Month: August 2008

Arithmetic is Useful in the Real World

I was momentarily excited to learn about a program called “Audience Rewards” – a loyalty program for Broadway shows.  Earn points for buying Broadway tickets, then redeem them for free seats or other items.  Sounds great, right?  Let’s look at the numbers.

Members earn two points per dollar spent on regular tickets (i.e., neither discounted nor premium).  Most orchestra seats cost about $112.  That’s 224 points per ticket – more on some nights of the week, or for some pricier shows.

To get a free seat, priced anywhere from $65 to $125, members must redeem a whopping 17,000 points!  That includes not only center orchestra seats at $112, but also the cheapest available rear mezzanine seat for Avenue Q on a Tuesday night, at $66.50.  Let’s review.  I’d have to spend $8,500 on at least 66 tickets just to earn a single free seat – a return of as little as 0.78% (or at most 1.4% on a $125 seat).

My credit card offers about 1.8% cash back, so that may seem about right, but I earn points with my credit card on every purchase every day.  I can earn points quickly, and cash in small amounts if I want – 4,500 points is a typical $50 gift card.  A better model for Audience Rewards to follow would be airlines’ frequent flyer programs.  Let’s take a look.

Airtran’s A+ Rewards program gives a free one-way trip after buying eight one-way tickets.  Bolt Bus offers exactly the same terms for bus rides.  That’s a return of one eighth or 12.5% – over 15 times better than what Audience Rewards has to offer!  On Delta, six round-trip flights to Denver (about 4,200 miles, depending on the route) earn a free round-trip ticket.  Now we’re up to a 16.6% return.

And we can do better than that.  My math there assumes that all airline tickets are priced equally.  In reality, an A+ Rewards member could easily buy eight $59 tickets and redeem a free $230 seat – a return of a whopping 48.7%.

Audience Rewards, you’ve really missed the mark.  I’d have to buy a $112 ticket to a Broadway show every week for 1.5 years to earn a single measly free seat!  And we all know I couldn’t cash in points for a just a free ticket anyway – I’d save up my $9,550 investment in tickets to get a free Spring Awakening poster. I could buy one now for $20, but it just wouldn’t be as rewarding.

Tha Bestest Besties

Someone on “Yahoo! Answers” (as if Yahoo weren’t already completely obsolete) asked:

[I] purchesed (sic) a domain from 1&1, got the confirmation e-mail and everything. Well it says the status of my domain is “Domain registration is being requested” What exactly does that mean?…

Here, in its entirety, is the answer marked “Best Answer – Chosen by Voters” having earned three votes:

i dnt even know what a domain is. or what 1&1 is. sorry.

Nothing I could possibly say could embellish that statement in any way, so I’ll just leave it there to burn through your eyes to the back of your brain and haunt your nightmares.  I, masochist that I am, went on to read her profile:

i love volleyball basketball softball track cheerleading!!! my besties amanda meagan haley heide and kenzie are tha bestest besties. [emphasis mine] i luvv em so much. i love candy. but i like being healthy. my favorite drink is a shirly temple or dr pepper with a lemon squeez! so delish!!! im very talkative outgoing funny and fun to be around. yeup i dnt wanna brag or sound conceited to ill just stop. but thats all about me!!! tooooooodlesss!!!

Paraphrasing Josh Lyman: It’s “tha bestest besties” that makes it art.

O Captain! My Captain!

If you’ve been having a good day so far and want to remember what soul crushing despair for humanity feels like, just read this Associated Press story from Ponce de Leon, Florida.  You’ll want to punch someone in the face and then probably take up drinking.

When a high school senior told her principal [David Davis] that students were taunting her for being a lesbian, he told her homosexuality is wrong, outed her to her parents, and ordered her to stay away from children.

He suspended some of her friends who expressed their outrage by wearing gay pride T-shirts and buttons at Ponce de Leon High School, according to court records. And he asked dozens of students whether they were gay or associated with gay students.

…

“Davis embarked on what can only be characterized as a witch hunt to identify students who were homosexual and their supporters, further adding fuel to the fire,” US District Judge Richard Smoak recounted in his ruling. “He went so far as to lift the shirts of female students to ensure the letters ‘GP’ or the words ‘Gay Pride’ were not written on their bodies.”

Even if we suspend all morality and humanity for a moment and suppose that a witch hunt for gay supporters were justified, how is it even then acceptable for a high school principle to start lifting up his female students’ shirts?  Perhaps they should have taken to writing it under their bras so we could more easily convinct the guy as a sexual predator.  More importantly, of course, school principals are not empowered to crusade against homosexuals.

Heather Gillman (in the article’s photograph) was one of the students who protested in defense of the anonymous gay student. Her mother, Ardena Gillman, got it exactly right:

“What happens when these kids get out in the real world after they leave Ponce de Leon and they have a black homosexual supervisor at their job?” she said.

