Sinclair Lewis had it right in 1935:

“When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

Our trip to Ohio reminds me that there are many people who will embrace things solely because of religious and/or patriotic duties. It reminds me that critical thought is not encouraged, obey. But what happens when the authority figures are not worthy of trust? We’re living through that situation now. When these good people wake up and realize that they’ve been had, the Republican party will not recover (since they’ve wrapped themselves in the flag and are carrying the cross.)

I just hope it’s not too late when the heartland wakes up. Actions speak louder than words and the actions of our political leadership do not match the patriotic and religious words they utter.

Another birthday comes and goes for our Republic. 231 years and counting. It’s been a good run with many amazing achievements and contributions to humanity. We now find ourselves looking at a midlife crisis as a country. Our “elected” leaders have been suborned by private interests, there is no visible integrity, and little hope of finding our way out.

But, it’s not in the American spirit to give up. Things may not be going well or right, but I do have faith that we can find our way forward and recover from the dark ages we’re living through at the beginning of this millennium.

We traveled from California to Ohio yesterday and the normal things that happen happened, cancelled flights, delays, and hassles. But, we’ve arrived safely and are enjoying friends and family.

Special kudos to the American Airlines employees – they couldn’t have been more helpful and professional in working through cancelations and rerouting.

The following is a screenshot of a Farecast prediction described in detail below


A few weeks ago I wrote an entry saying that Farecast looks like an interesting travel tool. Well, now, having used it for two trips, I can say without reservation, it sucks. A commenter on the earlier entry said as much…

“That’s pretty strong, why do you say it sucks?” some of you might ask. Here’s why: I’ve used it to watch two trips, one high volume route San Francisco to New York and one lower volume, San Francisco to Cincinnati. The results were identical. Since the SFO to CVG flight has the longer data trail, it’s more interesting. Here’s what I experienced:

• May 13, set initial price of $485 per ticket, Farecast prediction, fares will decrease an average of $150 to $335 per ticket.
• Week 1, fares go up $50 per ticket. Farecast prediction: wait, fares will decrease.
• Week 2, fares go up $90 more per ticket ($140 per ticket up now for those keeping score at home.) Farecast prediction, fares will decrease.
• Week 3, fares go down to $594 per ticket. Farecast prediction, fares will decrease.
• Week 4, fares go up to $720 per ticket. Farecast prediction, fares will decrease.
• Week 5, fares go up to $817 per ticket. Farecast prediction, fares will increase (really? Duh.)
• Week 6, fares go up to $1017 per ticket. That’s a net increase of $532 per ticket over published prices and a delta of $682 of the predicted fare of $335 on May 13. If that doesn’t constitute suckage on an airfare prediction web service, I don’t know what does.
• Of the 48 days of tracking fares, Farecast’s predictions were wrong 42 days and were right 6 days. Simply another dimension of suckage for the same service. A coin toss would have yielded substantially better results than the Farecast prediction service.

My only regret is not taking them up on their $9.95 insurance program that would make up the difference between the fare prediction and ticket price and booking at $1017 per ticket to collect the money. That would help their going out of business plan accelerate…It’s rare a service performs so badly in practice. I still like the RSS feeds keeping you informed of the air fare pricing situation. If they just did that and nuked the predictions, it would probably be ok.

Over a shorter time period, the SFO->LGA fares showed similar trends of prediction.

So, what did I do? I lost faith in Farecast by about the 10th day and started looking for better airfare. I booked the tickets at the beginning of June through Orbitz at $432 a piece going to an alternate airport, Columbus.

If you use Farecast for information, great, but don’t trust their predictions for a single minute.