The Overheard Bin - BobCarriesOn

April 14, 2015May 29, 2015

5 sure signs you are stealing hotel soap

Let’s be honest. Stealing at hotels is widespread. Egregious examples include $60 resort fees, $100 breakfasts, and $1,500-plus junior suites. But putting aside the shortcomings of management, let’s look at a question many hotel guests struggle with: Can taking hotel soap be considered stealing?

Yes it can.

You are stealing hotel soap if:

While a housekeeper’s cart is left unattended in the hallway, you load the cart’s entire supply into an empty suitcase you have brought along just for that purpose.

Noticing that the housekeeper has left another guest’s door ajar while servicing the room, you claim to be that guest, say you just need to duck into the bathroom for a minute, and make off with any toiletries you find. You increase the severity of your crime if, confronted by the room’s bona fide occupants, you claim to be a reviewer for TripAdvisor.

You actually are a hotel reviewer, and while an assistant manager waits patiently on the balcony, hoping you won’t notice the ants crawling up the wall, you strip the bathroom of everything you can fit into your camera bag.

Discovering the same soap in the hotel gift shop, you slip it into your tote bag and walk out without paying because you can’t get over how much they are selling it for.

You are a professional burglar, and are ransacking the room anyway, and take the soap because it comes in an expensive looking wrapper that makes it ideal for re-gifting.

If you do plan to steal hotel soap, the world’s best hotels to steal it from are:

The Hotel Principe di Savoia Milano

Lowest room rate: $353
Soap brand: Acqua di Parma
Soap cost: $35/3.5 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 10
Also worth considering: Recently re-designed by Thierry Despont, the Principe Bar is opulent, and its liquor stock not particularly well guarded.

Burj Al Arab Jumeirah Hotel, Dubai

Lowest room rate: $1,767
Soap brand: Hermes
Soap cost: $16.99/3.5 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 104
Also worth considering: One of the hotel’s chauffer-driven guest Rolls Royces will blend into local traffic for a clean getaway.

Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace Budapest

Lowest room rate: $333
Soap brand: L’Occitane
Soap cost: $7/2.6 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 48
Also worth considering: Nespresso coffee machine will fit inconspicuously into all but smallest bags.

Oberoi Udaivilas, Udaipur, India

Lowest room rate: $321
Soap brand: Kama Ayurveda
Soap cost: $10/2.65 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 32
Also worth considering: Chandelier in the lobby is not vintage, but of high quality.

The Langham, Chicago

Lowest room rate: $490
Soap brand: Chua Spa Private Label
Soap cost: $10/3.5 oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 49
Also worth considering: Upgrade to the infinity suite and you’ll have the option of making off with the custom-painted grand piano.

The Peninsula Shanghai

Lowest room rate: $403
Soap brand: Oscar de la Renta
Soap cost: $12.90/3.5oz.
Number of bars needed to recoup room rate: 31
Also worth considering: Artwork on walls at Salon de Ming lounge should prove easy enough to remove.

Big Stock Photo

April 9, 2015April 14, 2015

Top six reasons to travel with the dead

If you hope to learn anything about the world, going solo is by far the best way to travel. But if you must travel with others, I recommend the dead. An incontrovertible fact is that when they travel the dead seldom:

Argue about the hour of departure.

Insist on a window seat

Pout if a restaurant is not of their choosing

Wear board shorts when visiting sacred shrines

Use a calculator app to split the check

Take selfies

Among the dead, writers are favorite traveling companions. Their words are already out there, allowing you to decide in advance if their sensibilities are compatible with your own. But their corporeal selves usually remain conveniently entombed, making them not overly concerned about such issues as who gets the room with the view.

For a ramble through France, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson makes an excellent traveling companion. His Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes, the story of a 12-day walk through southern France in 1878, is largely about the shortcomings of traveling in company. Although in his case the company is his donkey, Modestine, who, frustratingly for Stevenson, is in no more of a hurry to reach their destination than Odysseus had been to reach Ithaca.

The irony is that despite the abuse Stevenson heaps on Modestine for not being focused enough on their goal, Travels With a Donkey contains the declaration that almost more than any other has been used to define the essence of travel:

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

For journeys through the Arab World, there may be no better traveling companion than Freya Stark, although she usually went alone. A constant traveler and prolific writer, her words, even more than Stevenson’s, make you want to walk out the door:

“Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.”

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.”

“I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling?”

To really understand Stark, though, the kind of traveler she was, the kind of journeys she would want to take you on, it is necessary only to read these few lines from The Valleys of the Assassins, published in 1936:

“. . . the country seemed to be thick with relatives of people he had killed, and this was a serious drawback to his usefulness as a guide. . .”

A guide to a far stranger land, and possibly someone you should not travel with alive or dead, would be Hunter S. Thompson, whose Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might or might not serve as a traveling companion for a journey of your own. This one little scene should be enough to help you decide:

“There’s a big … machine in the sky, … some kind of electric snake … coming straight at us.”

“Shoot it,” said my attorney.

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to study its habits.”

If you should find yourself traveling with Thompson the most important thing to remember is:

Don’t post selfies.

