Our weekend
May. 10th, 2005 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasWhat I've been up to the past couple days
It occured to me just now that I've been too busy the past couple days doing things to actually sit down and write about what I've been doing. So I figured I'd go and talk a bit about the past couple days.
So, my father, my uncle Bob, Lis and I flew down to Orlando, Florida on Thursday. Actually, we first met with the private insurance adjuster we are working with, so he could work on our behalf while we were in Florida. Then we flew to Florida. We flew on Song, by Delta. If you ever get the chance to avoid flying Song, take it. It feels like some Delta executives flew on Southwest, and took notes on what made Southwest work, distilled them to bullet points, converted them to action items, extracted the core competencies that were required, then presented a PowerPoint presentation on ways to actualize an implementation of the distilation of the core valuations of the Southwest paradigm. In other words, they totally didn't get it. And it is painful and horrible.
Our trip took quite a turn for the better as soon as we got off the plane. For one thing, we were no longer on the plane.
When we got to the hotel we were staying at, we found that the following people were also staying at the hotel:
My mother and father.
My mother's mother and father.
My father's mother and father.
My uncle Bob. (Yes, Bob is, in fact, my uncle. Actually, Bob is two of my uncles, one on each side of the family. This one is my father's brother Bob, not my mother's sister's husband Bob.)
My cousin Meghan.
My cousin Jenna, who I hardly ever see, because she's from Australia.
My mother's adopted daughter Tobin, aka Doctor Belzer. She's the one who's published an essay on being a Jewish Femininst Valley Girl.
Another one of my mother's adopted daughters, her husband, and their two kids, Winter and Drew.
Not staying at the hotel, but still spending a lot of time there were my sister Leila, and her roommate Joanna (who, incidentally, was a Hospitality major, and who worked at the hotel at which we are staying, and who therefore got us the hotel employee rate for all these rooms).
The first night, all we really did was say hello to everyone, then go out to dinner at the Pizzaria Uno which shared a parking lot with the hotel. That was Cinco de Mayo, so my sibling and cousins made some attempt to get drunk on Coronas.
The next day was Friday. And it was the Day of Graduation for Leila and Joanna. They were graduated from the University of Central Florida, with bachelors of arts in, respectively, Liberal Arts (Enviromental Studies with a concentration in Marine Biology), and Hospitality.
In the morning, we mainly hung around the hotel and played with my niece and nephew, hung out with family, and so forth.
Then we went and got to see my sister and Joanna walk. UCF is a big school: they had six ceremonies. Leila and Joanna were VERY happy to discover that they were part of the same ceremony. The speaker was junior Florida Senator and foaming rabid Bush-lackey attack dog Mel Martinez. He managed to give a commencement address which actually had absolutely no content in it. I mean, when I listen to someone talk, my brain kind of strips out the filler words and it reframes whatever the person is saying into a structured argument. (It also keeps track of emotional content, and beauty of language, separately, so those filler words aren't wasted, but they're not used for the "logical backbone" that everything hangs off of.) Sentence after sentence flowed out of Sen. Martinez's mouth and into my ear and into the information filter, and came out "NULL STRING."
Lis and I were happy enough at this -- "null speech" is less annoying than "hideously offensive speech", which was frankly the only other thing we could have seen him giving.
After the ceremony, we all went to Nonie and Papa's room to hang out. 'Cept Lis and me, we took a couple minutes to rest and change clothes, which meant that we missed something significant.
See, one of the other people who was there -- not staying at the hotel, but sitting with us at the ceremony, and so forth -- was Leila's boyfriend Kent. And we'd all been told (also important to notice: anytime "we'd all been told" something, or "everyone knows" something -- assume that my father missed the memo) that there was a chance that Kent would be proposing to Leila sometime this weekend.
Leila basically tricked Kent into proposing at that moment when we were out of the room. She hadn't entirely intended to. It involved text-messaging and practical joking. I'm not entirely certain how it worked. I'm also not entirely certain whether Kent actually proposed or not.
Anyway, later that evening, we went to the Macaroni Grill, an Itallian chain restaurant that was pretty darn good for a chain.
The next day was the graduation party. Kent had been saying that he and his brothers would deep-fry a turkey for it, but they didn't. 'Cause Kent was sick, and only one of his brothers showed up, and so forth. Lis and I were quite disappointed, actually. We'd been looking forward to deep-fried turkey. We've heard quite a bit about it, all good.
