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Austin, Texas: Come for the weather, stay for the HUGE FLOCKS OF TERRIFYING BATS

The Dead Man’s Hand

Once, quite some time ago, I agreed to go on a holiday. My wife and I had decided to ‘start a family’ and it was suggested, not by me I hasten to add, that we should go to Barcelona – Europe’s party town – for one last hurrah before we entered the tiresome world of babysitters and early nights.

As chance would have it, sometime between booking and checking in something untoward must have occurred, because my wife was demonstrably up the duff by the time we landed in Barcelona.

Consequently, the entire week was marked by eposodes of morning sickness, early nights, and afternoon naps. It was fortuitous that Spanish TV was showing George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy on a non-stop loop that week, dubbed into Spanish of course but I already knew who everyone was and what was going to happen and I’m not too bad at Spanish. Well, I say not too bad. I only know a few words but I’m astoundingly cocky so I’ll just have a go and expect to be understood.

By the end of the week we’d hardly spent any money. Now you can’t possibly come back from a city break without having bankrupted yourself. It was time to book the most expensive restaurant in Barcelona.

Which is, if you weren’t aware, some Catalan gaff where everything is painted white and the menu, by dint of being printed in Catalan, is upsettingly hard to read. Catalan isn’t like proper Castilian Spanish, the kind you get in phrase books. Catalan is more like cryptic Welsh Sudoku. There are more Xs on a Catalan menu than there are in a teenage girl’s email. No-one can read the things. To exacerbate matters, the waitress had formed the distinct impression that I was a cocky Londoner who spoke Spanish at approximately toddler standard and had chosen to punish me by electing to negotiate my dining options exclusively in Catalan.

I struggled for quite some time with the menu. My various food intolerances (gluten, tomatoes, foreign muck) weren’t helping much. Eventually I found something that looked as if it might be rice-based. Rice is great. You can make pudding out of rice.

The only issue was, I couldn’t quite make out what might be with the rice. My entreaties for guidance from the waitress were met with bloody-minded Catalan jibberjabber that I probably could have understood, had I but been brainier or more Spanish or something.

Anyway, the one scrap of information I could elicit was that the rice contained ‘marisco’. I had no clue what marisco might be, but frankly the explanations had gone a bit too long, and it was getting a trifle embarrassing. My wife’s contribution to the sketch was to say “ooh, marisco, nice” . That was good enough for me I went with the marisco rice.

As soon as the waitress had gone I asked Mrs Moran what I’d ordered. She had no idea either. She’d just said something positive to defuse the tension.

It later transpired that marisco means, if it means anything, seafood. It can cover a multitude of evils.

The evil in this case was a bed of rice surmounted by a white, five-fingered something that was bony, and possessed of a pallid, rubbery flesh that tasted mostly of nothing.

To this day, I have no idea what I ate. And I don’t want to know.

George Carlin: If you you thought it was all about Bill and Ted, you missed a lot

Splendid, very funny fellow. Few comics retained their early edge so deep into their careers. Few comics had so much to say about airline announcements either.

So, if you HAVE read the book..

You might have skimmed the biographical note at the beginning and thought 'yes, you say you made some tolerable but not remotely successful records but what were they like?'

Well, they were like this. Here is my band 5TA on Channel 4's pioneering 'The Tube' show in 1986 or so.

I'm the skinny lad with the hair on the right hand side. Or I was. Skinniness and hair are both but fond memories now.

The other members of that tolerable, but not remotely successful lineup are, reading from left to right; The very lovely and very Swiss Colette Meury at the electronic keyboard, the splendid but sadly no longer with us Melanie Lewis supplying the left-hand backing vocal while the established in her own right Julia Fordham pins down the vital right hand backing singer rôle.

The lead singer was the mighty, the inimitable Lance Jowers. My fondest memories of those days are the bits when he wigged out and started singing something that I could never have written or even thought of. There's some of that here. Nick Rhodes sat at the drum throne and occasionally managed to persuade me not to be a complete tit. Not often though. Mark Pinto played the bass guitar for us, more admirably than we deserved.