April 2, 2015April 9, 2015

10 buildings most likely to baffle future archeologists

Some day, when archeologists and other scientists are pulling away the vines and trying to figure out the significance of some of the world’s most mysterious ancient buildings, here are the ten most likely to baffle them.

Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada

Future generations, perhaps informed by the alien race that first created the Egyptian pyramids and later returned to take credit for them, will think they understand what the Luxor Hotel building is: a sanctuary for people who are happy to go without sunlight for a thousand years. But they’ll be as mystified as the aliens as to how it ended up in Las Vegas.

Longaberger Headquarters Building, Newark, Ohio

Scientists will spend untold centuries looking in the wrong place, in what was once known as the U.S. state of New Jersey, in search of evidence of a rumored race of human giants — giants grown so large from protein shakes and energy bars that the earth could no longer sustain them. The scientists will believe they have discovered proof of the elusive beings’ existence, though, in a place once known as Ohio, when they find the almost fully intact remains of a seven-story high picnic basket.

Dog Bark Park Inn, Cottonwood, Idaho

Created as a bed and breakfast accommodation, and described by its chainsaw wielding builder as the World’s Biggest Beagle, the Dog Bark Park Inn may someday be pointed to as a dire warning from the past about the risks of genetically modified pet food.

The Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic

Originally nicknamed the Fred and Ginger House, this current Prague landmark building will look to the uninformed of future generations like a cross between an episode of the ancient classic “Dancing with the Stars” and the melted aftermath of a thermo-nuclear blast. Scholars will shake their heads knowingly, however, in recognition that all has been explained, when they discover that one of the designers was architect Frank Gehry.

Selfridges Department Store, Birmingham, England

This building will be a tough one for future explorers of the past, because not even contemporary observers can find a reasonable explanation for why the scale-covered urban British structure known as Selfridges looks like it does. However, immunologists working only from old photographs may someday suggest that it could have been a giant mutant virus, capable of luring an earlier, more primitive race with the questionable promise of reasonably priced consumer goods.

Agbar Tower, Barcelona, Spain

For most delvers into the mysteries of humankind’s past, what is now known as the Agbar Tower, or Torre Agbar, will be easily recognized, just as statues on Easter Island are today, as a boastfully oversize phallic symbol. Strengthening that assumption will be the discovery of ancient texts describing one of the 473-foot tower’s most striking features, its nocturnal illumination, unfortunately mistranslated as nocturnal emission.

Upside-Down House, Trassenheide, Germany

As all records may soon be archived on electronic databases, followed by several millennia of no electricity, future generations will be unclear as to how the previous epoch of human history ended. Upside-down houses similar to this one, located in a small German seaside resort town, should suggest, though, that it ended badly.

Fish-shaped building, Hyderabad, India

Everyone in times-to-come will easily recognize this four-story piscatorial contrivance as one of many failed attempts to escape earth aboard a spacecraft. Who its specific passengers were meant to be, however, will remain a mystery until someone, probably part of an Indian National Monuments cleaning crew, notices a barely legible inscription at the base of the craft, just behind the anal fin, reading, “So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish Food.”

Aldar headquarters, Abu Dhabi

Archeologists of the 31^st Century will certainly find themselves trying to unravel the mystery of what we know today as the Aldar Headquarters Building, in Abu Dhabi. And while they may be perplexed as to why an earlier society would have felt the need to mint a coin that measured 361-feet in diameter, some as yet unborn historian will easily make a name for him or herself by hypothesizing the oversize piece of change to be representative of the moment in history when pickpocketing ceased to be a viable career path.

The Gate of the Orient, Suzhou, China

Unless procreation, perhaps adjusting to a post-apocalyptic world, goes in a radical new direction over the coming millennia, people will no doubt still understand the meaning of “to get into someone’s pants.” What they won’t understand, as they contemplate the ruins of The Gate of the Orient building, in Suzhou, China, is why the pants had to be 990 feet tall.

May 16, 2014April 9, 2015

When everybody is a comedian, security slows at Las Vegas Airport

Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport has announced it may have to review the effectiveness of the eight new security videos it introduced this week.

The airport security videos, featuring Las Vegas entertainers, some of whom people may have heard of, are meant to show the airport’s many inexperienced travelers how to get through security checkpoints in the shortest time possible.

“Unfortunately, the videos seem to be projecting the wrong message,” said Bob Payne, McCarran’s Assistant Director of Terminal Entertainment.

Payne said the airport security videos were released on Tuesday, highlighting tips by comedians Louie Anderson, Carrot Top, Murray SawChuck, the Blue Man Group, Terry Fator, the cast from “Raiding the Rock Vault,” and a father and son Mafia act, only one of which was carrying a machine gun in his violin case.

“Ever since then,” Payne said, “the airport security lines have slowed dramatically, as passengers insist on talking to TSA agents using hand-puppets, trying to make 5 oz. bottles magically shrink, and attempting to throw their voice so it sounds like people are crying for help from inside the x-ray machine.”

Payne said that just one among many security issues stemming from the videos has been that so many passengers are arriving at the checkpoints dressed from head to toe in blue body paint that the TSA agents, who do have loved ones to go home to, are hesitant to do anywhere near the number of pat-downs they normally would.

