New Shoes in the Rain

In my travels for my job I often find it interesting and a pleasant way to pass the time when I meet new people.  And I'm not one of those who interrogates his seatmate every time I get on a plane....I've been victimized by enough of those to last me a lifetime.  But I just returned home from a business trip and found a couple of the people I encountered to be interesting. For example, on my flight home the lady who was scheduled to sit with me spoke up, politely, and asked if Lexington was home for me.  I answered that it was, and then asked her the same question.  "Louisville," she responded, and that led to about fifteen minutes of chatting about airports, travel, jobs, etc.  Turns out this lady is the mother of three, ranging in age from 17 to 9, was in the ministry (!) for seven years, and now is in marketing for some sort of collective buying cooperative that sells primarily to non-profits and church-related entities.  And we also established that s...

It's Friday, and we're heading toward the Labor Day weekend, slowly but surely.  Time for a bit of a brain dump with some random comments about random subjects. Has it been hot where you live?  Excuse me, I meant to say "HOT."  This has been a summer of ridiculous temperature extremes in central Kentucky, and I know from traveling it's been that way in a lot of places.  You know it's hot when dedicated golfers elect not to play on a Saturday. For the first time in a number of years, the Reds are in serious contention to make it to post-season play (we used to simply say "the playoffs" but now there's more than one round of playoff series leading to the World Series), so baseball has a different significance for me this year than in years past.  Usually, at this point, I'm interested to see the prospects that the Reds have promoted to the big club to see how they perform at the major league level, as they're often hopelessly out of the...

As I believe I've noted here before, I fly a fair amount for my work.  Not traveling this week, thank God, or else all of the talk in airport gate areas and on planes would surround Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who lost his cool and stormed out the rear of an airplane onto the inflatable slide and into airline folk history, as well as custody. Most of my travels are on Delta and its affiliated regional carriers, and that's largely by choice.  From my home in Lexington I have far more options to get just about anywhere when I fly Delta than if I use competing airlines.  But let's be clear, I've flown most every airline that services the state of Kentucky, and have had what I would charitably call mixed results in terms of service and cooperation from flight crews. For about two years I traveled long distances regularly, as I managed a sales territory in the mountain time zone of the western US.  That meant a flight to a hub, then on to cities like D...

I don't watch very much "reality TV," unless you count HGTV (my wife's favorite channel), the Food Network and the Travel Channel among that category.  No, I'm referring to shows like "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race" and others that run on the big four traditional networks, as well as some of this other unscripted stuff that pops up on MTV, VH1 and the like. But, first, a quick aside....does anyone remember when VH1 launched?  It was supposed to be music videos for the rest of us, that is, those of us over 20 years of age.  And their original lineup of veejays included such luminaries as Don Imus and Rosie O'Donnell (no, I'm not kidding). But I digress.... A couple of stories in the news recently made me think a little harder than usual about reality television.  One was the arrest of someone called "Snooki" from a show on MTV called "Jersey Shore."  Now, I've never watched this show, but have recently see...

Today's installment is about commitments we make to others, and how unimportant they appear to be to some people and entities. First, let's all give a round of applause to British Petroleum, the fine folks who brand their overpriced gasoline as BP and who have been promising us for over three months that they're doing EVERYTHING they can to stop the uncontrolled flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast.  A lot of blathering, a lot of bumbling, a lot of excuses and one CEO later, it looks like that might finally be happening.  And to make matters worse, what we've been hearing for some time is that BP is trying to coerce Gulf are residents (particularly those who operate businesses adversely affected by all of this mess) into accepting lump-sum settlements with the added provision that the recipients of these settlements WILL NOT SUE. Don't sign them, people, I don't care how much is offered.  We just don't know what the long-term effec...