Traveling ain’t easy these days and it certainly resembles nothing of the free and open road Kerouac blah-blahed about. While I was stuck in Dallas-Fort-Worth airport on Monday, trying to locate my lost luggage, I turned and saw three empty ATA counters and three customers waiting for help like they were waiting for Godot. The representative at next-door-neighbor Frontier Airlines kindly directed the ATA customer to “a bell.” Yes, when you are checking in forty-five minutes before a flight, that’s exactly what you want to be served by: “a bell.”

Naturally, no bell was found. Perhaps one of the ATA employees had taken it out for a smoke?

Little did I know at the time that ATA was about to ring the Chapter 11 bell and call it quits just 48 hours later. ATA followed Aloha Airlines and Skybus followed ATA and Aloha. Three airlines rang the quitting bell in a week. Is there any doubt that we’re in a recession? Is there any doubt that flying a low-cost airline is riskier than a subprime mortgage these days. Speaking of…

The World Series of Mortgage Meltdowns
Way to go, CNN, for losing the last vestige of its television journalistic integrity with its coverage of the mortgage meltdown. First we have to put up with the double-headed monster of the ingratiating Anderson Cooper and his beefy tool, Rick “Flair” Sanchez.

When producers decide to roll in a poker table (yes, literally) and have Paul Krugman and a bunch of other “experts” play with their fake chips while giving a Mortgage Meltdown for Dummies lesson, I wonder how far we are from Anderson Cooper doing a polar-ice-cap-melt special report from inside a meat locker.

P.S. Did you know there’s actually such a thing as the phrase the “Best of Nancy Grace.”

Another Pastor Cracks

A New York pastor who had been reported missing by his wife after he told her he was getting his computer fixed at Best Buy was found several states over in Ohio at a strip club several days later. When discovered, Reverend Craig Rhodenizer began weeping and said he felt “emotionally guilty.” His wife called his discovery the “best-case scenario.” Check out how this particular churchgoer reacted to Rhodenizer’s fall from grace. Apparently, none of the believers wants to know “the details of what and why” including the wife. Well, here they are, in case any of them ever becomes curious after their sundry prayers: Rhodenizer told a dancer at the club he had not been in a strip club for more than 20 years