“Worst of all,” Payne said, “is that everybody thinks they are a comedian, which wouldn’t be so bad, except that far too many people, as they go through the x-ray machines, are starting their routine with, ‘This one will kill you.’ And when we hear the word kill we have procedures we have to follow, which just slows everything down that much more.”

May 7, 2014July 17, 2015

Former cannibals trying to develop tourism misunderstand “finger food”

An indigenous tribe once known for cannibalism but now trying to join the global mainstream by developing its own tourism product apologized today to a group of travel bloggers for a misunderstanding over the phrase “finger food.”

“They had no intention of causing mental anguish among their guests, and certainly had no idea that something as common in their culture as skewered digits would create such a culinary outcry, ” said a tribe spokesman, adding that according to tribal custom giving somebody the finger is considered a great honor.

The travel bloggers, who were on a press trip, and thus assumed to be less willing than most to criticize a free meal, said that despite their efforts to overcome a feeling of uneasiness, concerns had been growing ever since they received a press kit in which the tribe’s new marketing slogan was revealed to be “Host ‘Em, Toast ‘Em, Roast ‘Em.”

“Still, some of us were already tweeting ‘Finger-licking good,’ when we realized that among the yams, taro, and crayfish there actually were fingers,” said one of the bloggers, Bob Payne, of BobCarriesOn.com, the site that has been offering accurate travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth rock. “It was almost as disgusting as some of the stuff you see on “The Food Network.”

“Well intentioned or not, commenting on the meal would have been too much, even for an online audience,” said Payne. “And of course we had no choice but to cancel the tribe’s dinner offer, which they said would feature “Foot-longs.”

There has been no word on where the finger food originated. But late yesterday it was reported that a tribe in a neighboring village were gathering weapons and flooding the local beauty saloons with requests for face paint, as if in preparation for war.

May 1, 2014May 26, 2015

The most worthwhile souvenir? Old license plates.

While it is true that I own the world’s largest private collection of McDonald’s placemats in foreign languages, I’ve always felt that the only souvenirs worth collecting are conversations with strangers.

More than anything else you can bring back from a journey, conversations in far places help answer the two questions every traveler should ask: How are the people here different from me? How are they the same? When you know the answers, you have begun to help diminish the lack of understanding that is the source of much of the trouble in the world, and perhaps even unlock the mystery of why knock-knock jokes are nearly universal.

I now realize, however, that there is one more souvenir that can prove worthwhile to many returned travelers: the old license plate.

Perhaps with a dent or two in the metal, perhaps with a bit of rust, old license plates are available in the markets of many nations. Seldom costing more than five or ten dollars, and often thrown in for free if you buy a hand-decorated bong pipe or a life-size wooden carving of a horse, they make interesting keepsakes to hang on the wall above a garage or basement workbench in place of the auto parts calendar, featuring scantily clad “sales reps,” that does not seem as appropriate as it once did.

An old license plate’s value, though, goes far beyond it’s worth as an unusual keepsake. For many Americans, what they are really good for is avoiding parking tickets.

In 19 of the U.S. states, license plates are required only on the rear. In those states, you can put whatever you want on the front. Which is why when I lived in Massachusetts my front plate was from Aruba, and now that I live in Arizona it is from the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Originally, I put on the Aruba plate just for the novelty value. But then, after driving down to New York for a few days, I got a parking ticket that I discovered, to my delight, listed the Aruba plate, but made no mention of the Massachusetts one.

I’d parked in front of a church on East 88^th Street (who knew that the fines were double in front of churches?), and had apparently wedged in so tightly that the meter maid couldn’t read the rear plate. So, perhaps in a hurry, perhaps to get to church, she just wrote the ticket on the front plate.

I would have put the experience down to the happy outcome of a freak occurrence, except that a few months later, in Boston, the same thing happened again. I suspected I was on to something, and, over the next few years, by parking as close as possible to the bumper of the car behind me, I saved myself probably a half dozen parking fines.

After a hiatus of a dozen years, from living in New York, which requires plates on the front and back, I recently moved to Arizona, which only makes you have the one in the rear. So when I was in the Virgin Islands a few months ago, while my companions were buying “Don’t bother, I’m not drunk yet – St. Thomas” tee-shirts, I purchased a used license plate that reads: “U.S. Virgin Islands — America’s Caribbean.”

And long after my companions have stopped wondering whatever possessed them to buy their souvenir, I will remember, every time I rip up a ticket and scatter it to the winds, exactly why I came home with mine.

I do admit that attempting to avoid tickets in this manner can have certain drawbacks.

In Arizona, I have noticed, for instance, that every so often, when I back in tight to the car behind me, and then return from whatever errand I have been running, my rear bumper has been banged up by dents that appear to be about the size of the heel of a cowboy boot.

And once, when I still had my Aruba plate, and was returning to Boston from a weekend in Toronto, U.S. Immigrations detained me for hours while they questioned me, in great detail, about what exactly my connection was with Aruba.

Those drawback, though? Let me tell you, they can result in some very collectible conversations with strangers.