Lots of stuff to highlight today. We ran a little behind today as TBB managed to escape the home office/Panera bread office to see two movies back to back, “Jack Reacher” with Tom Cruise and “The Guilt Trip” with Barbra Streizand and Seth Rogen, courtesy of gofobo.com. Both two thumbs up! I feel guilty for liking Tom Cruise’s movie now, it has lots and lots of shooting. Barbra has a phenomenal performance! I still prefer Seth’s “high” roles! And then I watched my soccer team finish the season with another win for a 5-3 record and joined them at TGI Fridays for some drinks!
READER QUESTION: “Do you think about teachers differently after Newtown?”
YES! I wish we supported them and paid them more than greedy investment bankers, hedge fund managers and traders (ok, my main point is that the latter group are wildly overpaid and teachers are way underpaid!!). The memory of the heroine teacher giving up her life to protect her students should NEVER be forgotten. Loyalty Traveler wrote a beautiful post yesterday “I gave a teacher a hug today“, thanks Ric!
Ok, one more on the guns debate and then we will get on with our show! There is something profoundly wrong how the US Handles Guns, here is proof!
BEST OF
New policy from AMEX – No More than 4 AMEX issued credit cards by Paddy in the Big Apple.
This appears to be a new AMEX policy. It is issued CREDIT cards and not CHARGE cards! The noose is tightening slowly…
Loyalty Lobby is doing some excellent summaries of the main hotel loyalty programs:
Hyatt Gold Passport
Hilton HHonors
I guess the rest will follow, keep an eye for them!
Frequent Miler wrote “5x dangers and headaches“. Some really good points. Moderation people! Get your own system down & stick to it. You do NOT have to drive around town to find these cards or juggle a dozen prepaid cards, there are other a LOT more important things in life. And as always, never EVER break the law of course! If you got black listed by a bank or through a Financial Review…you probably deserved it:-)
Cranky Flier wonders if the Math Add up on American’s Fare Choice Bundles It is a pretty solid analysis of the new fare structure and confirms my original thinking: Basic and innovative idea in the right direction, perhaps a bit rushed out too quickly and everything will be judged on implementation of it (and first signs are certainly NOT positive!). We shall see…
A Pro’s Guide to Sleeping At The Airport [Infographic] This is a great infographic…just in case you are in an airport where you can not burn some points or cut off due to a snowstorm or something.
NOT SO BEST OF
The Points Guy ranks the top AMEX travel credit cards. 35 credit card app links, new record, our eye sockets have just been destroyed! And not even one that is worthy to apply at this time as they almost all have had higher bonuses in the past and AMEX will likely (hopefully) continue its short term promos with increased bonuses! Out of all of them the no annual fee Hilton AMEX card always made sense to us! We have had it for years and been Hilton Gold for years. No reason to reach for Diamond status, always in our own opinion of course. And why is the Jet Blue card even mentioned here, blah!
Points, Miles & Martinis wrote “AMEX Keeps Sending me 100k Business Platinum Offers“. Naturally, we were intrigued. Is PMM related to MrPickles who also gets many of the same offers? Anyway, interesting post and then, BANG, we get blindsided by Chase links for BA, Ink Bold, and Ink Plus, seriously??
Milevalue writes about how you can fly on Virgin Atlantic Upper Class for 35k Really? Why don’t you have the confiscatory fuel surcharges on the headline too? Commenter ASDF said “Say no to programs that impose fuel surcharges. No way I’m forking over all that money for an award flight.”
And we so agree and encourage every one to STOP flying airlines that charge award fuel surcharges, they SUCK!! And two nice cc app links to the Barclay’s Virgin America Visa are conveniently served (20k signing bonus, annual fee not waived…Wow, really?) near the end of the post. In addition, you can transfer American Express Membership Rewards points at a 2:1 rate. In other words, avoid this crap! Thank you for the research. After all that effort this is NOT how to Recap this: “People with Virgin America miles have a new cheapest way to get into Upper Class. If you don’t have any miles, consider the Virgin America credit card or a Membership Rewards transfer.”
ODDZ & ENDZ
An interesting article about yet another social network, Nextdoor. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” Interesting idea that this can introduce you to the people in your neighborhood. There are two hilarious parargraphs in this article:
I live in a 75-unit apartment building. I know only two of my neighbors by name. The woman across the hall (who once invited me over for a delicious Rosh Hashanah dinner) seems like a lovely person, and she returned my folding chairs promptly after she borrowed them. But then there’s this other dude.
This guy—let’s call him Larry—managed to invite himself into my apartment shortly after I moved in, when I was surrounded by open boxes and crumpled packing tape. Within minutes, he’d begun bragging to me about how he cheats on his wife. Since then, he has knocked on my door and 1) asked if I wanted to buy some cocaine, 2) insisted that he wanted to hire a prostitute for me—his treat, and 3) suggested we film some porn in my apartment, with him behind the camera and me as the star. I declined these offers.
No comment, only LOLs!
Quartz: Our Favorite Charts of 2012 Pretty good big picture economic stuff here, in case you are interested.
Or perhaps you are interested in the topic of oral sex? Here is a hilarious interview with Amsterdam’s Most Unusual Teacher. She gives a workshop in giving oral sex to men. She responds to questions such as ” Do you give homework?” or “Have there been any injuries yet, like choking or gagging?” or my favorite question….”Can you spot talent in the class?” Fantastic find! If you are offended you are definitely reading the wrong blog:-)
THE END
You can find me as gpapadop in FlyerTalk and Milepoint.
