics, with his French defeating my Russians in a hard-fought battle of Eylau.

Tonto and What's-His-Name

We went to the Beach Movie Bistro for opening night of The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer as the masked man. I had high hopes, but it was weak. Too violent to be fun--one of the bad guys cuts out someone's heart, with lots of blood--but later on it's almost cartoonish, with the Spirit Horse casually standing on a roof, the madame with the ivory leg, and infinite-six-shooters. Tonto is eccentric-to-crazy, which is fine--eccentric people are more memorable than normal people--but he outshines the supposed main character.
The Ranger starts off bland and clueless, and never really gets a clue. When he tracks down a villain, he insists on "bringing them back to justice", but when he finds out that   the local political boss is in cahoots with the villain and no justice will be done, he doesn't really even think through the situation, much less come to any decision on what to do about it. He doesn't want to carry a gun. When he's persuaded to carry one anyway, he then doesn't want to shoot anyone; but when his first shot ricochets and kills two bad guys, he doesn't have any misgivings about it, nor does he rationalize why violence is sometimes necessary.  Overall, a wimpy character. There was no chemistry with the Love Interest.
Pass.

Tattoo

Someone at work has a musical symbol tattoo'd on the back of her leg. It's a treble calf.

Permanent Lightning Storm

There is a more or less permanent lightning storm over Maracaibo, and it's been going on since at least 1597. The lake is boxed in on three sides by mountains, so the air moving across the lake rises and produces thunderheads. The lightning that results is called Catatumbo Lightning, based on the Cataumbo River that flows into Maracaibo; it's also called the Lighthouse of Maracaibo, since it can be seen for miles around the lake.

Delta Airlines and the Trip From Hell

On Monday night we left for Canada. The flights were:

Monday   6/24
4.53 pm  Delta 7300 to LaGuardia  -- delayed due to weather
7.00 pm Delta 6217 to Montreal -- cancelled

Tuesday 6/25
8:40am Delta 6202 to Montreal -- delayed due to maintenance issue

Returning Wednesday   6/26
7.05am Delta 3907 to Detroit  -- delayed due to maintenance issue
10.20am Delta 3653 to Norfolk -- missed because 3907 was delayed

When we landed at LaGuardia, there was a theoretical possibility that our second flight might also have been delayed and we could still catch it. However, there were no gates available, so we (and other planes) sat on the taxiway for over an hour. It literally took us less time to fly from Norfolk to New York, than to get from the LaGuardia runway to the terminal. We would definitely have missed the second flight, if it hadn't been cancelled instead.

All the hotels around LaGuardia were full, so for dinner we went to a sports bar in the airport, where Josh said "I could microwave better burgers than these." Around 1am, the LaGuardia staff started setting out cots; they were under bright fluorescent lights but they were more comfortable than hard plastic chairs and, unlike Philadelphia's airport, they didn't have an ad blaring every ten minutes on why the city is so great and you should really spend a lot of money there. Josh still didn't get any sleep, but I managed a couple of hours.

Sleeping in the airport and waking up at 5am made it easy to catch our 8:40am flight, which left the gate on time, made it almost to the runway, and then went back to a maintenance area. The crew told us that they didn't know how long it would take, and they might be putting us on a shuttle to go back to the terminal. It was looking like we might miss Mum's funeral entirely, and I was considering just chucking the trip and going back to Virginia Beach. But, an hour late, we got airborne, and landed at Montreal at 11:30. Josh and I had our suits with us, so we decided to forego picking up our checked luggage; we raced through the airport, found the Customs and Immigration hall miraculously empty and blitzed through, and got a cab directly to the church, arriving about 12:10, just before the limo with the rest of the family arrived. We had just enough time before the service to find a washroom and change into our suits, before taking our places.

The next morning, we got up at 4am and headed to the airport at 5:00 to catch the 7.05 flight. Needless to say, that one was delayed also. A passenger seat had been broken the night before, and the clean up crew hadn't fixed or reported it. The flight left about an hour late, long enough to make us miss our 10:20 flight and leave us sitting in Detroit until 2:10. Delta gave us $6 meal vouchers, which isn't enough to buy a meal in an airport; but at least the Detroit airport has free WiFi, unlike LAX or LaGuardia. Instead of getting home at noon as we should have--which would have let Josh get to work at his usual 1pm--we landed a little after 4pm and made it home at 5:15.

I wrote a letter to Delta to say: "The front line people were almost all at least okay, some were good, some went above and beyond. They just weren't the people responsible for getting the planes from A to B on time. "Getting from A to B" is the reason for spending $1500 on a pair of plane tickets in the first place. So, you were polite while completely failing in the whole point of your business.