That morning, however, before the party, Lis and I went for a walk in the immediate neighborhood of the hotel. We were looking for a bookstore, and we found two college bookstores. The pathetic kind -- the kind without any books in it.
School logo memorabilia, mainly. The only books in the place were used textbooks. This being Commencement Day, they were at a pretty low ebb in even stocking textbooks.
However, we did find a cafe: Natura Cafe, which had coffee things, tea things, beer things, wine things, port things, and mead things. It was pretty nifty.
Then we went back, and went to the barbecue. Even without the turkey, there were burgers and hot dogs and so forth, and it was all good. And I got to meet Kent's daughter, finally, which is good, because if Leila and Kent DO marry, she'll be my stepniece, so I should meet her and all.
After the barbecue, we tried to get folks to come out with us back to the Natura Cafe, but everyone was tired. So we went on our own. It was open mike night, and we had cider and mead, and listed to people sing songs, and we played gin rummy. One of the singers was this skinny white guy with a Jewfro who was singing acapella blues. Skinny white guy with a Jewfro with James Earl Jones's voice.
The next day, Sunday, was Mother's Day. On Sunday, we spent the day with Lis's family, who live in Clearwater, two hours away from Orlando. Dad, Lis, and I drove out there in the morning (Mom was also invited, but was feeling a bit under the weather and unable to make the car trip). We met up with Lis's father -- her mother is in Kansas City at a trade show, which was vaguely close to ironic, it being Mother's Day and all -- and went out to a Mother's Day brunch at the Safety Harbor Spa, which is a resort and health club built around some mineral water springs which were thought to be one of the possible locations of the Fountain of Youth.
(As far as the health-giving properties of the water goes, I find it significantly more ironic than the last time I used that adjective that the list of "beneficial and health-giving minerals in the Safety Harbor waters" is pretty much identical to the list of "impurities that our Brita filter removes." On the other hand, the food is INCREDIBLE, and reasonably healthy.)
Brunch was fantastic. Besides the fact that the food was delicious, Lis's brother and his family was there, so we got to see Josh, Missy, and our godson Nathan. Who is adorable. This was the first time Dad got to meet him, and Dad was charmed by him. Nathan's a genuine toddler now. . .
Also, Lis's grandparents were there. When we went down for Pesach, her grandparents were in Milwaukee with the OTHER branch of Lis's family, so we didn't see them. This was one of the reasons we decided it was so imperative to go to visit them this trip.
After brunch, they took us out shopping. They've wanted to take Lis clothes-shopping for a while, now. They haven't had a chance to actually buy her stuff in years and years. And I got shopped for, too.
Zayde took me off to the men's department, while Bubbe took Lis off to the women's department. And we both got shopped for. I now have a new suit, a sport jacket, two pairs of pants, and an overcoat, and Lis has four new pairs of pants, a half-dozen tops, several cardigans, and I think other stuff, too, which all looks great.
("Bubbe" is Yiddish for "grandmother", and "Zayde" is Yiddish for "grandfather". I could call them "Manny" and "Sally", I suppose, but that feels so impersonal. . . )
Then we went back to Bubbe and Zayde's apartment, and they showed us some photo albums and told us some stories we hadn't heard before. Also, Father fixed a leaking line in their water purifier, which made him happy, because he truly enjoys fixing things for people he likes, and he really likes Bubbe and Zayde.
Lis's grandparents have funny stories about how a drunk Soviet soldier tried to rob them at machinegun-point, and Zayde managed to get the magazine out of the machinegun and kick the soldier out of the horse-cart they were riding in, and how the NKVD officers in the area worked the soldier over really fucking badly for messing with them, because the NKVD were friends of theirs. . .
Yeah. The terrifying spectres of Soviet-era terror were buddies of my grandparents-in-law. They went drinking together. I'm not sure what this says about our respective families. But Lis's grandparents' drinking buddies were the NKVD. At about the same time, MY grandparents' drinking buddies were the Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars. Which, I suppose, is pretty cool in its own right.
Anyway, we went back to Orlando in the evening, and this time did manage to drag everybody out to the Natura Cafe. Dad, who I may have mentioned elsewhere, is pretty bad at interpersonal things (he may have Asperger's, in fact), managed to invite Kent over to join us in such a way that Kent thought Dad was angry at him. Kent came over, rather worked up, and Leila met him outside the cafe and explained that, no, Dad was actually being sociable and friendly, just in a particularly tin-eared way, and Kent realized it was so, and came into the cafe to have a couple beers with us.
