roll for initiative

Just a quick little reaction shot to the most recent WayLay comic.

An alternative theory:  Both the woman and the dog survived the fall, but the woman was knocked unconscious.  The dog was probably freaking and was trying to get out of the barrel.

But in any case, if things did go down like Ms. Lay suggests, I’d still have to excuse the dog.  In his defense, he wasn’t a consenting passenger on the trip over the falls.
See, I’m a dog owner.  I love my dogs.  One thing I’ve learned is that the human-dog relationship is one based on trust and respect.  We have a tight little mini-pack going, my dogs and I.  I give them food, water, attention, and the structure to make them happy.  They return that attention ten fold and give me companionship.  It’s a great trade off, but I don’t do things that puts them in mortal freakin’ danger.

Sorry “intrepid woman”, but if this story is actually true, you broke the human/dog contract when you put your dog in that situation.

Looks like I was a tad bit ahead of the time with the whole loyalty program thing for online travel sites (see original here). Expedia.com is rolling out a new loyalty program, effusively called the “Thank You Network“.

Okay, so they’ve probably been working on this thing for a year or so … so chances are they weren’t wholly influenced by my insightful if not-quite-ahead-of-its-time ramblings.
In any case, the pretty basic system: you earn one ThankYou point for every dollar you spend on Expedia. You then redeem points for “stuff”.

This illustrative chart walks you through the complexities of the system:

Unfortunately, it’s not immediately clear how this stacks up to other miles or awards programs; I took a quick look over the Thank You Network site, but did not find a list of how many points it takes to book a national or international flight.

But … I wonder if you can get points from the Thank You Network AND from the airline on which you’ve booked your flight. In fact, if you use a mileage credit card to book your travel on Expedia on an airline … you could potentially get credited for the trip on 3 different rewards system! Hmmm this might be worth looking into.