We recorded a whole album with Cure producer David Allen. It's here, if you're interested. Remember though, don't judge us too harshly, It was the Eighties. Everyone thought that kind of thing was OK.

Anyway, there it is. Or was. Enjoy. If you can.

The secret evil of hotels

We all sort of know that hotels like to add annoying little extras to our bills that we're generally too polite to dispute. 

Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel and Lodging Association would like to make it clear, though, that fees for incidental services represent a 'miniscule amount of revenue'

So, in that case, they must be doing it just to annoy us..

Welcome, Guardian Guiders!

Thanks for popping by. There's an extract from my fitfully amusing book below, if you fancy it. Or of you're just here for the map, which is pretty funny (my favourite one's Istanbul) you can find it here. Or you can leave your own tale of holiday woe here.

Or you can just poke around the blog and find stuff. There's another extract somewhere, some slightly comical news items and even an alternative Olympic logo, for some reason...

EXTRACT:5 reasons that everybody hates a tourist

1: Money

Wherever you’re going, it’s a safe bet that you’ve got more disposable income than most of the people that are there. The farther you go, the greater the disparity will grow. Now, money isn’t everything but it can more-or-less buy everything and so it ends up figuring rather significantly in the minds of people who haven’t got so much of it. I’m not suggesting that your squandering conspicuous sums of money on international travel will engender the sort of resentment that, say, the self-indulgence of the French Royal court did in 1789, or the lavish excesses of the Russian aristocracy in 1917. No, Not a bit of it: The fops and dandies in question interacted very little with the peasantry, yet still annoyed them enough to precipitate a bloody revolution. Tourists are there in the people’s face every day for the whole bloody Summer. Which leads us to…

 

2: Luggage

A lot of foreign travel involves cities. Even if you think you’re going to a bit of exotic countryside you’re bound to end up flying into an airport on the fringes of some major conurbation and then getting a train or taxi through the city centre to your destination. Let’s hope it is a taxi, because that’s just an annoying car like so many others and unlikely to give rise to too much smouldering resentment. If you’re on a train or an underground system of sort you’ll be dragging assorted pieces of bulky luggage around with you, scuffing the shins of pedestrians with your suitcase, obliviously crushing the newspapers of  tube travellers with your rucksack, or tripping absolutely everybody up with one of those spectacularly annoying trolley-bag affairs. You may think that you’re having enough trouble struggling from airport to hotel or train terminus, but the people you’re inadvertently barging into are on their way to or from work, and were probably in a fairly bad mood before you clattered into them with your skis. Which rather calls to mind..

 

3: Congestion

The joy, such as it is, of visiting a foreign city is stopping to look up at the interesting architectural features, unexpected poor weather, or strange and unusual birds that are about to defecate on your head. The drawback to these simple pleasures of course is that every time you stop to rubberneck at an exotic-looking and mildly pornographic advertising hoarding you will cause a concertina of collisions in the ‘long tail’ of fast-moving locals behind you who have seen all this stuff before and are just trying to get to where they’re going before the monsoon rains kick in. Which naturally takes us to..

 

4: Time

You’ve got lots of it. The people you’re asking for directions have little or none. The people behind you in the queue for overpriced cups of coffee have even less. Words do not exist to describe the depth of their hatred for you. Please remember that in many other countries knives and guns are more commonly carried than they are in – say – Royal Tonbridge Wells. Which takes us rather neatly to..

 

5: Money (again)

The presence of a large group of people with substantial amounts of disposable income, generous amounts of leisure time to fill and no way of storing or cooking fresh food tends to skew the local economy somewhat in the direction of overpriced coffee or sandwich bars and expensive clothing shops. Exactly the opposite of what you need if you actually live in one of these places, where all you want is a sensibly priced pastie to reheat in the office microwave for your lunch, a reasonably-priced dry cleaners and somewhere to buy an emergency present for your wife’s birthday and you’re not made of bloody money and you’ve only got an hour to eat, get your suit cleaned and buy the Smallest Diamond On Earth™.

