The city of Seoul could confuse a compass.  It is an epic FAIL when it comes to urban organization, but it does boast the funniest commerical I have ever seen.  If you’ve ever craved the superpower of a wall-shattering pee stream, Korean prostate medicine is apparently just the ticket.  Enjoy:

Dear Mr. Kim:

Thanks for releasing Laura Ling and Euna Lee.  It appears they did in fact commit a crime and cross into your country illegally, but I understand your pardon in exchange for a visit from fellow international playboy Bill Clinton.  I’m sure you two had lots to discuss on the topics of sleeping with staff members, lying to your people and drinking excessively.  You’re two peas in a pod!

Mr. Kim, I’ve visited your Stalinist dystopia utopia once already, and I’m thinking about visiting again.  I guess I just can’t get enough of Karaoke Tuesdays in Pyongyang.  I’m writing to ask if you could kidnap me as well?  Maybe hold me in a villa for a few months, let me receive mail and make phone calls, then release me to whichever international supermodel they send to pick me up in a Gulfstream V.

You see, in our capitalist system Laura and Euna are going to be paid a shitload of money to tell the story of their experience in your country.  And frankly I’ve done far more interesting things than either of them and I think it’s bullshit that these idiots broke the law and are going to get a huge payday out of it.

So yeah- an extended vacation in Pyongyang is exactly what I need.  I’ll be there soon; just have your guards grab me at the airport and take me to my bungalow cell.  After I’m rescued and get my seven-figure book deal I’ll send you a bottle of your favorite XO Hennessy to say thanks.

Warm regards,

The malcontentist.

It’s finally here: the beginning of the end for the fees airlines charge to use your hard-earned miles.

Let me explain.  In the beginning you could accumulate enough miles for a trip, call the day before you wanted to leave, find a flight with a mileage seat and be on your way the next evening.  This flexibility was very valuable, because airfares generally rise to rip-off levels in the days leading up to a flight.  If you just had to be somewhere last minute, using 25,000 miles was a far better option than paying $1,500 to fly from LA to Chicago.

Eventually airlines realized this was costing them money so they started charging a fee for expedited service.  This was back in the days of paper tickets, roughly around the same time as the Commodore 64 and Super Nintendo.  And at the time, airlines were right to charge a fee: someone had to print out the tickets and FedEx them to you.  So an airline charging a $50 last minute fee was merely recouping its costs.  Fair enough.

But then came the era of the e-ticket (and the Game Cube).  And the costs incurred from issuing last minute tickets vanished: no more paper = no more FedEx.  And when travelers booked mileage awards online no airline staff had to get involved in the process.  Airlines were saving tremendous amounts of money.

So what did the airlines do?  Eliminate the fee in a gesture of goodwill to customers?  No, by this time fee revenue had become their crack cocaine and airlines were full-on junkies.  Fees went up, not away; they become staggered: no charge for booking more than 21 days out, up to $100 for booking with less than three weeks notice.

It took a recession and precipitous drop in demand to get here, but I’m happy to report that members of United’s Mileage Plus program can now live fee-free for last minute travel.  United has eliminated this bullshit fee so we can now use our miles at any time without having to pay for our “free” ticket.

This is great news for consumers and a step in the right direction for United.  However let’s not forget that United’s mileage program has a dark side more sinister than Lord Voldemort: they routinely block you from using your miles to book seats on their Star Alliance partners.

So while this fee elimination is a step in the right direction, United has some way to go before they’ll get my business again.

Worse than useless, actually.  Dangerous.  I’ll get to that in a minute.

Many of you dear readers know that I’m a travel guru and it’s my day job to help wealthy people spend their money on fancy vacations.  In the course of doing that I recently booked all available first class seats on a Virgin America flight from LA to the east coast.  I received a call this morning from Virgin America HQ informing me that for “federal reasons” two of the passengers in our party would be downgraded to economy.  (Airlines are legally obligated not to disclose the fact that air marshals are behind this passenger displacement, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know exactly what’s going on).

This isn’t Virgin’s fault; it happens on all airlines and Virgin did more to re-accommodate us than many others would have.  The blame here lies squarely with the federal government and the worse-than-useless Department of Homeland Security.  Its workfare program to pay people to fly around the globe armed with handguns is a colossal waste of money and is a bigger danger to passengers than any would-be terrorist.  Don’t believe me?  Ask the man they gunned down in Miami.  Or the marshal who left his gun in the lavatory for a surprised passenger to find.  Or the one who threatened to shoot a passenger in an airport lot over a parking space.