"Us" consted of Lis and me, our parents, Leila and eventually Kent, Jenna-from-Australia, and Dr. Tobin Belzer, PhD. (It's just fun calling her Dr. Tobin Belzer, PhD. I mean, like, in sentences like, "Dr. Belzer then went outside the cafe to bum a cigarette and see if she could score some pot." But I, of course, wouldn't write that sentence, because nothing like that ever happened that night, Mom. Really. Besides, the person she talked to didn't have any.) And Joanna came by after a bit, too.
Dad ordered a port. Which came in a wineglass. This isn't me being all bartendery-stuffy-pedantic here, when I say that this was a potential problem.
'Cause, see, it was a PORT. And it came in a WINEGLASS.
Port glasses are like one sixth the size of wineglasses. Because port is a fortified wine. It's got like six times the alcohol of wine. I did a quick calculation and figured that Dad was carrying around like a half-dozen drinks. And he's on a medication which potentiates alcohol, about two or threefold.
Lis had always wanted to try tobacco, since she never had before, and so did I, because I also had never tried tobacco, and Tobin hadn't smoked since like, the day before. and they had hookas for rent, so we got one. It was fun. Lis, Mom, Leila, Jenna, Tobin and I all used the thing, and mostly agreed that it was fun, but they mostly would have preferred something other than tobacco in it. Mom used to have a two-pack-a-day-unfiltered-Camels habit, which she quit cold turkey thirty two years ago when she was pregnant with me. I think my father used to smoke a pipe, but Mom used to steal them from him, and end up biting through the mouthpieces.
As for me, I think I don't get tobacco. It didn't seem to do anything particularly for me. It was kind of fun, though. 'Course, the next day, my lungs felt like, well, they felt the same way they did the day after we had the fire and I'd run into the burning kitchen. I think smoking is kind of fun, but inhaling is bad.
So that was Sunday night. We all got home by about midnight or so.
Monday, we packed (a bit of a challenge as we had several extra outfits to fit in), and then went over to the MGM-Disney theme park for the day. That was Mom, Dad, Leila, Lis, Joanna, Tobin, and Jenna.
I don't think I'm ever going to a Disney park again. I mean, I had fun, but had I known that they were going to fingerprint me to let me into the park, I wouldn't have gone. I may write them and let them know that.
We had a good time, but there were a lot of little things which seemed to say to me that Disney is going real downhill and isn't long for this world if things don't change. First off, we did a lot of the same things we did the last time our family went to Disney. Which was fifteen years ago. I mean, I really liked the Muppets In 3-D thing. Which was a project Jim Henson worked on. And which we saw fifteen years ago. And which we liked fifteen years ago, and which we STILL like, except that the print of the 3-D film has gotten grainy. That's just sloppy. They let their print deteriorate. As Lis said, "This is something that one really ought to digitize. . . "
We saw Star Tours. And it was a lot of fun. We enjoyed it almost as much as we enjoyed it fifteen years ago.
We (not Lis or my parents, but Leila, Jenna, Tobin, Joanna, and me) did the Tower of Terror. They all think it was adorable how terrified I was. All I have to say to them is, "THHHHBBBBTT".
Dad and Lis and I flew home after that. The flight back on Song wasn't as bad as the flight down, because the safety instructions were done in a smooth soul style instead of a salsa style. And I found that flying is much less terrifying if one puts in one's earplugs, then plays the Ramones at top volume through one's earphones. See, you can't play the Ramones quietly, but if you play them at the apropriate volume without protection, it's a) painful and b) damaging, so you have to wear earplugs THEN earphones THEN crank it.
While listening to the Ramones (see, the thing about Song airlines is that they provide a whole lot of music choces), I also was reading Jared Diamond's newest book, Collapse. He's the guy who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, about why some cultures beat other cultures in conflicts, and this book is about why societies fail, or manage to avoid failing. It's fascinating stuff. I love his writing.
Anyway, we got back to Boston, got our car, and checked back into this hotel, and that pretty much takes us up to now.
It occured to me just now that I've been too busy the past couple days doing things to actually sit down and write about what I've been doing. So I figured I'd go and talk a bit about the past couple days.