Planning on visiting London in 2012?

Read this before you book. I think everyone outside Westminister accepts that it's a massive exercise in hubris bequathed by one dimwitted publicity-addict mayor to another, but all the same some poor bugger's bound to accidentally buy some tickets.

If they do actually complete any of the facilities they're bound to collapse as soon as somone tries to do something silly like walk into them.

Still, could be worse

They always said the logo would evolve. This one's inspired by a comment thread on Fark, created by my pal D-Hutch and I did all the stealing and cajoling.

"Folks, if those of you seated on the left hand side look out of the window you'll see a van wedged under the plane"

I don't normally run stories involving travel fatalities, as this one appears to do, but the news item does carry with it an extraordinary picture.

The 20 most annoying airports in the USA

Forbes has a list of the Top 100 airports in the US for delays. I know you're a modern person, though, with no time to waste on reading long lists or taking your ADHD medication. Here's the 20:

1: Chicago, Ill.: O'Hare

2: Newark, N.J.: Newark Liberty International

3: New York, N.Y.: Kennedy International

4: New York, N.Y.: La Guardia

5: Dallas/Ft.Worth, Texas: Dallas/Ft. Worth International

6: San Francisco, Calif.: San Francisco International

7: Boston, Mass.: Logan International

8: Philadelphia, Penn.: Philadelphia International

9: Atlanta, Ga.: Hartsfield-Jackson

10: Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minn.: Minneapolis St. Paul International

11: Denver, Colo.: Denver International

12: Detroit, Mich.: Detroit Metro Wayne County

13: Seattle, Wash.: Seattle/Tacoma International

14: Charlotte, N.C.: Charlotte Douglas International

15: Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles International

16: Washington, D.C.: Dulles International

17: Phoenix, Ariz.: Sky Harbor International

18: Las Vegas, Nev.: Mc Carran International

19: Miami, Fla.: Miami International

20: Washington, D.C.: Washington National

If airline delays really float your boat, WCBS-TV have (inexplicably) got a picture gallery of the worst offenders

From BBC Radio Kent

HOME OR AWAY

With the credit crunch, recession and the whole green anti-flying campaign looming over the summer holiday season, how about focussing on holidays closer to home? Or, cheaper still, AT HOME? In "Sod Abroad" Michael Moran explains why'd you'd be made to leave the comfort of your own home. It's a silly, joyous collection about the impossibility of having any kind of fun on holidays either in the UK or abroad and has assorted lists of great things you can only do at home, if you ever had any time there, plus detailed critiques of assorted holiday destinations and even one fairly scientific equation. "Sod Abroad" by Michael Moran - John Murray paperback original - £7.99

A standard Air Rage story..at first

So here we are with a fairly routine story of some rather silly woman going nuts because she wasn't allowed to smoke on an aeroplane. Irrespective of your views on the creeping criminalisation of smoking, the idea of someone sparking up a gasper in the confined environs of a tourist jet is a pretty antisocial affair. Even if you ignore for one moment the spectre of the 'shoe bomber'

Here's what bothers me about the story though: She was restrained with the standard 'flex cuffs' which Sky Marshals carry to restrain terrorists, or more commonly people who've got a bit carried away with the in-flight gin-and-tonics.

And she Hulked out and broke them. If an average (one assumes) 35 year old woman can bust out of these things motivated by no more than the love of Woodbines, what possibility would there be of preventing some bomb-happy zealot from spearing the next 737 flight to Alicante into Canary Wharf?

Just a thought...