I have no idea how the data was gathered for that chart, but I find it very hard to believe that there is 90 guns owned in the USA when just about every heavily populated urban city either:
A) bans owning a gun
B) banned it until the Supreme Court Decision a few years ago
C) has insanely restrictive gun laws (i.e. NYC)
Considering it’s almost impossible to legally own a gun in NYC, DC, Chicago etc. I don’t see how there can be around 280 million guns in the US. There aren’t enough people in the loose-gun-law south to make up that difference
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Lucky’s post will make your blog tomorrow?
Speaking of all the hyping… I have issues with bloggers highlighting ‘cheap’ awards. Many people think they are referring to ’roundtrip’ awards, when in fact they’re talking about one-way awards. I hated it when the airlines did this. It’s misleading. I understand the ‘headline’ is meant to grab the readers, and I understand many readers ooh and ahh over the concept.
I do expect bloggers to be more upfront about this. Many ‘in the know’ understand this concept; but I suspect new readers don’t.
dhammer53
Actually there’s about 300 million guns in the U.S (with roughly 330 million people). That’s because certain people own multiples (I have 7 for example (and I live in a city), and no, none of them are “assault weapons”). We are indeed a very heavily armed populace.
@ Anonymous & J. Trebuchet:
Rasheed Wallace, NBA player, used to say this “Ball Don’t Lie”. Same with the stats on the abundance of guns in this country. We have a problem that we MUST deal with it decisively. There is a pretty good article out there how Australia managed to attach this problem. I am going to stop talking about this issue, so different from the main topic of my blog!
@dhammer53. I hear your point and I so agree!
@Anonymous 2: If the pics on twitter are any indication, it is a good assmuption;-)
Don’t worry. Everyone has become a gun control expert since Friday, so you might as well get in on the fun (and I’m not saying that as an attack on you, since you at least seem to do your homework). I just can’t wait to see what solutions we come up with in haste that probably will do nothing to address the actual issues that lead to these kind of events and the majority of gun crime.
Does anyone still operate under the belief that The Points Guy breaks news on deals or points out new angles or adds any value to the community? I certainly don’t. He’s basically a bunch of links + a few pages from Fodor’s.
@J. Trebuchet: I am afraid of the solutions coming too. I think we need to take our time and get this right. In the meantime, another Colorado shooting today…
@Traveler: Certainly not. But facts show he has the blog with the HIGHEST traffic and does a hell of a PR job! And now can afford to outsource lots of content out so…he can do more PR. TPG has become a big shooter.
George, please please pick a focus. I respect your opinions, but I don’t want your opinions on everything. Be a FF site, or be a gun control site, it doesn’t matter. Focus is the successful blogger’s friend. It develops and maintains a following and keeps you from getting distracted.
@Anonymous: Thanks for the comment! Good point about the focus. I think the gun control issue just came out of the blue, I just feel a bit strongly about it obviously and could not keep myself from writing something about it. These personal turns I take sometime may add some “real” feel to the whole blog, keeping it a little bit different than others? I will definitely keep the travel/miles/points/rants/praises/cutting edge links/life enhancements/addvalue/myownspinonstuff focus…that was suppposed to be a joke:-)
Can a wild variety blog that may go to any direction and highlight stuff that most readers have missed AND be (hopefully) funny sometimes…is that too NOT focused?
I get it, I get it…You had a great point actually…No more gun control stuff. But I did notice it brought some additional traffic by the way. Or maybe it was the cocaine and oral sex headlines, lol.
Thanks again.
@TravelBlogger Buzz — you can actually research traffic stats for the different blogs and you’ll see that The Points Guy doesn’t have the most traffic. View from the Wing does, followed by Lucky. But the Points Guy does have the most credit card links, probably makes the most money. Want to see something sort of sad? How little traffic the Frugal Travel Guy website gets.
I am glad that FTG doesn’t get the most traffic, he continually pimps out credit cards now and has become mundane like most of the points bloggers. Even Darius is running out of things to write about today was post 598686 on his Bora Bora trip report in which he was only in fp for 4 days….post 598686 was about a frog they saw on their way to breakfast and how darius explained to the frog how to earn points. He bought out Points Envy so now he doesn’t even really have to write that many articles anymore 4 a week? 1 trip report, 1 interview, 2 on random musings in the ft world and outsource one a week to points envy, oh wait the 2 on musings were where he pushes affiliate links.
Is there any reliable site with public information on website traffic numbers?? From experience, I thought it was TPG first by far, then MMS, then FTG/GL/OMAAT very close to each other. I may be way off…I think we can not reliably know…or can we??
>>>>>>>>>post 598686 was about a frog they saw on their way to breakfast and how darius explained to the frog how to earn points
Lol, you are killing me:-) Thet top bloggers run very lean and mean operations and are SCALING UP big time. One of the things they do is…outsource content and then hammer on what brings the dough (through SEO, mega PR & of course the precious aff cc links).
LOL. Did you actually count 35 links?
(Can’t believe I just discovered this).
Yes, it was 35 in total, give or take a few!
Oh man! I can’t be out done like that!
I am.Watching.You….you can click but can not hide, lol. For the record, MMS had 21 and held the record for some time:-)
I don’t think creditcards.com has that many on one page. :-/