Guns should not be allowed on airplanes, period.  Not by passengers, not by pilots, not by law enforcement - no one should have a firearm in that space.  The TSA’s job - ineffective and politicized as it is - is to prevent weapons from entering the “sterile” area.  Those of you who know as much about airport security as I do know that airport concourses are anything but “sterile”, with ID-badged workers constantly coming and going without being screened.  But to intentionally allow anyone to bring a gun on a plane is just plain stupid.  Stop this practice now before someone else gets killed in the hunt for unicorns terrorists.

And while we’re stuck with the marshals on our flights, for fuck’s sake make them fly coach.  The government doesn’t pay for the seats the marshals use, meaning that the feds are stealing revenue from the airlines.  In Virgin’s case these two occupied seats made up 25% of their first class cabin.  This is theft, and it hits Virgin disproportionately hard because their premium cabins only have eight seats.  The marshals can be proximate to the cockpit from the first row of economy.  Greedy bastards.

So yes, after years of mocking people who come to LA to “make it big” or “get a break” I have apparently become that which I mock so mercilessly.

Yes, dear friends and strangers, while I don’t usually talk about too many “personal” things on this blog, and after years of putting it off, I am writing my ultimate travel tome.  I’ve had some fucked up and weirdly hilarious shit happen to me in 59 countries and 31 years, and it’s time to share some of that insanity with the world.  Hopefully for a large profit.  One that will finance a lifestyle of basically living in Westin and W Hotels and being worshipped by adoring fans.

Sorry, got a little carried away there.  Must be the half bottle of vodka I’ve ingested this evening.

At any rate, if you aren’t already watching Californication you really should be.  And not just because I say so (even though I do know best).  Because David Duchovny is Hank Moody.  And Hank Moody is my idol.

* His response to any challenge is to threaten a “dick punch”.

* He’s 40-something, yet routinely fucks women half his age.

* Ultimately, he’s on the same journey we all are: to find meaning in this Hobbesian life that is “nasty, brutish and short”.

What’s not to like?

Don’t get me wrong: I love New York.  It’s just about the coolest city on earth, and there’s really nowhere else I’d rather spend a long weekend in May or September.

That said, what the fuck are the transportation officials at PANYNJ thinking?  They’re deploying millimeter wave (strip search) machines at PATH train stations.

(PATH is Port Authority Trans-Hudson, a suburban rail service that links parts of New Jersey with Manhattan.)

These are the machines TSA is deploying in airports that show a detailed image of your naked body to a stranger.  Not only are there no credible threats to commuter rail in the northeast, even if there were you don’t respond by dropping a steaming turd on your citizens’ civil liberties.  Not that I don’t want to flaunt my masculine body every day, but I put on clothes for a reason: privacy (and I don’t just give away the striptease gratis).

I’m sure the brain trust that came up with this genius scheme is the same that gave us the NYPD (warrantless) bag searches of subway passengers.  Whether it’s a bag search or strip search, there needs to be some level of cause before the authorities are allowed to invade our privacy so rampantly.  Absent that it’s an unconstitutional practice, regardless of what some sycophantic court thinks about it.

You know the expression: nothing good comes from Jersey.

PS- a correction to the AP article I linked above: millimeter wave machines do not detect explosives.  They produce a detailed image of a person’s naked body to the machine operator.  Any explosive detection will be done by a human, not the machine itself.  If they want explosive detection they should use ETD swabs on every bag.  Those are effective and far less invasive to privacy.

By now we’ve all heard about the tragedy of Air France 447.  More than 200 people lost their lives when the Airbus 330 dropped out of the sky for reasons that remain a puzzling mystery.

What strikes me as odd about this crash is that it happened during cruise.  Aircraft are far more accident-prone during takeoff and landing.  It’s very rare that something catastrophic happens mid-flight.  (For a great example of just such an occurance, see the story of British Airways flight 9.  The engines inhaled volanic ash and all four shut down.)

Because the incident happened over the Atlantic, recovering the flight data and cockpit voice recorders will be very difficult.  Here’s what we do know:

* Whatever took place happend very quickly.  The plane’s automated sytems sent out several warnings in rapid succesion, and apparently there wasn’t time for the pilots to issue a mayday call.  So it happened fast.

* There was a bomb threat made against Air France in Buenos Aires on May 27.

* Airplanes like the A330 are built to take a lot of punishment from the elements.  Repeated lightning strikes and even severe turbulence should not bring down a modern airliner like this mid-flight.  Airbus and Boeing test their designs extensively to make sure things like this don’t happen.

