Well, not really. It’s unlikely the Mercedes Benz marque will disappear from the streets anytime soon. But Daimler AG, maker of Mercedes, Smart Car and Freightliner and Western Star trucks isn’t taking chances. The German-based company recently purchased GlobeSherpa, a company that built the ticket-purchasing app for Tri-Met, Portland’s bus and light-rail operator. Daimler folded GlobeSherpa into Moovel, its company that also develops related apps for public transportation providers. Blame it on urban millennials, who aren’t buying cars like they’re supposed to.
Category: Places
Places I remember
How To Pack – without regret
During my recently ended traveling-for-work days I made many passages through the Charles M. Schulz – Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa. Alaska/Horizon Airlines offers once-a-day flights to Seattle, Portland, Orange County, San Diego and twice a day to Los Angeles. Now that I no longer need to go to Scottsdale Arizona, American Airlines is soon to begin service to Phoenix.
Alaska operates prop aircraft from Santa Rosa. A high percentage of travelers passing through security are clueless about the procedure. That’s not a problem, though. With six flights a day, a couple more in summer, and 76 passengers per flight, there’s not much anxiety and TSA people are very patient and accommodating. There is also a 100% chance your checked luggage will be inspected.
Condé Nast recently published a baggage handler’s tips for improving the chances of your belongings arriving in the same condition as when you packed them.
And just for fun: a musician’s paean to the “Worst Airline Ever.”
Organic Agriculture Report
California recently joined Oregon, Washington, Colorado and other states by making legal the sale and use of marijuana for no purported medical reasons. Whether this will eliminate the surreptitious growers illegally using private and public land and who poison the ground and water with chemicals and trash and divert water from streams in the midst of serious drought… well, we’ll see.
The End of Hawaiian Sugar
Tourists visiting Maui can no longer ooh and aah at the spectacular flames – and choking smoke – from burning sugar cane after the harvest. The last shipment of sugar from Hawaii was recently unloaded at the C & H (California & Hawaiian) plant in the tiny town of Crockett, northeast of San Francisco. After 145 years – one year less than Ringling Brothers Circus – the sugar industry is no more in Hawaii. Government subsidies and cheap labor have made sugar from Florida the winner in the marketplace.
The Notorious Pink Lady of Malibu Canyon
Fed up with the graffiti despoiling the area around the Malibu Canyon tunnel, Lynne Westmore Bloom decided to do something about it. During the night she suspended herself with ropes down the rocks above the tunnel’s entrance. She went to work to chipping away at the defacement. Finally, after several months of nocturnal labor removing graffiti and clearing out scraggly brush, in one night, October 1966, using ordinary house paint, she created her gift to Los Angeles commuters: a sixty-foot-tall naked lady.
MLK and AZ and the NFL
After four unsuccessful election attempts, Evan Mecham took office as Governor of Arizona in 1987. His first official act was to rescind his predecessor’s executive order creating the Martin Luther King Jr holiday in the state.