The Top 6 things banned by Airport Security

As enumerated by the always rather interesting Unsought Input

Explanation and illumination over at the UI site, but that handy bullet-point chart in full is:

1: 3.2oz of toothpaste

2: A MacBook Air

3: Some breast milk

4: Any book with either some dynamite on the cover, or Harry Potter, or both

5: One of those admittedly rather annoying flashing LED badges

6: Our old favourite, the Transformers T-shirt

I'm sure there are other exciting and unexpected things that airport security will take arbitrary exception to. Why not fly somewhere and find out what they are?

Multimedia Wednesday!

First in a series of at least one, your chance to hear my interview with a nice chap at BBC Radio Lincolnshire as I try to persuade him not to fly to Boston.

Click!

This is your captain speaking: We're just going to circle a while until they clear all the jackals, raptors, and giant lizards off the runway...

From MSNBC:

NEW DELHI - Jackals, monitor lizards and raptors descended on a runway at New Delhi's main airport after heavy rains Monday, delaying flights, an airport official said.

The animals were looking to dry off and warm up after the first monsoon rains hit India's capital, and their appearance on the runway forced authorities to stop planes from taking off and landing for about an hour, Indira Gandhi International Airport spokesman Arun Arora said in a statement.

Animal welfare authorities cleared the runway of wildlife, including monitor lizards that measured as long as 2-3 feet, Arora said.

Arora didn't say how many flights were delayed. The Hindustan Times newspaper said about 100 flights were affected.

In the monsoon season, which runs from June to September, heavy rains routinely delay flights all over India.

I don't need to add anything here, do I?

A long list of delicious foods you can't get overseas

Now, my remit is substantially (as you know) to encourage people to have a relaxing two weeks in their front room, rather than enter a debate about the great Middle England disapora - which has distributed comfortably-off retired cabbies as far afield as Alicante and...well..just Alicante really.

Nevertheless, here's a list of things you'll miss if you leave your own lovely kitchen behind.

Johnny Vegas: He's got it half right

The roly-poly funnyman™ says he doesn't care for foreign holidays and would prefer a break on the North Sea coast. Now, if he can just follow his own logic through and realise that the North Sea is balls cold and that a British coastal resort is basically the same as the town he lives in, except slightly more expensive, he'll be ready to join my exclusive 'stay at home' club.

Here's a marvellous quote about a holiday in Ibiza though:

I was a mass of hypochondria back then. My mate got bitten by a dog on the first night, and later he shook my hand, and I got it into my head that I had rabies. So, everywhere I went, I carried a glass of water, to see if I was becoming afraid of it.

Read the rest over at TimesOnline.

The 12 things you will definitely forget to pack..

..as covered by the fine folk at Times Online

1. That Book You Really Wanted To Read

There’s this thing you saw on Richard & Judy once that sounded brainy and entertaining at the same time. It’s a hardback though, and they weight a ton so there’s no reading it on the way to work. No. It’s a "save for the holiday" book. It’ll probably make it into the case for a bit, then get taken out to make room for some flip-flops and never quite find a place in your hand-baggage.

Assuming you brought your glasses (see below) , you’ll end up making do with some flimsily unsatisfying paperback humour title you found in the airport Smiths instead. It's bound to be called something dreadful like Sod Abroad

Read on....

Sharks: Getting a bit more bitey with all this hot weather

You will no doubt have been told that shark attacks are rare. That's true. As this handy map demonstrates though they're at their rarest on land, in the UK. Where all the pub lunches are to be had.

If you're silly enough to go to nasty hot places like Mexico, and then get in the water where at the very least you'll get soaked, if not definitely bitten, then I'm not sure we have much more to say to one another.

You look good naked: Welcome aboard

"SECURITY scanners that can see through passengers' clothing and reveal details such as their sex organs, colostomy bags and breast size, are being installed in 10 US airports"

It says here...

"Once the transportation security officer has viewed the image and resolved anomalies, the image is erased from the screen permanently. The officer is unable to print, export, store or transmit the image."

Yeah, but he can remember it can't he?

And he will. Mark my words. Men are beasts. I should know. I've been one for a while.