Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

7 Signs the World’s Gone Mad

1) My 8-year-old daughter just got her third credit card solicitation from JP Morgan Chase. (The first one was when she was only 4.) Is it any wonder the banking industry is in such a mess? With this bailout, I guess my tax dollars are paying for the postage too.

2) People who are supposedly health nuts keep filling our landfills by wasting money on bottled water every day, even though a study published in Bloomberg found that “top-selling brands of bottled water contained a total of 38 pollutants including fertilizer, industrial chemicals, bacteria and the residue of drugs such as Tylenol.

3) On the heels of Michael Buckley’s article about branding Shangri-la, the country of Colombia has announced its new ad slogan, “Colombia is passion.” Is that the passion you feel when two of your are snorting coke together? Well, how else is it distinctly different from the passion you feel in any other Latin American country?

4) Belt-tightening corporations are trying to make couchsurfing part of the cost-cutting strategy. What, business travel isn’t unpleasant enough already?

5) Air France and Singapore Airlines prove that bad business practices do spread around the globe now: they are going to start charging extra for exit row seats on long-haul flights. (Can I slip that person $25 to switch seats halfway across the ocean? Or maybe three of us can pool our money and take one nap each?)

6) In this economy, some people are still apparently willing to pay $2,500 for a bottle of cognac.

7) US Airways actually comes out and admits that what it’s offering to customers sucks. Bigtime.