JetBlue recently started flying from Boston. At $69 each way to Florida it is tough to resist so last week I hopped on a plane to Tampa. The people who run this airline are geniuses. In Boston they fly from the brand-new international terminal (E). All of the flights to Europe leave in the evening. The JetBlue flights leave in the middle of the day. Thus there are no security lines and all of the shops, including a Borders bookstore, are empty.
The in-flight experience is comparable to the best Coach flight on a big airline. You are moderately cramped on a new Airbus. The 25 channels of DirectTV are depressing. There is nothing interesting on, unless you want to keep up with the latest news in the Laci Peterson case. There are no movie channels. There are no music channels unless you count VH1. Bring an MP3 player and noise-cancelling headphones.
Overall verdict on JetBlue: brutally tough competition for the unionized airlines.
How about Florida? Is it true that, as my neighbor says, “You have to regard every day spent in Florida as having been subtracted from your life”?
St. Pete is a lovely little town, close to a 50-mile bicycle rail-trail (Pinellas) at which you can rent a hybrid or recumbent bike. Tampa has a good public aquarium and a fantastic steakhouse (Bern’s). The Gulf Coast beaches ought to be nice but last week they were plagued with red tide, which means that dead fish wash up on the beach and you get an irritation in your throat. Not too nice if you’ve booked your wedding at the $300/night Don Cesar Hotel. It was also fun to go to Orlando for a day of theme park action. The locals tend to dislike Disney theme parks, except for kids. Everyone’s favorite seemed to be Universal’s Islands of Adventure, which has several world-class rollercoasters (The Hulk and Dueling Dragons (Fire and Ice)). A day at a theme park is very loud and it was nice to spend the next day at some beautiful gardens in Orlando and Lake Wales, then visit the world’s largest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings at Florida Southern College (http://www.flsouthern.edu/fllwctr/index.htm).
While down in Florida I reflected on the fact that good weather is much more important when you don’t have a job. If you’re going to sit in an office all day anyway, what difference does it make that it is cold or grey outside? But if you’re retired any day that the weather is bad is stealing a day out of your life that could have been enjoyed outside on a bike, in a garden, in a small aircraft, etc. When I pointed this out to a Floridian he said “Yes, that’s why God put all the Third World countries near the equator in warm climates so that people don’t mind not having a job.”
jetBlue is run so well, I was waiting for them to start handing out brochures on how to join their cult. Too bad no flights to Puerto Rico out of Boston, but maybe someday.
The Dali museum in St. Petersburg is awesome. http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org
Do you ever work?
I visited the Dali museum back in 1986. The docent made all kinds of outlandish claims about Dali. I remember her pointing to a vaguely helical structure in one of Dali’s early paintings and claiming that Dali had predicted the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Or is it the other way around – in northern climes, weather is usually so lousy that there is nothing else to do but work, work, work?
Last weekend, my girlfriend and I took a flight on EasyJet from London Gatwick to Amsterdam. Check in was fast, the flights were on time and baggage came off the belt very quick. All that for just
Damn! Too bad I didn’t wait a week longer to get my tickets to Florida for the php|cruise! I could have saved about $60.
I hate Jet Blue. Of course, I hate all airlines, so JB at least has the benefit that they don’t rip you off as bad as most. You’re crammed into a tiny seat for several hours with nothing to do (it’s too loud for music, too cramped for work, too dark to read). It’s hard to even get some sleep, since everybody in front of you has those TVs on, even at 3am, so the entire plane is lit up by the average color of TV. It’s like a bad horror movie.
TSA “security” (I use the term loosely) took forever to clear me. (I was carrying some camera equipment, which probably confused them when they X-ray’d it.) These people aren’t employed by the airlines, AFAICT, but I bet most airlines have platoons of lobbyists in DC; any airline which isn’t throwing a phalanx of them at reducing the security nightmare at airports gets a thumbs-down in my book.
For the first time, I’m downright scared on an airplane. If some out-of-work mujahadin felt like hijacking the airplane, he’d know that nobody on the plane has any sort of weapon. If he managed to sneak one on board (the security isn’t that great), we’d be SOL. At least before 9/11 you could carry a knife. Right to bear arms, my ass.
Ken… You complain that there’s nothing to do, but then don’t want passengers watching TV; you complain that security is careful, but you’re afraid that a mujahadin might slip through. And lastly, you want to have the right to bear arms on an aircraft. You’re a beautiful piece of work, Ken.
Yes, Phil, please entertain us wage slaves with more tales from early retirement land. If I can’t do it yet, I want to hear about it. It must be nice being able to jet around to exciting places. The most exciting thing I have done in Philly in the last two days is slip on ice.
Slacker: Security is not careful. Security is annoying. It’s also not secure. The rate of their detection of weapons is the same today (with 20-minute checks) as it was 5 years ago (with 30-second checks). Since they no longer allow knives on planes, the only people with weapons are the people who have brought them there illegally, e.g., to hijack the plane. (Sifting through everything I’m carrying without cause sounds an awful lot like a 4th amendment violation, too, but that’s a different story.)
I absolutely want the right to bear arms on an aircraft. (Knives, at least; I understand guns in a pressurized cabin should be restricted.) I think the 2nd amendment makes the right to bear arms pretty clear. That clause exists for precisely this situation: so people have power over their immediate environment, over people who would try to bring them physical harm. At one time it was the British army in your house; now it’s terrorists in your airplane — as an American I still deserve the right to defend myself. Now that it’s clear hijackers are willing to sacrifice an entire airplane of civilians, that’s one place we should allow people to arm themselves.
I’m pissed that my tax money is being used to pay people to violate my constitutional rights. Why aren’t you, Slacker?
Thanks for mentioning Florida Southern. Rumor has it that “Philip and Alex’s Guide” is well known in the CS department there.
JetBlue is addimg XM Radio to it’s services–
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=industryNews&storyID=4085619
The 2nd Amendment is the result of a political deal that is now meaningless. Madison strongly wanted the standing army he got in Article 1, and one trade-off was the guarantee of state militias in the 2nd Amendment. It just says the Feds can’t go around confiscating weapons from state military units. Since the Federal military has items like thermonuclear bombs, the balance of force isn’t remotely like 1789.
Roger: while I’ll grant that the facts you list may well be true, they’re irrelevant. The Constitution doesn’t say “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed, unless the balance of power shifts and the feds get the bomb”.
In 1934 Germany (a modern constitutional democracy explicitly modelled after the USA) voted (95% for) to give Hitler complete control of the country. The Jews and Gypsies had their guns taken from them by the government. Whether there were thermonuclear bombs involved seems irrelevant, when soldiers knock on your door and ask you to do something. If you’re unarmed, you’re completely at the mercy of those who have guns. The mainstay of any army, even today, is the rifle, not nuclear weapons.
Until they put thermonuclear bombs on aircraft that are capable of taking out hijackers and letting the rest of us land safely, I think having armed civilians on airplanes still has some use.