Just Ridiculous

This isn't my first screed on Ticketmaster, and it probably (sadly) won't be my last. This was just so shocking I had to share with the world. I'd like to catch Chromeo at the Trocadero in Philadelphia next month, but at a 43% gouge for convenience, I'll inconvenience myself by walking to the box office. It's nice out today and this might actually be a fun errand.

American Express Foreign Currency Conversion Fee

On my way back from Canada two weekends ago I naturally wanted to hit up the duty-free at the Thousand Islands crossing to shore up on my summer reserves of booze sans tax. While the exchange rate isn't awesome these days, the prices are marginally better and you can also load up on Canadian candy (Smarties baby!) and maple syrup.

So after scoring bottles of Patron, Hendricks, Ketel One and Grand Marnier, I thought I was pretty clever right up until I got stopped at the US Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint and referred to secondary inspection after admitting I'd ignored the one-bottle per visitor rule and actually purchased four.

They lined me up with about 7-8 other cars and had me roll up all the windows and leave the vehicle and not use my cellphone (to call my Al Qaeda friends), while a big Ford truck with a white box in the bed (Mobile Radiation Portal Monitor) slowly puttered down and up the line of cars apparently shooting some kind of radiation to find bombs, yellowcake or other instruments of terrorism.

Satisfied that we were carrying nothing dangerous, CPB let us go and I was off into the States with my tax-free hooch.

Now a fortnight later, I'm checking my American Express bill online and notice this funny little blue dot in the statement next to my duty-free liquor purchase:

...and find that AMEX has tacked on an extra 2.7% to my purchase for the service of foreign currency conversion. Shame on your AMEX for taking the low-road of surprise hidden fees (though I'm sure I was notified in one of those dense, rice-paper pamphlets about my Terms and Conditions), but I guess you have to take advantage when you have the world by the balls? That's nice customer-centric thinking.

I used to think of AMEX as the goto for travel purchases, but knowing that I'll pay an extra 2.7% on top of anything I buy in foreign currency, I'm thinking twice.

Justin Bieber's Purple High Tops

An old story goes that, back in college, I got out of sorts one afternoon while watching MTV and had an emotional 'freak out.' Without willing it, I drifted across the street to the multi-cultural student union building for a smoothie, into which I gently wept over my despair at feeling out of touch with pop culture. The exact stimulus, I believe, was N*Sync, or something like them, on a stage in Cancun amid a throng of thong-clad beauties and their bouncing parts and here was my sudden and overwhelming lack of comprehension. Looking back it was probably just plain old jealousy. My spring break trip to Key West hadn't been so fruitful.

Since then, I've largely reconciled my connection with pop culture. I think in the maturation of (still) pending adulthood, which entailed the erosion of the dream of setting the curvature of cool myself, my efforts to be so have softened to the point that I'm really taking most things less seriously and not expecting much beyond face value. As a result, I've come to celebrate Justin Timberlake's entire solo catalog and I'm not afraid to admit it.

There's no shame in owning up to something that makes you feel good. So another thing I'm going to surrender henceforward is my effort to log and hold people accountable for instances of hypocrisy. We're all guilty of it and pointing it out (usually) as a means to justify something bad you want to get away with is not a constructive exercise. The better thing to do is expect it, since it's human, and get on to the constructive path of forgiving. It's what Jesus would have wanted.

So with my new enlightened attitude, I'm marveling at this new wunderkind, Justin Beiber, who's suddenly up there dancing and singing from the wisdom of his 16 year old perch about love and its travails. He may be an old soul, but the 20 year old me would have rejected this on grounds of dubious voracity. What does a doe-eyed, pre-pubescent Canadian queerbait have to tell me about love?

Then, what would I have to gain by keeping the Beiber at arms-length? That's what the older me has realized and so I'm embracing Beiberama and starting to plumb its pop-cultural richness for seams to lace into my own life.

To wit, these are my new kicks -- Adidas Equations, to be precise -- loosely inspired by a sweet pair of purple kind that Bieber sports and they're driving my wife crazy. Only, not with the teenage fan-girl lust like I'd hopefully envisioned. It's more like crazy with fatigue at my antics, or something such that effects more weariness and ridicule than horniness and adoration.

Still I occasionally insist on these shoes, most recently on the ferry to Nantucket, because my point is this: Bieber doesn't act his age. Why should I?

May Tripping

From the home base in Old City, I traveled over 5,000 miles across the Eastern United States throughout the month of May as abstractly illustrated in the above SnagIt Editor on Google Maps digital visualization. In real terms, I made round-trip visits from Philadelphia to:

• Atlantic City, NJ
• Charlotte, NC
• Nantucket, MA
• New Orleans, LA
• New York, NY
• Rideau Ferry, ON

As much as my itinerant nomadisticity was a journey of man on wheel, rail, wing and hull, what strikes me here at the end of it all was the gastronomic effort involved in literally eating my way through May on the road. En route I sampled an awesome array of distinctly North American cuisine in all of its regional splendor. While the exotic wonders of cajun cuisine in New Orleans, buttered chip wagons in Canada, and Nantucket's amazing Portuguese bread command respect, the core of the culinary experience was far more American: lite beers (and lots of them) plus hot meat, cheese and white bread. 