So, my father, my uncle Bob, Lis and I flew down to Orlando, Florida on Thursday. Actually, we first met with the private insurance adjuster we are working with, so he could work on our behalf while we were in Florida. Then we flew to Florida. We flew on Song, by Delta. If you ever get the chance to avoid flying Song, take it. It feels like some Delta executives flew on Southwest, and took notes on what made Southwest work, distilled them to bullet points, converted them to action items, extracted the core competencies that were required, then presented a PowerPoint presentation on ways to actualize an implementation of the distilation of the core valuations of the Southwest paradigm. In other words, they totally didn't get it. And it is painful and horrible.
Our trip took quite a turn for the better as soon as we got off the plane. For one thing, we were no longer on the plane.
When we got to the hotel we were staying at, we found that the following people were also staying at the hotel:
My mother and father.
My mother's mother and father.
My father's mother and father.
My uncle Bob. (Yes, Bob is, in fact, my uncle. Actually, Bob is two of my uncles, one on each side of the family. This one is my father's brother Bob, not my mother's sister's husband Bob.)
My cousin Meghan.
My cousin Jenna, who I hardly ever see, because she's from Australia.
My mother's adopted daughter Tobin, aka Doctor Belzer. She's the one who's published an essay on being a Jewish Femininst Valley Girl.
Another one of my mother's adopted daughters, her husband, and their two kids, Winter and Drew.
Not staying at the hotel, but still spending a lot of time there were my sister Leila, and her roommate Joanna (who, incidentally, was a Hospitality major, and who worked at the hotel at which we are staying, and who therefore got us the hotel employee rate for all these rooms).
The first night, all we really did was say hello to everyone, then go out to dinner at the Pizzaria Uno which shared a parking lot with the hotel. That was Cinco de Mayo, so my sibling and cousins made some attempt to get drunk on Coronas.
The next day was Friday. And it was the Day of Graduation for Leila and Joanna. They were graduated from the University of Central Florida, with bachelors of arts in, respectively, Liberal Arts (Enviromental Studies with a concentration in Marine Biology), and Hospitality.
In the morning, we mainly hung around the hotel and played with my niece and nephew, hung out with family, and so forth.
Then we went and got to see my sister and Joanna walk. UCF is a big school: they had six ceremonies. Leila and Joanna were VERY happy to discover that they were part of the same ceremony. The speaker was junior Florida Senator and foaming rabid Bush-lackey attack dog Mel Martinez. He managed to give a commencement address which actually had absolutely no content in it. I mean, when I listen to someone talk, my brain kind of strips out the filler words and it reframes whatever the person is saying into a structured argument. (It also keeps track of emotional content, and beauty of language, separately, so those filler words aren't wasted, but they're not used for the "logical backbone" that everything hangs off of.) Sentence after sentence flowed out of Sen. Martinez's mouth and into my ear and into the information filter, and came out "NULL STRING."
Lis and I were happy enough at this -- "null speech" is less annoying than "hideously offensive speech", which was frankly the only other thing we could have seen him giving.
After the ceremony, we all went to Nonie and Papa's room to hang out. 'Cept Lis and me, we took a couple minutes to rest and change clothes, which meant that we missed something significant.
See, one of the other people who was there -- not staying at the hotel, but sitting with us at the ceremony, and so forth -- was Leila's boyfriend Kent. And we'd all been told (also important to notice: anytime "we'd all been told" something, or "everyone knows" something -- assume that my father missed the memo) that there was a chance that Kent would be proposing to Leila sometime this weekend.
Leila basically tricked Kent into proposing at that moment when we were out of the room. She hadn't entirely intended to. It involved text-messaging and practical joking. I'm not entirely certain how it worked. I'm also not entirely certain whether Kent actually proposed or not.
Anyway, later that evening, we went to the Macaroni Grill, an Itallian chain restaurant that was pretty darn good for a chain.
The next day was the graduation party. Kent had been saying that he and his brothers would deep-fry a turkey for it, but they didn't. 'Cause Kent was sick, and only one of his brothers showed up, and so forth. Lis and I were quite disappointed, actually. We'd been looking forward to deep-fried turkey. We've heard quite a bit about it, all good.
That morning, however, before the party, Lis and I went for a walk in the immediate neighborhood of the hotel. We were looking for a bookstore, and we found two college bookstores. The pathetic kind -- the kind without any books in it.
School logo memorabilia, mainly. The only books in the place were used textbooks. This being Commencement Day, they were at a pretty low ebb in even stocking textbooks.
