No big deal. I mean, who among us hasn’t send a few obscene pictures to a corporate mascot? I often send dick-pics to the green M&M, 99-year-old Henry Kissinger frequently Tweets pics of his asshole to Mr. Clean, and I know for a fact that Golda Meir used to send open beaver shots to Mayor McCheese.
It is said of many men that they have some big balls. That is normally a figurative expression, but not in Tommy’s case.
True dat, but phrases like this don’t help: “legitimate resort fees.” There is no such thing.
It is not fare to lump these fees in with airline add-ons, because airline add-ons are actually for something, and if you don’t use that something, there’s no fee. You don’t pay baggage fees, for example, if you have no baggage.
Resort fees are not an add-on, but simply part of the room rate that they want to hide from you for one reason or another. You can’t avoid them they way you can avoid baggage fees. The hotels pretty much created the concept to hide the true cost of the room, and then turned it into a complete scam to get the top search results on places like Priceline and Booking.com.
Here’s the most radical scam I have seen personally:
I searched for a hotel room in a southern town, and I set the options for ranking from cheapest to most expensive. Normally I would choose the cheapest one that has a high score for customer satisfaction with a large number of votes. Miraculously, one of the highest-rated was only $39.95 a night. I figured that’s because it was off-season and they don’t want empty rooms.
I figured wrong.
They just listed that rate to get the top position in the search. When I went to pay, I found that my bill would be more than $200 per night. There’s forty bucks for the room, about twenty bucks for local taxes, and 150 bucks for resort fees.
I ended up staying down the road at a place that was honest about its prices. That place listed a base price twice as high as the scammers, but I ended up paying about half as much – and it’s actually a much nicer place.
By the way, I think they are probably hurting local governments as well as cheating their customers. Many localities place a sales tax on hotels. If the hotel charges me $190 for the room in an area with a 10% tax on hotels, I presume they have to collect $19 tax. If they charge me $40 plus a $150 resort fee, I’m guessing that they only collect $4. (But that’s just me guessing. Coming up with dodges like that used to be a part of my job, so I’m always suspicious.)
My girlfriend has zero tolerance for resort fees and goes full Karen on the poor clerks and assistant managers, insisting that the hotel reveal precisely what the fees are for, then says “OK, we don’t want any of that, so just charge us the base rate.” We have actually run into one honest business that agreed to that, but mostly they just offer some mealy-mouthed crap about how “it doesn’t work that way,” whereupon she forces them to admit out loud that it’s not really a “fee” of any kind, but just part of the base rate.
I don’t have the patience or inclination for such confrontational tactics, but she reminds me that by doing it in front of all the other customers, she’s educating the public to the scam. (I always point out that they would gladly trade that education for checking in ten minutes faster, which they would do if the person ahead of them was not complaining.)
SIDEBAR:
If you are out there and influence the policies of some company like Priceline, I would very much like you to sort by true cost instead of the posted rate. That’s easy to do. Your software already makes that calculation when we click on “choose,” so there is no excuse for your failure to offer that sorting option. The way it is now, I have to click on each individual hotel to get that number, then write it down with my low-tech BIC pen, then repeat as many times as I can until I get weary of the process.
“Oh, um, it’s literally, like, in my butt crack … He probably threw it away.”
“Speculations have been made in the local area that the McCrispy billboard will be replaced with one for Burger King’s flame-grilled Whopper, however, these claims have not been confirmed.”
He actually has a great sense of humor, and some pretty good comedy chops.
I’m not even sure Montreal exists. I’m thinking that Quebec is pulling off some kind of tax dodge.
Le Nouveau Duluth has 85 reviews, all of them giving five stars. “In the features, they do everything: they deliver, they do takeout, reservations, outdoor seating, buffet, private dinings, private parking, they have a full bar, wine and beer, waterfront, live music, jazz bar, it’s a drive-through, they’re on the beach, they have a playground.”
“Le Nouveau Duluth does not exist. The ease with which it rose to the top of a travel advice site is a clear example of how easy it is to create buzz with no substance behind it”
Here is the story of the comedian behind the prank.
He’s from Bethlehem.
So the two guys most closely associated with Easter are both from Bethlehem.
Is that tasteless? Let’s face it, the only truly appropriate obituary would have to be totally tasteless, like his famous creation.
