Wordle cloud

Wordle is a fun online toy that makes pretty-looking tag clouds of whatever you fancy. I tried squirting the whole manuscript of my book in but of course the words that got the most action were rather dull conjunctions that tend to appear a lot in any long English document. These are a shade better, if not absolutely 'true' -

The world's most expensive flight simulator! Try it today!

I know I should be running stories about more varied topics than just the stupidity of airlines, but really - they keep doing funny stuff.

OK, funny stuff where somebody dies, but still. Funny stuff.

Budget airlines do the funniest things - #69: The phone sex line

Here's our on-the spot correspondent Barbara in Michigan

Did you know that Spirit Airlines is now charging their customers for making a seat reservation — middle seats are $5, Aisle and Window seats are $10 and the "exit row seats" are $15. I was shocked with this change. I didn't make a seat reservation because I already paid the airfare for the ticket, which entitles me to a seat. I know the gas prices are very high, however, this was too little information, not written int he small print (I checked) and only identified when you selected your seat. I tried to call customer service, but was connected to someone in the Far East (they didn't identify the country they were calling from) and their English was so poor I could not understand the person I was trying to communicate with...When I mentioned I lived in Michigan, I was repeatedly asked, "Where, where do you live?"

Then, when, I asked for a "customer service" number in the US and the number I was given connected me to a "pornographic" phone service — I was more than startled!

Seriously - can I get a ROFL?

We've all done it, haven't we?

Fallen asleep while flying a packed airliner and just gone past our stop.

Haven't you? Well these guys did. If you must fly somewhere this Summer, ignoring the irreversible damage that you're doing to the environment, your finances and your sanity, then just make sure you make plenty of noise while you're airborne.

After all, it seems to happen a lot.

Quite a lot

It's not that surprising, when you think about it.

And if the price of keeping the pilot awake is to be Tasered by an overzealous Sky Marshal, then so be it.

And there was I thinking I was the only person that didn't like holidays

The chap (or, equally, it could be a lady) that runs Cruise Bruise hates 'em. Admittedly, he (or she) has a narrower focus, saving all his (or her) disapprobation for ocean cruises. The Cruise Bruise website (see how I avoided the gender pronoun there? Sweet eh?) features a long..surprisingly long..list of people lost on diving expeditions, getting drunk and falling off boats, passengers stranded after liners sink, and a few more people getting drunk and falling off boats.

There's also a hefty collection of pederasts working at Disneyland and assorted terrorist plot rumours. If you were an unusually parsimonious individual, perhaps hoping to persuade a feckless spouse not to squander a four-figure sum on a Caribbean boat ride, the site is your cast-iron guarantee of a nice Summer at home in the shed instead.

Picture of the Day

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.