Travels to Key West: The good, the bad and the ugly

I had a lovely 5 day vacation over the Thanksgiving weekend in Key West, Florida.  For those unfamiliar, it is a relatively small coral island that is closer to Havana than Miami, at the end of the Florida Keys, and at the end of highway US1.  It's a lovely place that suffers from nice weather 10 months out of the year (the other 2 can be very hot and humid), has a great reef for snorkeling and diving, a lot of history, fantastic restaurants, and many museums and art galleries.  The local population is very diverse culturally and politically, and most seem to get along.  Their survival depends largely on the tourist industry.  There are cruise ships most days of the week, filling up the area of lower Duval Street and  tourist haunts such as Sloppy Joe's Bar, Ernest Hemingway's House, and the Southernmost Point in the continental US.  There are trolley tours, the famous Conch Train and any kind of tour you can imagine.

I tend to go there for the more quiet side of the island, as well as visiting the many friends I have made there over the years.  Deep sea fishing is awesome off the lower and middle Keys, with many boat captains offering competitive half and full day excursions.  There's a seaplane as well as a ferry that goes to the Dry Tortugas National Park, 70 miles west of Key West, with it's amazing 19th century era Fort Jefferson.

The bar scene us unsurpassed, with everything from the falling down wreck of my favorite Schooner Warf Bar at the Key West bight harbor to dive clip joints on lower Duval St. to more classy wine bars further from the

Well you get my drift, Key West is a tourist town, and with that you get to meet a lot of different types of travelers.  I've never cared much for the cruise ship passengers.  They are usually in town for 4~6 hours, and tend to push their way to the usual tourist traps, and end up having a crappy burger at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville restaurant and gift shop.  I avoid that part of town when the cruisies are in town, especially if a Disney boat and its stroller brigades take siege on the town.

This past weekend I noticed a lot of European travelers in town, mostly from Germany and France.  The lovely guesthouse where I was fortunate enough to be staying seemed to be largely occupied by folks from abroad.  The good here is that these tourists spend a lot of money.  They eat out, buy lots of stuff, like to party, and explore the place.  The bad is that Europeans are notoriously horrible tippers, when they bother to tip at all; this in an economy where waiters, bartenders, trolley drivers, and tour guides live largely off of tips.

Needless to say, workers in the tourist and food/drink business cringe when a group of Germans, British or French show up.  They know that on a $200 bill, they may get a $5 tip, if they get anything at all.

Occasionally I get the chance to play tourist guide and good Samaritan. While having breakfast on the front porch of the guesthouse where I was staying, I met a very nice young couple traveling from Japan.  They had a million questions, and I'm always happy to help as much as I can.  Unfortunately, the young lady spoke no English, and her husband spoke only a bit, so it took a lot of patience to answer questions, and get them where they wanted to go.  I ended up showing them around for about a half day, introducing them to Cuban coffee, a number of landmarks that are off the beaten tourist track, and finally put them on a Trolley Tour, while gently reminding them to tip generously.  I came back to my room later that day with a nice bottle of wine waiting me and a nice note thanking me for the nice day out.  This is the good part about going on vacation. 

I've seen a bit of the ugly over the years, with one incident that could only be classified as grand larceny.  A number of years ago, I was having a drink and some appetizers at a very nice restaurant near the cruise ship docks, and in came a very large group of foreign tourists, obviously from a boat.  They ran up a bill of over $500, and essentially skipped out on the bill.  They all started leaving a couple at a time, and finally the table emptied, and all that was on the table besides food scraps was a $100 bill.  The server was on the hook for the other $400 because she is responsible for the check.  Not only did she get stiffed on a tip, she had her wages docked.  Of course the boat people were long gone and scattered, so no chance of finding them

That incident may be an extreme one, but it is part of the ugly that goes on in a tourist town.  It's a tough place to live and work, and folks like me who go there a couple times a year for a vacation don't often get to see just how hard folks there work, often for not much money, in a very expensive town.  I've developed a great deal of admiration for those who stick it out, live and work there and operate business there, against very hard conditions at times.

Key West and the Florida Keys remain one of my favorite places in the world, and perhaps one day I'll retire there. There seem to be a lot of older folks who work part time, manage to enjoy the place and make ends meet.  Still living in a tourist town sure does have it's good, bad and ugly sides.  I'm only scratching the surface here, without even getting into the local politics, the bubba system, and ruthless backstabbing that goes on amongst certain tour companies.

I can recommend to anyone who likes the water, history, good food, relaxation, and truly friendly people in a tropical environment, while staying within the safety of the US.  Come on down, bring a smile, a good attitude, and you will have a ball.  I guarantee it!

UPDATE:  I leave you with local musician Michael McCloud performing Schooner Warf Bar Dog, taped by my friend Joe, a retired cameraman and videographer of "Parrots Eye Video":

Why the USPS is a modern dinosaur

How many of you have had the pleasure of going to a post office lately?  Actually, that is providing you can find one that is ever open when you might need to use it. 

I had a notice on my door today the post office attempted a delivery on a package I was expecting from amazon.com, that they shipped with "free shipping".  A signature was required.  The options were show up at my local post office, who's hours are 9am to 4pm Monday through Friday, or request redelivery when someone was at home between the hours of 9am until 6pm on the day of my choosing, Monday through Friday.  Well, for most of us 99% are working during those hours and it is neither practical for me to take off work for a day in hopes that the post office actually delivers the parcel or either be late or leave early so we can accommodate the bankers hours that the USPS employees enjoy.

I'm probably going to go to work late tomorrow just because I want this package before Thanksgiving, but I'll stipulate on any further orders that the USPS is not to be involved.

The post office is losing BILLIONS of dollars a year, while providing crappy service, complete with high government union salaries and pensions that have nothing to do with productivity.  This is a perfect example of how the government "businesses" fail us time and time again while private companies like FedEx and UPS provide great customer service, on time deliveries, even on cheaper ground service, and make it easy for pick-up and redelivery.  They both operate well into the black, while the USPS hellorages billions every year, with their diminishing first class mail business, bulk rate mail, and parcel post.  Bad customer service and limited office hours just sours the mix.  Postal employees are all high paid civil servants and under union contracts, we taxpayers still have to pay them even if they get laid off.

Other government services are just as bad.  Think how wonderful it is to deal with the Social Security Administration, or Medicare.  Think how wonderful all of our health care will be once ObamaCare kicks in with all it's sundry agencies, bureaucrats, and bean counters making decisions on what kind of medical care we will receive.  Will I, a MS sufferer be denied expensive drugs that my private insurer grudgingly allowed after a long protracted fight?  Or will it be, like President Obama said, "can't he just take a pill?"

The less the government is in my life the better off I am.

Third world diseases come back to America

Tuberculosis has been pretty much a thing of the past for most of us lucky to have been born in a modern first world country, in the later half of the 20th century, and I can not remember knowing a single person in the US of ever contracting the disease, however my 81 year old mother has tested positive on the skin test since she was a child.  In the third world countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America diseases such as TB, Chorea, and Typhoid are common place and bring about a high mortality rate in those countries.  The slums and squatters villages that often are in the most squalled conditions, and lack of modern medicine are a great contributor to the propagation of these horrible illnesses.

Well apparently, Occupy Atlanta, wants America to experience how bad that the 99% of the rest of the world have it.  Tuberculosis has broken out at the Atlanta Obamaville as this group of anarchists, communists, Marxists, hipsters, neo-Nazis, and other ragtag misfits continue to build their own squatters villages throughout the major American cities.  Is this the America that these people want us to become?  Or is this the one of the unintended consequences that result from dropping out of civil society and living like an animal within one of the richest countries ever to exist?

I've got to wonder how many of these stinky hippies have ever witnessed up close and personal real poverty and suffering?  How many have ever wondered where their next meal was coming from, or wondered where they could find a corner to sleep safely at night?  I'm willing to guess, apart from a few Marxist and apologist college professors, and hypocritical 1%ers like Michael Moore, have ever left the safety of their home country, where it is safe to protest against whatever they please. 

I personally have seen some of the worst living conditions in the world while traveling in third world countries, in many cases where their countries leaders live in luxury and talk in platitudes about how they love their people.  It is not a pretty picture.  We don't live in a "democracy" that the Occupiers demand, we live in a democratic republic where we elect our representatives in local, state, and national politics.  A true democracy means anarchy, and it has been a failure everywhere it has been tried.  The last place that gave lip service to this was Democratic Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the late1970's and 80's.

