mccullochblog

Was ignorance actually bliss?

That was the question spinning through my mind this Sunday afternoon as I got increasingly frustrated (to the point of hurling small food items around the kitchen) by searching the Web for various things.

Take hotels for example. I was trying to book some affordable hotel rooms in Las Vegas for my mum’s upcoming trip. In days gone by, we would have called (or visited) a travel agent for such a task. The agent would have tapped away for a few minutes at a keyboard connected to a green screen (not visible to us customers) and pronounced that they had found ‘a great deal’ at the Hotel Flamingo or some such. We would have walked away happy to have found something for our price range and thought no more about it. We trusted the travel agent, didn’t we?

Fast forward to today. I just spent about 90 minutes fervently searching Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, United Airlines and Hotels.com, desperately trying to get the best deal. When I’d compiled a shortlist, I searched Yelp and TripAdvisor for peer reviews, thereby increasing my frustration to boiling point as invariably every ‘fantastic deal’ I’d identified was revealed to be next to a ‘deafening construction site’ or ‘in desperate need of an update’. Because I no longer trust the travel agent (or perhaps because I’ve been duped to believe I can do the job myself) I wasted a good chunk of my precious time off. Is this really progress? What have we really gained form the Web? Does having all the information we need at our fingerprints make us richer, or merely more paranoid?

I can’t help wondering that the next phase of Web travel booking will see the advent of the ‘online travel agent’ – the 21st century equivalent of the ‘green screen operator’ - who does all the searching of all those disparate Web sites for you, and presents you with ‘a great deal’. Perhaps you’ll even be able to visit or call the green screen person to get that really personal touch? Do you think I’m on to something

Serendipatiousness.

I love to travel, as you well know, and I love it in particular for the like-minded souls one meets on the road. Take Jane Glendenning, for example. We met five years ago in Peru when I was between jobs (en route to the USA) and she was taking a year off from marketing en route to becoming a teacher.

We hiked the Inca Trail together, combatted smyptoms of altitude together, exchanged life stories (its a long walk!) and tails of respective other halves (as you do) and swapped email addresses on the off chance that our paths might some day cross again.

Well, what do you know! They did. Jane got back in touch with me via this very blog and spent this past weekend visiting Emma and I here in San Francisco with her fella, Justin, who coincidentally she'd just fallen for five years ago, on the eve of departing for her year off. We biked across the Golden Gate bridge, visited the usual tourist haunts, drank in swanky SF nightspots and even recalled a few Inca days.

And that's it really. A simple blog to recount the simple pleasures that abound when one steps outside one's daily routine, explores another land and extends a hand-shake in friendship. So, next time you hit the road and swap an email address...keep it handy, you never know!

Who really won the war in the Lebanon?

Amid all the pathetic posturing about who 'won' the war in Southern Lebanon today, I couldn't but wonder  (as financial markets generally rose on news of the ceasefire) whether there wasn't a weapons manufacturer out there somewhere cursing its bad luck.

After all, if anyone can really claim to have won the war, surely it must be an entity such as Lockheed Martin, maker of the F16 fighter and the largest weapons manufacturer in the world. Or perhaps Raytheon, maker of the Sidewinder and Tomahawk missiles.

But heck, don't take my word for it, just ask look at this lovely Yahoo! Finance chart. What a marvelous five weeks it's been for Lockheed Martin!! Hoorah!

And what's that you say, America sold $120million of jet fuel to the Israeli military on July 14th? Now, who is the largest supplier of jet fuel to the US (and thereby Israeli) military? Why, that would be BP US. And how did they do in the past five weeks? Well, they were very nicely bucking a downward trend in their stock price until all this talk of a ceasefire began. Damn the UN!

But here's a funny thing...did you know that the last time Israel invaded Lebanon (in 1981), that silly forgetful President Reagan withdrew military aid and froze weapons sales to Israel. This time around? Well, thank God we've got the pro-business George W Bush in the White House.

Good old George, always doing what's good for the economy, even if a few hundred people need to die in the process. Hoorah for George. Hoorah for affordable gas and big SUVs to guzzle it!

How do you drive?

I  was driving to work this morning, bleary eyed, wearing sunglasses on a day that didn't demand it, when a thought struck me. Does the way you drive reflect the way you live your life?

Take yesterday, for example. Emma and I were involuntarily following a woman in an SUV. She was weaving between lanes, chatting with her passenger and gesticulating energetically. She failed to signal before her manouvers and eventually rolled through a red light. She seemed, we inferred, a woman who was inadvertently or deliberately selfish, easily distracted, directionless and possibly quite rude.

So this morning I tried applying the theory to Emma. Those who know her know that Emma drives fast. She drives fast, but she also anticipates very well. Emma also lives fast, but has a plan for everything she can conceivably plan. (See, she's an anticipator). On the downside, Emma's quite a determined driver (lots of horn beeping, very little tolerance for bad driving) which can sometimes, ahem, wind me up a bit. In life, Emma's determination is one of her great assets (see half-marathon post!) but her single-mindedness can, ahem, wind me up a bit too. I still love you honey but...is a theory forming here?

Testing my hazy hypothesis further, I turned my attention to...me! I think I drive reasonably safely. Not cautiously. And definitely not slowly, but I'm not a big anticipator either. I'll confess I occasionally get distracted and find myself stuck in an immobile lane of traffic. In essence, I like to put the peddle down to the metal, but I'm not big on planning and could look around a little more. Hey presto...me in real life! Plan next weekend? Pah...that's days away! Throw myself totally into whatever venture I'm pursuing? Yup. Occasionally drift off into a parallel dimension. Ah, yeah...

So, the question is...how do you drive?

Duck, Cover and Hold!

One of the curious pleasures of being a foreigner living in San Francisco (excluding those that lived here as long ago as 1989) is the minor earthquake.

Even though every one of us knows that earthquakes are generally not all that safe, we simply can't resist enjoying them.

Take last night, for example. Emma and I were visiting friends for dinner and at some point during the main course Emma interrupted a noisy conversation about circumcision (yes, really) by saying: "Hey...is that an earthquake?"

A split second later, the floor rumbled, the room rolled from side-to-side and a broad smiles spread across the faces of the eight diners. "Wow...that was pretty big!" said one. "Yeah, I'll bet that was a 5.2," said another. "No way! Much bigger," said I. And so it went on until we sent our hostess off to the Internet to check for the answer.

"What? Only a 4.4? It seemed MUCH bigger than that!" The room was palpably disappointed that we hadn't encountered at least a 5.0. Still, we hadn't all felt an earthquake for ages and so it really made the evening!

It possibly goes without saying that no-one ducked into an archway, flung themselves under the table or moved away from the windows. Oh no. Clearly no-one had been practicing their earthquake preparedness drills at home! Still, why should we? After all, there's only a 70% chance of a major earthquake hitting the Bay Area in the next 20 years! Pah...hardly worth worrying about, right?