So what could have possibly caused this accident?  I’m no NTSB investigator, but based on the facts in hand I find both of the main scenarios unlikely.

The first is that some catastrophic sequence of events occured to bring the plane down.  It’s possible that flying through a thunderhead or a rapid succession of lightning strikes caused a fire on board which doomed the plane.  Again, planes are built to withstand a lot of environmental punishment, so this would truly be a freak accident involving some previously unforeseen and lethal combination of design faults.

The other possibility is terrorism.  Shockingly almost no one is talking about this (much like with TWA 800).  Without evidence from the wreckage itself we can’t draw many conclusions, but the recent bomb threats against other Air France planes in South America certainly deserve investigation.  The only reason I find terrorism unlikely at this point is that no group has claimed responsibility.  Most terrorist groups are nothing if not narcissistic.

In the end we may never know.  Discovering that Pan Am 103 was brought down by a bomb was pure luck; the flight was delayed out of Heathrow on departure.  If it had left on-time it would have been over the Atlantic when the explosion took place, making the investigation impossibly difficult.  Unfortunately that’s exactly the situation we’re in now.

Us LOST fans know about Oceanic 815: on September 22, 2004 the Swan station went batshit when Des failed to enter the code, causing the flight to crash on the Island-of-weird-things.  But have you heard about some of Oceanic’s other mishaps?  All I can say is that Oceanic is the unluckiest airline in the whole damn world.  Kind of an anti-Qantas.  Some gems:

Oceanic 343 was hijacked by terrorists who had chemical weapons on board (Executive Decision).  On a different day, the same flight was also hijacked by North Koreans (JAG).

Oceanic 815 (again, different day than the island crash) gets shot down by a surface-to-air missile (Chuck).

Oceanic 456 had its first officer murdered in flight (Diagnosis Murder).

___

Normally when I complain about an airline it’s because of a service snafu or late flight.  In Oceanic’s case, I’m not going to give them a chance to fuck up, lest I end up in 1977 battling North Koreans who want to use chemical weapons to wipe out the Others and kill Jacob.

As for the van, it makes it a little bit too real.  = creepy.

“We are simple Dutch bakery.  Now put your clothes back on white boy!”

That’s from Eurotrip, the funniest movie on the planet.  I’ll assume you already knew that and haven’t been hiding under a rock with the Taliban since 2001.

So, Amsterdam.  What a trip.  The parts I remember, that is.  When I wasn’t trying to assassinate my liver with increasingly poisonous mixtures of liquor, or window shopping for hookers, I decided to indulge in a little herb.  I had been to Amsterdam once before and totally pussed out when the clock struck 4:20.  Also, I only smoke when on fire, so the traditional method of experiencing the good weed was out.

Having never tried any illegal drugs (yes, in my entire life- swear) I was determined not to be a wuss this time.  Before I left I got the whole spectrum of advice, from “don’t bother- the brownies are weak” to “it’s a really strong high, be careful how much you eat.”

So it turns out they don’t actually have pot brownies in Amsterdam.  They have “space cake”.  Imagine a slab of poundcake from Starbucks with pot baked into it.  It actually tasted pretty damn good, but the effects were very disappointing.  I felt semi-drunk for half an hour.  That was it.  Guess I should have had a second helping.

Your blogger = drug experimentation FAIL.  In Amsterdam, no less!

As for window shopping for sex… what can I say?  To me, paying for sex is like paying for oxygen, so I didn’t indulge in Amsterdam’s other famous vice.  But I do find the Red Light District fascinating to the point where I can’t look away.

Wandering the twisting, reddish alleyways of the district is not for the man who lacks confidence.  Some girls are shameless and will try anything to lure you; a little flash, rapping on the window, suggestive twirls of bikini strings.  What I found far more interesting were the ones sitting on a stool in their windows reading a book.  It was like they couldn’t be bothered to try to seduce me.  If I want girls to ignore me I can go to any bar in LA and stare at them like the craigslist killer.  If I’m going to pay for it, I want some fucking customer service.

PS- the Dutch word for “study” sounds just like their word for masturbate.  Next time you’re in Holland and you meet a girl in a bar, ask her what she studies!

That’s right, the city of legalized soft drugs, prostitution and many other types of debauchery.  So your blogger will be taking some R&R, partying with friends for Queen’s Day, and enjoying some homemade Dutch brownies.  And in honor of my latest euro trip…

I may come back.  I may not.