The Crummy First Day of My Trip

So while I don't have the tickets I now have my flight arrangements. To put it mildly the first day of my trip is going to suck. I've got a direct flight from New York to Egypt (5800 miles) but I have to get to New York (JFK) from Detroit (just under 500 miles). Here's the sucky part, to get to JFK from Detroit they are flying me via Atlanta, GA so I'm going 1350+ miles instead of 500 miles, plus it's probably an extra half traveling to do all the connections. Now I'm not a travel expert (or a geography expert) but it just seems odd (see the picture) that there isn't some better way to route me less than 750 miles out of the way. Next time I'm make that part of the reservations myself and pay the extra for two different airlines one way or something.

Part of the annoyance was when I called to see what they could do to help they said, “that's because you're flying on Sunday and they only have one flight from Detroit to JFK, if you went on some other day it wouldn't be a problem”, well I'm not the one who scheduled the tour on a Sunday, they did, I picked the tour company, they picked the day not me! And it's true there is only one direct flight from from Detroit to JFK to get me there in time for the Egypt flight, it'd be nice to have some other options. I'd have paid extra for another airline or if they told me it was going to stink I'd have made my own reservations or I'd pay extra to get a direct flight the day before and spend the night in NY...

Alex Rider and Harry Potter

First we digress: This post was supposed to be a follow up to a post that I thought I did but can't find the message but I can't really do the follow up first now can I?

So I've always thought there were connections between Alex Rider and Harry Potter. Young English boys who are orphans and get to go on the adventure of a lifetime. Harry gets to be a wizard and Alex gets to be a secret agent. Both had father's in the business but didn't get to know them (or all the secrets). Plus they're always getting injured...

SPOILERS! If you haven't read book four, Scorpia, don't read on, I'm going to give the ending away.

Here's the thing, in the last book Scorpia as I'm reading along and recalling the similarities. They're wrapping up the story, no I'll correct myself they wrapped up the story, and as he's leaving the leaving the building the bad guys sent a new teenage trainee to assassinate him and as he gets closer and closer to pulling the trigger you wait for something to happen, but it doesn't. He pulls the trigger. Alex dies in a pool of blood and sees his parents in the light and the story ends (for good). There really isn't any room for interpretation, IMHO.

Here's the other Harry Potter connection/question: Is this series similar enough that they did this to see how much outrage the reading public might have if they kill another English boy who is the hero of a story?!?

By the way, until the last few pages it was another great Alex Rider novel...

Product Placement

So I was going to finish up the followup to the Alex Rider post before I hopped in the sack but then I remembered I didn't mention my dreams!

So I've had odd dreams lately (the last two days) with lots of advertising. This is odd for several reasons, I generally don't remember my dreams and when I remember them as well as I did this morning they're usually normal, as in I'm not sure if the stuff really happened or not.

So back to the advertising dream: I think I was in Cingular (which I actually needed to go to today) and there were people there in Dominoes' uniforms trying to sell me a Dell. They made a phone call to their friends who were at Taco Bell and wanted to meet up with me and we were going to go eat and get eggs or omelets or something like that. Oh and I think the friend's played on a baseball team, which I would assume is the Tigers since Dominoes' owned them at one time.