In the first episode of I Love Lucy, somebody said “Why don’t we have a cigarette?” The result looked like this:
.
They took the cigarettes out of a wooden box and never identified the brand, so the show wasn’t cashing in on a product placement. It was just a general pro-smoking message! Worse yet, Lucille Ball was obviously very pregnant (in real life) while she puffed away. She wore robes and aprons to hide it because her character was not pregnant, but it was painfully obvious whenever her contour could be seen. (Note how in the scene above she was in a very odd outfit for wandering around the apartment.)
Later in the episode, there was an obvious product placement. Fred and Ricky each drank a bottle of Ruppert beer on camera, and when they set the bottles down, the labels were conveniently turned toward the camera and in focus.
He was playing hide-and-seek in Bangladesh, but was never found by his playmates. He was eventually discovered in Malaysia, more than 2,000 miles away. When it comes to hide-and-seek, he is the GOAT.
(He hid in a shipping container, fell asleep … etc. And, yes, it sounds like a plot to a contrived movie, but it was no fun for him. He was lucky to live through it after being in the container for a full week that left him starving and dehydrated.)
I guess they weren’t really evil demons. I mean, torturing him with a catchy pop song from a musical genius? Among the exploits of the Evil family, that would even embarrass Scott.
Real demons would have used this:
Volunteers, Like, Get High, Man – to Demonstrate Marijuana Impairment for Police
Bill banning sale of kangaroo parts introduced in Oregon
This will take its toll on the Scoopy Store, but my spotted owl buffalo wings are still available, and everything in them is genuine – meaning that the wings really come from spotted owls and the buffalo sauce is actually made from bison. Unlike the Native Americans, we do NOT use every part of the buffalo. We use only the flanks to make our sauce, then dump the gigantic, stinking carcass out of town, near the interstate.
Also – now available for take-out anywhere in the country except Oregon: my juicy Scoop Steaks. Trump had his shitty steaks and I have mine. The big difference is that every one of mine is guaranteed to be from an endangered species. The juiciest, by far, are the delicious manatee steaks. You used to have to come to my restaurants to eat ’em, but now we store ’em and ship ’em frozen, and pass the savings on to you. Well, that’s only half-true. The passing-on part is true, but there are no savings. In fact there are all sorts of extra costs associated with the freezing process, but if its any consolation we do pass those on to you.
This brings back unpleasant memories of the phrase heard by so many of us who have lived in New York. “OK, buddy, your shoes or your life!”
He claims that muggers took his shoes at three in the afternoon on one of Manhattan’s busiest corners (55th St and 5th Ave).
He presumably made his way home in his socks, assuming that they were not stolen.
That is some truly fucked-up fashion. She looks like something out of Hellraiser.
The woman on the left is the actress Maureen O’Sullivan, who played Jane in several Tarzan movies, and went on to a long career in the industry. The taller woman is a lesser-known actress named Ann Morriss, who was about 5’9″. The actresses were working on a 1938 film called Spring Madness.
Wadlow was about nine feel tall when he died at 22. He wore a size 37 shoe (some sources say 39), and weighed 481 pounds at his highest point. He is the tallest known human in history, and was still growing when he died.
“Johnson Comes Up Big, Dick Shrivels Late”
Now THAT is great sports writing.
I love this guy!
Somebody unearthed the fact that he performed in Brazil as a drag queen, and he denied it.
Needless to say, there’s always a paper trail!
He is absolutely the most entertaining story to come along in politics in years. It appears that the voters elected a completely fictional character!
In a way his lies are sheer genius, because he ran as a MAGA Republican in a Democratic-leaning district (Biden won it by seven points) and won with a brilliant strategy. Assured of all the MAGA votes, he siphoned off enough liberal votes by claiming to be a gay, Black, Jewish Latino who overcame a brain tumor, whose grandparents were holocaust survivors, and whose grandmother died on 9-11. He pretty much ticked off every concern of liberal identity politics, except that he somehow forgot to mention that he was the descendant of slaves. In essence he created a special kind of liberal Frankenstein monster – let’s call it an Al Frankenstein.
Did you see the guy Jimmy Kimmel hired to impersonate Santos? Uncanny resemblance: