shrader

Then it gets left behind in Miami...

The overhead that is full...

Large bag under the seat blocking me from getting my feet further away from my seat = knees up higher and in line with the reclining seat back

Depending on how I'm sitting, the seat back hits my knees.

Will a diet make me shorter?

He just wants to keep his name at the top of the news. He's absolutely brilliant at that, no doubt. I'm just amazed how people always fall for the tricks of attention whores.

The character who winds up preaching morality always gets killed. I supposed you'd have to say the same thing about Gabriel, but he's not a major enough character to care whether or not he dies. The change in his mindset finally makes him a little interesting though. I'm not going to suggest some sort of iconic death for him, but if the moral character always dies, he's got to be high up on the "you just know he's going to die" list as well.

Did people seriously get worked up by that Pope comment? He was clearly speaking in metaphor, the typical "unite, don't divide" message. The "build a bridge" portion should have tipped anyone off to how generic that statement was.

There's a difference between reclining the chair a little bit and reclining it all the way? It seems like those things only move about an inch. Granted that inch completely screws over the person behind it, but the actual reclining person barely moves at all. And the opposite of those people who try to push the seat back even further when standing up are the ones who pull down on the back of the seat when getting up. That drives me mad. I'm barely comfortable in this seat as is, now you're going to shake my seat back and forth? I get it with older people who have trouble standing up, but most of the time it's the young 20-something doing it.

Amen to that. The reclining serves no purpose other than stealing someone else's space.

The intent to injure is exactly what they called him for. That's the purpose of a match penalty. I didn't realize that's what they called at first, but looking at the box score, it's not listed as anything but match penalty.

I actually did get the refund for the first night in the hotel. So far so good. I'd love to know their process for returning lost bags though. They gave me a tracking number and the bag has been sitting at the airport here for 4 hours now. I guess I'll be making that phone call shortly.

I'm at 1 hour and 47 minutes currently. It actually sounds like progress though. We'll see how much I actually get out of this. This is all about the lost night at the hotel, the other stuff with the airlines is what I fully expect to go nowhere. The only think I expect to gain out of that is the knowledge of two airlines to never use again. It's probably a post for the pet peeves thread, but coats in the overhead bin are a big part of why I still don't have the bag I was forced to check.

I did have a useless encounter with one of their support people during our delay. I had a hard time cutting through his accent. He did everything in his power to make sure the hotel wouldn't cancer our reservation due to the late arrival. He completely ignored me when I tried to ask about any reimbursement for the lost day. The response was something along the lines of "you're all set now, do you have any other questions" each time I asked about money. After the third attempt, I gave up. I would have tried to take it to someone higher up the ladder, but we were about to board the new flight. I'm going to try again today, but I don't expect much.

I'm curious if any have had luck filing complaints after bad travel experiences with airlines. My wife and I flew out to Vegas on Friday (technically saturday after reading this story) and that and the return flight were a series of screw ups. Our first flight was a connection through Chicago (we're in Raleigh). Due to mechanical issues, that flight was delayed. The delay was going to be long enough to make us miss our connection to Vegas. Not a great start there. I worked with the agent at the desk for at least a half an hour with little luck. Ultimately, they put us on a flight to LA and then we'd catch an early morning flight to Vegas. She said they'd put us up in a hotel for the night. Fine, it seemed like the best option, as opposed to staying home and getting into Vegas much later the following day. So when we landed in LA, there's no record in the system that we're owed the free hotel. After a good amount of fighting, we finally got that, but by then it's 2AM eastern time and we had been up since 5AM. We were put in a room where they had been working on the sink, complete with a tool kit still sitting in there. So we have to get that changed too. The morning flight to Vegas was fine, the only one of the trip that worked out. Still, we're into town 14 hours later than originally planned and stuck paying for one night at the resort that we weren't even there for. All of this was booked through travelocity, so I'll be checking with them to see if we can get anything back, but I doubt it. And speaking of that, the flights were actually two different airlines, United to Vegas, American back. United actually bumped us to an American flight (that one to LA), then we caught a United flight in the morning to Vegas. Fasf-forward to the return trip. I was having no luck printing boarding passes from the hotel, so we decided to get them at the airport instead. The machines aren't working for us either. We have to talk to an agent. It turned out that when United changed our friday night flight, they also somehow deleted our reservation for the return flights (connecting through Miami). They sent us off to another agent who after a long series of phone calls was able to get us back onto those same flights, which were oversold. But thanks to the amount of time it took, we weren't able to eat breakfast/lunch at the airport as we had planned. So we're stuck on that long American flight to Miami without having eaten, and they just happen to be a cheap airline that doesn't give any snacks. Also on that flight to Miami, as we're about to board, they announce that the overhead bins are full and larger roller bags will have to be checked, which you can pick up at baggage at your final destination (yeah, you know where this is going). So we've got no choice, had to check one bag. As we're boarding, we were greeting by a ton of available overhead bin space, so who knows why they forced that upon us and a few others. Our connection in Miami wound up being delayed one hour, no big deal. But as you've already guessed, that checked bag never made it to Raleigh. It sounds like they had major screw ups in Miami, as there was a line about 20 deep from just our flight of bags that didn't make it. This is also all happening at 1AM this morning, so everyone's thrilled. We'll see if/when I actually get that bag today. Sorry for the long post. It's good to vent though. Do you think I'll have much of a chance of getting anything back from these two airlines? I'll try with travelocity too, but my initial chats with them during the initial delay weren't exactly productive.

Did I read that right, he got a match penalty for that? I saw interference and nothing else... well, that and the embellishment from the player staying down for a while. I know we can't judge this single hit in a vacuum, but I can't see that being the one that puts him over the edge.

It looks like this one does have a Big Adventure feel to it. I'll have to check it out when it's available. I need to find Big Adventure too. It's been a while.

I'd love to see Manning's lawyers version of the document. That's the only way we'd get an idea of the full true story, averaging out the two highly biased versions are forge story. We will never see that though because he has nothing to gain by releasing it.

Speaking of Heath, he's probably not long for this world. He has been cast as the lead in a new version of 24. That could be a bit down the road though, so maybe he does have plenty of time left.

My wife got pulled up on stage at the start of the Penn and Teller show last night. That was so cool. Teller, who never speaks as a part of the act actually talked to me when they were selecting her for the bit. We now have a video of the whole thing saved on her phone which was a part of the whole trick.

I had to serve on a jury last week for a week long trial. It was a particularly bad divorce, accusations of adultery, hiding money... that kind of stuff. This whole thread makes me think of that immediately. During the first half of the trial with the plaintiff going through their whole argument, it looked really bad for the defendant. I know She looked like the scum of the earth and guilty as sin. That half of the trial is exactly what we just read here. But then there's that missing part, every single word from the defense. Once we started to hear their side of the story and hear from their witnesses, the whole thing became a jumbled mess and we realized the plaintiff wasn't exactly an angel either. She wound up not receiving a thing. The only facts ultimately acknowledged as "facts" by the court were their marriage date, the divorce date, and the defendants 2nd marriage date, not exactly earth shattering details. If we judged cases like this solely on what we've been given by King, we'd have a 100% conviction rate (or successful lawsuits). These arguments are designed for one sole reason, to make the defendant look as bad as humanly possible. Unfortunately, that's all we ever use to publicly judge people.

It'll be nice if we ever get to Vegas. Airline incompetence has us currently stranded in LAX.

Your act is usually so much better than this. Tough week?

I don't know which thread to post this in, but since I got a good laugh, I'd qualify it as making me happy. I was listening to Pandora on my phone at the gym yesterday and "Stuck in the middle with you" came on. The album was listed as "The Best of Stealers Wheel". I'd love to know what else is on that album. It also made me want to cut off some guy's ear and set him on fire... but that's another story.

Thanks for the reminder. I'm heading out of town this weekend so I need to set the DVR for Saul.