However, we did find a cafe: Natura Cafe, which had coffee things, tea things, beer things, wine things, port things, and mead things. It was pretty nifty.
Then we went back, and went to the barbecue. Even without the turkey, there were burgers and hot dogs and so forth, and it was all good. And I got to meet Kent's daughter, finally, which is good, because if Leila and Kent DO marry, she'll be my stepniece, so I should meet her and all.
After the barbecue, we tried to get folks to come out with us back to the Natura Cafe, but everyone was tired. So we went on our own. It was open mike night, and we had cider and mead, and listed to people sing songs, and we played gin rummy. One of the singers was this skinny white guy with a Jewfro who was singing acapella blues. Skinny white guy with a Jewfro with James Earl Jones's voice.
The next day, Sunday, was Mother's Day. On Sunday, we spent the day with Lis's family, who live in Clearwater, two hours away from Orlando. Dad, Lis, and I drove out there in the morning (Mom was also invited, but was feeling a bit under the weather and unable to make the car trip). We met up with Lis's father -- her mother is in Kansas City at a trade show, which was vaguely close to ironic, it being Mother's Day and all -- and went out to a Mother's Day brunch at the Safety Harbor Spa, which is a resort and health club built around some mineral water springs which were thought to be one of the possible locations of the Fountain of Youth.
(As far as the health-giving properties of the water goes, I find it significantly more ironic than the last time I used that adjective that the list of "beneficial and health-giving minerals in the Safety Harbor waters" is pretty much identical to the list of "impurities that our Brita filter removes." On the other hand, the food is INCREDIBLE, and reasonably healthy.)
Brunch was fantastic. Besides the fact that the food was delicious, Lis's brother and his family was there, so we got to see Josh, Missy, and our godson Nathan. Who is adorable. This was the first time Dad got to meet him, and Dad was charmed by him. Nathan's a genuine toddler now. . .
Also, Lis's grandparents were there. When we went down for Pesach, her grandparents were in Milwaukee with the OTHER branch of Lis's family, so we didn't see them. This was one of the reasons we decided it was so imperative to go to visit them this trip.
After brunch, they took us out shopping. They've wanted to take Lis clothes-shopping for a while, now. They haven't had a chance to actually buy her stuff in years and years. And I got shopped for, too.
Zayde took me off to the men's department, while Bubbe took Lis off to the women's department. And we both got shopped for. I now have a new suit, a sport jacket, two pairs of pants, and an overcoat, and Lis has four new pairs of pants, a half-dozen tops, several cardigans, and I think other stuff, too, which all looks great.
("Bubbe" is Yiddish for "grandmother", and "Zayde" is Yiddish for "grandfather". I could call them "Manny" and "Sally", I suppose, but that feels so impersonal. . . )
Then we went back to Bubbe and Zayde's apartment, and they showed us some photo albums and told us some stories we hadn't heard before. Also, Father fixed a leaking line in their water purifier, which made him happy, because he truly enjoys fixing things for people he likes, and he really likes Bubbe and Zayde.
Lis's grandparents have funny stories about how a drunk Soviet soldier tried to rob them at machinegun-point, and Zayde managed to get the magazine out of the machinegun and kick the soldier out of the horse-cart they were riding in, and how the NKVD officers in the area worked the soldier over really fucking badly for messing with them, because the NKVD were friends of theirs. . .
Yeah. The terrifying spectres of Soviet-era terror were buddies of my grandparents-in-law. They went drinking together. I'm not sure what this says about our respective families. But Lis's grandparents' drinking buddies were the NKVD. At about the same time, MY grandparents' drinking buddies were the Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars. Which, I suppose, is pretty cool in its own right.
Anyway, we went back to Orlando in the evening, and this time did manage to drag everybody out to the Natura Cafe. Dad, who I may have mentioned elsewhere, is pretty bad at interpersonal things (he may have Asperger's, in fact), managed to invite Kent over to join us in such a way that Kent thought Dad was angry at him. Kent came over, rather worked up, and Leila met him outside the cafe and explained that, no, Dad was actually being sociable and friendly, just in a particularly tin-eared way, and Kent realized it was so, and came into the cafe to have a couple beers with us.