Hold whatever views you want in private, but if you can’t teach tolerance to the children under your supervision in a public school, you should be kept at least a thousand meters away from any place where minors gather.

The district had to pay $325,000 to cover the ACLU’s attorney fees.  The students who were sensible enough to stand up and protest should get another $325,000 to invest in improving their school in any way they want – up to and including firing the idiot that runs it.

Pot Pie, Cajun Style

Marie Callender’s makes a great frozen chicken pot pie.  When you cook it in a conventional oven, as I do, the instructions demand wrapping the edge of the crust in a strip of aluminum foil.

This is easy to do, and I’ve always followed the directions before.  On the other hand, it takes two strips of aluminum foil to achieve, given the circumference of the pie and the width of my aluminum foil.

I decided to run a controlled experiment: what would happen if I wrapped only half the crust in foil?  Would the two sides be indistinguishable, rendering the extra 20 seconds of foil-wrapping effort unnecessary?

Yeah… that step turns out to be rather important.  Half the edge of my freshly baked chicken pot pie is now deliciously flaky.  The other half is in my garbage can.

The View From Above

The downside of flying through Atlanta is that I had to fly through Atlanta. This is an experience that everyone who’s ever flown will find familiar. I remember doing it at least as young as 13 or 14 on the now defunct Trans World Airlines. I was flying from Denver to Boston then too, but living in the other city. (Life is oddly circular that way.)

Sorkin’s West Wing even wove it in:

Josh: Did you get me a flight?
Donna: Yes.
Josh: One that gets me there in time for dinner?
Donna: Yes.
Josh: And I don’t have to change planes in Atlanta?

Donna: No. Even better: you do have to change plans in Atlanta.
Josh: I told you…
Donna: You have to change planes in Atlanta. Deal with it.

(later)

Donna: You don’t know any special, secret flights to Palm Beach today, do you?
Sam: Yeah, but you gotta change planes in Atlanta.

The upside is that the flight from Atlanta to Boston offers a gorgeous view of New York City. At night in particular, it’s clear that Brooklyn has some very orderly-looking streets. Oh, and Manhattan looks pretty good too.

“Airport Emergency” Has an Awful Ring to It

Denver International Airport has a distinctive way of paging passengers on its concourses:

Mr. Smith, Mr. Charles Smith; Mr. Atkins, Mr. Derek Atkins; Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Aaron Sorkin – please dial zero on an airport courtesy telephone.

The familiar rhythm is oddly comforting.

Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport also demonstrated a distinctive way of paging passengers during my layover there:

Charles Smith, please go to the nearest phone and dial 911 for a very important message.

I’m not sure how Charles Smith reacted, but I sure didn’t find it comforting.

Mile High Club Subscriber?

Which of the following seems stranger?

  1. A person sits on an airplane and reads Playboy magazine.
  2. A person leaves behind their copy of Playboy magazine in the seat-back pocket for the next traveler to enjoy.

(Yes, there was really a copy on board.  No, the airline had not just generously provided it.)

Sophie is Cute (Exhibit F)

Sophie has started planning a lot lately.  After we told her we were going to Chili’s for lunch, for example, she announced that she’d be getting soup.  Then she began checking up on our dining plans periodically during the car ride there:

“Sophie get soup?”  Yep!  “Ben get soup?”  No, I want to get chicken.

Then a little later:

“Sophie get soup?”  Yep!  “Ben get chicken?”  Yep!

This tactic apparently lets her formulate her own plans based on ours.  At bedtime on Friday night, for instance, she checked up on our evening plans:

Sophie:  Mommy go night night?
Mommy:  Yep!  Mommy’s going night night.
Sophie:  Ben go night night?
Ben:  Yep!  Ben’s going night night.
Sophie: (decisively) Sophie watch Pooh!

At least now we know what she does after everyone else is asleep.

Sophie is Cute (Exhibit E)

On August 15th, at 6:18 pm, I stepped off the escalator into the terminal building at Denver International Airport.  The moment I turned the corner I saw a pink Sophie-shaped blur streaking toward me at her fastest possible speed carrying a gleeful grin and delivering an enormous hug.  That alone would have been worth the trip.

Then at 6:39 pm, as we sped down Peña Boulevard out of the airport, Sophie asked from the back seat, “Ben goes back home now?”

Apparently, even after all the excitement in advance of my visit, she would have been perfectly happy with a 21 minute appearance.

Of course, this did nothing to lessen her reaction as we sped back down Peña Boulevard on the return trip.  The moment the terminal drifted into view she adopted the same facial expression one would use after being slapped hard in the face and then kicked repeatedly in the shin.

An obviously fake yet earnest attempt at crying then lasted until we pulled up to the curb.  That’s when she changed tactics.  She just refused all offers of a hug goodbye, and to ward off any possibility of a goodbye kiss she even covered her mouth with her hand.

It turns out 21 minutes isn’t long enough after all, but I definitely feel appreciated