Might I suggest to the hippies who are occupying pieces of cities, going on criminal rampages, and spreading diseases long dormant in our civil society, to go join the Peace Corps, spend time in the Central African Republic, Bangladesh, and Honduras actually helping alleviate horrible diseases like TB, rather than spreading them back to the first world. 

The 99% verses the 1%

Class warfare is an ugly thing, especially when it is used in a country that is as bless as the USA.  Yes we have the very rich, and most have done something or created something to get there.  They didn't steal it from the rest if us.  Take Fred Smith as an example.  He certainly didn't come from poverty, but took an idea that his Yale professor said was not practical and gave him a C, and turned into one of the most successful American companies ever, FedEx.  Yes, these class warriors at the occupy (name your city here) want to take all his money because he is a greedy capitalist who steals money from the workers.  This meme goes right back to the Communist Manifesto of the mid 1800's.  Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, all leftist ideologies have failed everywhere they have been tried.  Fred Smith made nobody poor, but has made many people besides himself very wealthy.  I'm one who gets a nice salary, and though the benefits have shrunk over the years, I'm better off than many.

So here we are again with this ragtag of misfits, anarchists, communists, socialists, Nazis, fascists and just stinky slackers who don't know how a shower works, occupying parks and squares around the country to pass on the message, that America Sucks.  It's the 60's all over again.  President Obama is with them.  Apparently he thinks we all suck too, in his attempts to take away wealth from job creators, redistribute to unions and cronies has made the economy weaker, hindered growth in private business growth and driven more job off shore.

One thing I appreciate about living in the USA, is that we can let these Occupy idiots have there say, and though the mainstream media tries to contrast them favorably to the Tea Party, anyone with a brain can see who these people are, if they just don't take Diane Sawyer's take on it.

So let's talk about a few countries that the lefties really love.

Cuba - When was there last free election?  How good is their health care for average Cubans. Can we bring in anyone other than Ray Suarez from PBS to fawn all over CastroCare?

China - Communist?  Please, that is so Mao era.  They are fascist where they use private industry to bring money to the state.  You have the right to make money as long as you don't tread on a PLA company that is your competition.  There are no civil liberties, and no other party permitted than the CPPRC

Vietnam - Ditto

Laos - 4th world is being  kind

North Korea - The DPRK has a GDP that is smaller than Scranton, and that says a lot.  It is hell on earth, when the people just across the border in the ROK have one of the highest living standards in Asia.

So slackers, misfits, anarchists and communists at the Occupy demonstrations, have fun.  The rest of us have jobs, and are at least looking for them.

I've personally been around some real poverty, particularly in the Philippines.  There is a huge difference between the rich and the poor, and most of the rich have had this money passed down for generations.  They own land and businesses, and just throw scraps to the poor.  However, they build shopping malls, sports centers, and movie theaters that employ a lot of people.  I'm not a fan of the Ayala clan or even worse Imelda Marcos and her awful children (all who have government positions!) or a leach like Lucio Tan.  They all have a  lot of sins to atone for but, who am I to judge?  Still even these people produce jobs.

So, how many jobs has Obama produced in the private sector?  I'll wait with baited breath for your response,

America will survive Obama, at least if we can convince enough Americans that he needs to have a nice retirement to a 19th hole somewhere else in 2012.

Update:  Every legal US citizen is in the 1% compared to the rest of the world.  Where else can you be below the poverty line, own a car, have cable TV, and maybe even own a decent home?   Hey Occupy Wall Street crowd, try selling your message to people in Zimbabwe, Sudan, or Chad and see some real poverty.

Was Delta Airlines just playing with us?

I posted back in July that the Essential Air Service program was out of date, needed to be repealed, and cost the tax payers millions of dollars.  Delta Airlines announced that they would end service to many small cities and towns previously served. (mostly run by Northwest Airlines before the acquisition). Just out of curiosity I checked Delta's website recently and noticed that only a few of these towns have been dropped and several have picked up regional jet service who only had turboprop service previously. 

So the question is, was Delta just playing the people in these small towns to lobby their congress-critters to pass the EAS bill to keep the pork rolling in to places that can't afford commercial air service, and want the rest of us to pay for it?