"Us" consted of Lis and me, our parents, Leila and eventually Kent, Jenna-from-Australia, and Dr. Tobin Belzer, PhD. (It's just fun calling her Dr. Tobin Belzer, PhD. I mean, like, in sentences like, "Dr. Belzer then went outside the cafe to bum a cigarette and see if she could score some pot." But I, of course, wouldn't write that sentence, because nothing like that ever happened that night, Mom. Really. Besides, the person she talked to didn't have any.) And Joanna came by after a bit, too.
Dad ordered a port. Which came in a wineglass. This isn't me being all bartendery-stuffy-pedantic here, when I say that this was a potential problem.
'Cause, see, it was a PORT. And it came in a WINEGLASS.
Port glasses are like one sixth the size of wineglasses. Because port is a fortified wine. It's got like six times the alcohol of wine. I did a quick calculation and figured that Dad was carrying around like a half-dozen drinks. And he's on a medication which potentiates alcohol, about two or threefold.
Lis had always wanted to try tobacco, since she never had before, and so did I, because I also had never tried tobacco, and Tobin hadn't smoked since like, the day before. and they had hookas for rent, so we got one. It was fun. Lis, Mom, Leila, Jenna, Tobin and I all used the thing, and mostly agreed that it was fun, but they mostly would have preferred something other than tobacco in it. Mom used to have a two-pack-a-day-unfiltered-Camels habit, which she quit cold turkey thirty two years ago when she was pregnant with me. I think my father used to smoke a pipe, but Mom used to steal them from him, and end up biting through the mouthpieces.
As for me, I think I don't get tobacco. It didn't seem to do anything particularly for me. It was kind of fun, though. 'Course, the next day, my lungs felt like, well, they felt the same way they did the day after we had the fire and I'd run into the burning kitchen. I think smoking is kind of fun, but inhaling is bad.
So that was Sunday night. We all got home by about midnight or so.
Monday, we packed (a bit of a challenge as we had several extra outfits to fit in), and then went over to the MGM-Disney theme park for the day. That was Mom, Dad, Leila, Lis, Joanna, Tobin, and Jenna.
I don't think I'm ever going to a Disney park again. I mean, I had fun, but had I known that they were going to fingerprint me to let me into the park, I wouldn't have gone. I may write them and let them know that.
We had a good time, but there were a lot of little things which seemed to say to me that Disney is going real downhill and isn't long for this world if things don't change. First off, we did a lot of the same things we did the last time our family went to Disney. Which was fifteen years ago. I mean, I really liked the Muppets In 3-D thing. Which was a project Jim Henson worked on. And which we saw fifteen years ago. And which we liked fifteen years ago, and which we STILL like, except that the print of the 3-D film has gotten grainy. That's just sloppy. They let their print deteriorate. As Lis said, "This is something that one really ought to digitize. . . "
We saw Star Tours. And it was a lot of fun. We enjoyed it almost as much as we enjoyed it fifteen years ago.
We (not Lis or my parents, but Leila, Jenna, Tobin, Joanna, and me) did the Tower of Terror. They all think it was adorable how terrified I was. All I have to say to them is, "THHHHBBBBTT".
Dad and Lis and I flew home after that. The flight back on Song wasn't as bad as the flight down, because the safety instructions were done in a smooth soul style instead of a salsa style. And I found that flying is much less terrifying if one puts in one's earplugs, then plays the Ramones at top volume through one's earphones. See, you can't play the Ramones quietly, but if you play them at the apropriate volume without protection, it's a) painful and b) damaging, so you have to wear earplugs THEN earphones THEN crank it.
While listening to the Ramones (see, the thing about Song airlines is that they provide a whole lot of music choces), I also was reading Jared Diamond's newest book, Collapse. He's the guy who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, about why some cultures beat other cultures in conflicts, and this book is about why societies fail, or manage to avoid failing. It's fascinating stuff. I love his writing.
Anyway, we got back to Boston, got our car, and checked back into this hotel, and that pretty much takes us up to now.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 04:27 pm (UTC)(Note: The question format does not mean I disbelieve you; it is intended to express being stunned, aghast, and shocked. And dismayed, but not awed. Possibly, however, odd.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 04:44 pm (UTC)I also see references that these are incompetently done, that multiple people within a group have successfully swapped tickets around, so who knows...
http://allearsnet.com/pl/fingerscan.htm
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 05:55 pm (UTC)And it's called biometric finger scans. But it's still fingerprinting.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 08:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-11 08:55 pm (UTC)Kiralee
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 06:17 pm (UTC)BTW, there's Macaroni Grill franchises around here.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 06:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-10 06:38 pm (UTC)