For the most part I try to watch what I eat. But healthy eating, like exercise, piano-lessons, non-fiction reading and prayer, is a routine easily toppled by the flux of travel. Simply stated, the road is an excuse to scarf all the junk food you can handle. And so this May I happily gave-in to the impulse to eat, and eat I did to end up here in June counting back on the previous month and realizing that I ate literally 3 home-cooked meals, had red meat almost daily and can count among that total cheeseburgers from 10 different sources and 3 philly cheesesteaks (my normal total on both of the above is like 1 per month).

Beefy Highlights:

• Hot barbecue brisket at the random strangers house in New Orleans on the recovery from being rocked by Pearl Jam at Jazz Fest.
• Returning to the fast-food burgers of my youth: Wendy's 1/4 Single with Cheese, A&W Papa Burger, McDonald's Big Mac.
• The simple, yet technically advanced burger at the Crepe Cellar in Charlotte, NC - hand-packed patty, fried onion strings, gruyere and a truly wonderful bun make this the only one I'll refer to as the French Onion Soup of cheeseburgers. 
• Not 1, but 2 cheesesteaks at Cosmi's - Philadelphia's best 'Philly Cheesesteak.' (Suck it Pat's and Geno's!)
• Memorial Day Natucket grill-o-rama featuring classic, hand-made burgers on the grill with sliced tomato, grilled onion and pickles and the best weather anybody's seen on that island since the New World was discovered.

It's been real. 

Now as my brother says, it's time to be a homeboy, and for June that means getting back to leafy greens and high fiber to hopefully undo some of the massive damage May must have done on arterial walls and GI tract.   

Random Fact: Nashville, Tennessee Got a Lot of Rain in May 2010

A somber footnote from my recent trip to New Orleans was that my brother, a last minute addition out of Nashville, Tennessee, spent a good portion of the trip nervously monitoring his iPhone for updates on the deteriorating situation with regards to the Cumberland River and record-setting flood stages back in his home city.

The weather that weekend in New Orleans was strange, frighteningly humid with an endless surge of low-lying  clouds flowing north off the Gulf at 20-25 mph. It was horror-movie, pre-apocalypse style cloud action and everyone just kept waiting for what felt like the inevitable, Biblical deluge. But it didn't come.

With this boatload of moisture coming in from the sea, New Orleans only reported 1.55 inches of rain during those first two days of May while Nashville received 13.56 inches. I'm an amateur meteorologist in aspiration-only, but my feeling is we saw that moisture in New Orleans en route to Nashville.

*Data for this post was provided by Weather.com, which is an excellent website with a lot of delightful drill-down ability for the weather and/or data junkie. Check out the Monthly view for precipitation and temperature recordings, extremes and averages.

Facebook Makes Your Privacy Difficult to Understand

There's a genius working at the New York Times graphics design center who produced the comprehensive visual (from which I happily pimped the above) of Facebook's 'bewildering tangle' of a privacy policy.

I'm generally trusting of all things Internets, including Google's all-seeing eye (well acquainted with the collective id), but it's not a bad thing to be a little standoffish in knowing that the privacy rules governing the web are largely unwritten, or rather, being written by the companies you use everyday on the Web (Google, Facebook, etc.). Your guardedness should arise from the fact that they are attempting to create a market-driven, self-interest supporting code of conduct that balances their business interest against the whip of torts. As with any pioneering enterprise, the law isn't yet advanced enough to cover this ground with prescriptive rules simply because the list of contingencies is branching and broadening everyday with no signs of slowing down or normalizing. So the shake-out of privacy protection will probably happen by dint of these companies being called-out in court for bad behavior, aka violations of your privacy. All I'm saying is be careful how much you share since Facebook is working mostly to capitalize on your personal information as their marketable data. This should bother you only so much as you have ignorantly shared compromising information. The upside is relevant advertising, the downside is martyrdom in the courts. As always, the ancient writ of caveat emptor applies.

In these instances, I like to fall back on the rhetorical utility of my run-in with the naive young coed Boobs McGee, whom I interviewed several years ago at a campus recruiting visit to an elite college in the Northeastern United States. Before the interview, I received a dossier on Ms. McGee (actual name forgotten to protect her identity, which, on second thought, why should I work harder to protect her identity than she does?) with her resume and cover letter.

Naturally, I Googled her and found her Facebook page entirely too-open to the public featuring a profile picture of her busting out of a slinky black dress with some frat-guy chomped down on the upper-middle camber of her cleavage. Whatever her name was, 'Boobs McGee' she instantly became and the jettison of respect only quickened when her self-reported 'interests' included 'My Tits' and 'Cocaine.'

After the interview, I consulted with the career services folks and let them know that Ms. McGee wasn't quite right for us but might be better-suited for one of the open (and far more lucrative) Tiger Woods' mistress roles. Additionally, her professional faux pas might be cited as a parable to all undergraduate job-seekers as to the dangers of over-sharing via Facebook.

My Weekend at Jazz Fest in Pictures

Trombone Shorty!

Two Rude Dudes!

Tipitina's!

Cafe du Monde!

Peace!

Clouds!