Remembering September 11th, 2001 While Abroad

I happened to be a long way from my home in Memphis on 9/11/2001.  I was currently on assignment in Lisbon, Portugal.  It was mid afternoon there when the attack happened, and was really only covered at the time on TV by CNN International.There was no G4 network to send me live video, but I had dozens of text messages telling me to turn on the TV.  I saw the attack on the second tower, and the subsequent collapse of the towers,  My first feeling was shock.  Once I got a little more news, I got angry, and once I found out who was responsible I wanted to go get the bastards (We Scots like to do that), although I was too old and had a disability that would prevent me from that. 

Once over the initial shock, I started reading the local press that happened to have an English edition, and RDP English broadcast for foreigners. It was pretty much stock NBC footage.  A lot of the comments in the local press disturbed me greatly.  I don't speak Portuguese well, but I could understand that "America deserves it", and "Those arrogant bastards have it coming".  Remember these are our "friends".  I didn't see the solidarity that the MSM portrayed here in the US about the attack on our territory.  Most was "what you got what you deserved".

A few days later I was in Spain, and had pretty much the same reaction.  Platitudes from the government abounded , but the average person just shrugged his shoulder and said we had it coming.  Spain learned the hard way, about jihadist Islam a few years later when Al-Qaeda attacked a railway station in Madrid.

I haven't been back to western Europe since 2002, and plan no trips there in the near future.  They are no longer our friends and allies, with the exception of the United Kingdom, but with another 4 years of Barack Obama that may also change.

I have been to Eastern Europe, and specifically Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.  Folks there have just the opposite view from our traditional allies.  The fear not only a revived Russia and seek out our protection, and fear Islamist's in nearby countries, and the havoc they will bring once civil unrest breaks out there.  In the Asian countries I've visited, I've had mixed opinions on the 9-11 attacks that range from almost universal horror and shock in the Philippines to celebrations in Indonesia and Malaysia.  Our "friends" the South Koreans, who we protect from the tender mercies of Dear Leader, are pretty blase, and consider it an American problem that doesn't affect them. 

This gets me back to the original topic.  We all will mourn the loss of over 3000 Americans just doing their job when attacked by Muslim jihadis 10 years ago, but to think that the world stood with us is a myth, especially our so called NATO allies.

World opinion should never matter when it comes to American national security,  We need to do whatever it takes to keep out country secure, within the laws and constitutional authority, and the UN and "world community" be damned.

As we remember the attacks on 9-11, please keep in mind that this was an unprovoked attack on American territory by zealots who care nothing about human life, and want to impose a global Islamist caliphate, putting the world under the totalitarian 7th century legal and religious code of Sharia law..  A tragedy is when a parent loses a young child, or a young person contracts a fatal disease in their prime of life.  These events were not a "tragedy", they were brutal acts of war.

We need to get back to America First.  Our national survival depends upon containing Islamist imperialism, Chinese expansionism,  Iranian quest to control the middle east.

Update: I should mention that our only real friend in the middle east is Israel, and "our friends the Egyptians" are busy burning down their embassy during this Arab Spring. 

Glen Campbell diagnosed with Alzheimer's

I was saddened to find out that one of the musicians I grew up with has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.  Glen Campbell was a well on our TV weekly in the late 60's and early 70's in my parents home, and had a string of hit songs and albums.  And he proved himself a horribly awful actor in the otherwise great movie, True Grit.  But his beginnings were more as a session guitarist in the Los Angeles area, recording with such luminaries as Elvis Presley, The Beach Boys, Johnny Cash and Leon Russell.  He had a bit of a brush with the law a few years ago, but many suspect if was related to early onset Alzheimer's. 

Well, Glen has recorded his final album and it is a gem, and is going on a farewell tour, that includes his adult children.  His short term memory isn't good but he is still a great singer and guitar player, as these videos from his new album demonstrate.

Glen and is wife recently talked about his ordeal, and it is obvious to this casual observer that he has all the classic symptoms of the disease.  He remembers everything that happened 40 years ago, but can't remember where he is going on his upcoming farewell tour.

So here is to you Mr. Campbell.  Godspeed on your final journey, and make your last tour your best!