Hate driving?

Wanna date someone who can put you in their will before they croak?

Then move to Atlanta, Georgia or Nashville, Tennessee!

Why come?

These were the only two cities (” “) that not only had cheap one-way mass transpo base fares in cash but also appeared on Forbes‘ December 2008 “America’s Best Places To Grow Old” list.  I discovered this while reading “Feeling Listless?” in the Spring 2009 issue of LoftLifeMag.com.

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And now, for today’s salute to the hand that feeds me “maconi” and cheese … you can always test the waters of said cities (” “) … by going to grad school.

• Grad schools in Atlanta
• Grad schools in Nashville

xoxo

Stuff like this gets me excited:

American has developed direct connection distribution technology — which Orbitz and Expedia have refused to adopt — that could change the way it displays and sells tickets. Rather than displaying fare listings based primarily on schedules and prices, American’s technology eventually will customize offers to a traveler’s individual needs. So, during booking, the site will display fees charged for more legroom, priority seating or whatever else the passenger prefers, thus enabling American to promote options that could generate more revenue.

(From Jane Levere’s January 4th NYT article “American Airlines in Fee Battle With Web Agencies”)

This is huge, people.  Distribution dynamics and own-the-pipes slugfest ginormous.  Parlance_2010: epic.

This is the first time I’ve seen a brand say to a pipe: screw you; I’ve built my own (pipe-optimizing) pipe.  I’ve seen pipes say that to brands (e.g., WalMart charging extra for premium shelf space, screwing brands on deal terms, and using their sales data to intelligently build in-house brands) but I’m having a hard time thinking of anything so big as a brand like American Airlines givin’ the old what for to a distribution channel.

Mebz I am missing something; do you know of any brand that’s done this before? (And/or mebz my use of mebz makes you want to contract food poisoning all over my head?)

On Miami to-dos, college degrees, the universe’s opinion of elitism, and business travel

What a difference two years make.  I was in Miami this weekend, with a rental car, for the first time in a couple of years.  (When I was here last September, I didn’t have wheels.)

I was looking forward to hitting a few favorite spots while down here.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that these establishments n’existe plus:

• Domo Japones
• Cacao
• The famous Cuban bookstore
  

Insert frowny-face here.

Fortunately, all is not lost:

• The Coco Grove Sonesta remains a chillax non-South Beach lodging option for those of us who have matured out of our vodka tonic years
• La Ventana on South Beach is still a low-key Colombian restaurant with great morcilla and a ridiculous hot dog
• New find: a French restaurant in The Grove with a mouth-pleasing Patagonian toothfish

One interesting aspect of this trip, now that I’m in the higher ed marketing industry and thus particularly attuned to all things higher ed, is how different the relationship is between career entry and college graduation in these parts versus the urban Northeast.  Or at least, how different I perceive it to be, what with availability bias and all.  It turns out, Miami (269) and Philadelphia (803) have very similar college grad densities (NYC, of course, is off the charts high, but I can’t tell if the analysis controls for proportion of non-official residents), which is not what my working experience in the Miami - Boca Raton corridor (?! do they call it South Florida ?!) would suggest.

Net net?

• I am an educational attainment snob (duh; the last time I dated a guy without a graduate degree was 2006)
• If you want to date people like me, you should get your graduate degree in one of the following five cities:

1. San Fran (620)
2. NYC (2,025)
   
3. Beantown (1,238)
4. DC (867)
   
5. Seattle (271)

• There is no third bullet

Finally?

Even if you’re crashing in a hotel that’s nicer than the Best Western - Chester, business travel is still deeply unsexy.  I miss my bed, my cat (yeah, yeah), my life.  As much as I nurse romantic notions of invisible underground cork-lined solitude, an up-in-the-air existence is not for me.

Especially when you get food poisoning during said business travel (which reared its chunder-y head sometime between me starting this post and finishing it … clearly the universe’s comment on my college degree snobbery).  No friggin’ bueno.

Open item: the relationship between my educational attainment snobbery and my feelings about my elementary school dropout mother