The Supreme Court of the United States interprets the Second Amendment as protecting the individual’s right to own a gun. Some limitations apply. Offer not valid outside of United States.
Washington, D.C. residents: you may now lock and load in the privacy of your homes.
Is anyone in favor of the Farm Bill’s sustained subsidy of profitable agricultural businesses or is this a moot point among us?
When Zoe heard that I’d be in San Francisco on business for a couple of days she wanted to join me. I decided to stay over the weekend so we could spend time here together. My flights and weeknights are a company expense but the weekend stay comes out of my pocket.
Automattic rides in style. Maya put me up at the Westin on Market. This is a four-star hotel, or “the bomb” in urban parlance, just one star short of “bling bling”. Thus they command six times the nightly rate of the hotels I usually book for myself. I learned this when I checked in.
I’m neither cheap nor, despite Mom’s best efforts, congenitally frugal, but like a boxer to a muffler I wasn’t going to pay a lot for a hotel room. I checked hotels.com for something closer to my range and found the same room in the same hotel available for about 45% less than the hotel’s quoted rate.
With several hours before the cancellation deadline for the weekend stay, I called the front desk to offer them the opportunity to take my money. I told them about the hotels.com quote and asked them to match it. The agent checked with her manager and then advised me to book it online and cancel the existing reservation.
That’s crazy, right? I offered to pay the hotel the full price quoted by hotels.com, saving them a commission and thus increasing their profit and they refused. Book it online, they said. So I went back to hotels.com.
Right about then, the hotel internet connection died. Perfect. Challenge me to book it online and cut my internet connection? Not really. The connection came back in a few minutes. I booked it and called the front desk to finally cancel the original weekend reservation and note that I’d keep the room for the new reservation.
Fifteen minutes of my time yielded a very big savings. It’s too bad the hotel will pay that commission. It’s a funny business. Use hotels.com.
From an email signature:
“Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.”
Notice I didn’t tag this as “humor”.
Hi. I’m Andy Skelton. Nobody special. I’d like to learn your name and get to know you and I’ll tell you why right now.
It’s often said that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. I just now realized that I have always arrogantly believed my intuition about people based on a mere first impression, a momentary experience that will be tainted by microsecond subconscious attempts to match you with others from my memories.
You haven’t ever spoken to me or met me but I have heard you and seen you. You made an impression. Everything you did, your look, your words, and your tone reminded me of people I have known who were complete assholes. Thus my intuition was that you were a complete asshole.
Wait. Let me back up a little. Those people might not have been assholes in their lives, but they were assholes in my life. Some of them became assholes over time and some became some of the best people in my life. First impressions are not permanent.
See, what’s happening for me right now is that I’m becoming less of an asshole myself because I am giving us another chance to see eye to eye. I reviewed my entire experience of you and I see now that there is room for doubt. For all I know, you could be the nicest person in the world.
That’s why I want to know you. Take my card. If you don’t want to talk to me right now, talk to me when you do. I’ve invaded your time and space enough. Please just tell me your name.