Airline Manager Game On Facebook

Many of you loyal TransGriot readers know that I'm on Twitter and Facebook, and yes you can find me on both social networking sites.

Facebook does have some cool games and apps that are addicting. Every now and then my homegirl Melinda challenges me to a game that tests your geography knowledge.

The first time I played it I busted her high score. She has subsequently beaten that high score I posted and I haven't gone back to it yet.

My friend Chandler introduced me to a Facebook game that grabbed my interest. It's turning into a lot of fun and somewhat of a mini labor of love called Airline Manager.

Your challenge is to take the one airplane they start you off with (a Boeing 737-800) some start up capital and build an airline. You select the routes it flies, make the ad buys, employment payroll decisions, purchase fuel and investing in the stock in the other virtual air carriers in the game.

You also have all the drama of labor unrest, random events like bird strikes, potential fines, volatile fuel prices, C-checks and all the other joys and pains real life airline execs grapple with including the possibility of a crash.

Of course this appeals to the airline junkie in me, so I have been busy in between posts, work and speech writing building up TransTexas Airlines.

Of course you know I have my virtual airline hub in Houston, and I'm having fun recalling the 14 years of accumulated airline knowledge and making all the decisions that can make or break an airline.

Some of my old CAL co-workers are playing this game as well and I've invested in their airlines and Chandler's Happy Nappy Airlines.

Over time you want to build your airline into a powerhouse that gets cargo runs and make money so that you can buy bigger airplanes. You also get passenger bonuses that you can spend on items like 100,000 pounds of fuel, et cetera.

It's also real time based in terms of the flights. For example if you have a plane on the Houston-Nashville fight it actually takes 4 hours to complete a roundtrip. The Houston-London takes 16 hours. So you learn early you want a mix of short hauls and long routes that keep the cash flowing.

And just like with a real airline, your virtual planes can't make you any virtual cash if they're sitting on the ground.

Well, now that I'm hooked on the game, we'll see if I can build TransTexas Airlines into a powerhouse or bankrupt it. I was at CAL long enough to see it done both way, and have a head start in avoiding the mistakes that lead to bankruptcy.

But we'll see.

The Christmas Assembly

Every time I hear the song Angels We Have Heard On High during the holidays, I start chuckling to myself and my mind drifts back to a Christmas assembly during my junior year of high school.

It was a JJ tradition to have the band and choir perform a Christmas concert just before we departed the school for winter break. The Mattel electronic football games were the ultra hot toy at the time and some of my friends already had them. Although I didn't know it at the time, I'd be getting one of my own in a few days. Mine was wrapped under the tree along with the Mattel electronic basketball for my brother. (We failed to find the hiding place in the house for our Christmas gifts that year)

My high school served breakfast in the morning, so we congregated inside the cafeteria before school started, especially during the winter months. (yes, Houston has winter weather)

That morning I'd been playing a game with James McCulloch. He was beating me badly before the opening school bell put a premature end to the electronic butt whipping he was administering.

That assembly happened after we got out of homeroom around second period, so as we were filing into the school auditorium we bumped into each other and grabbed seats together in the back.

The concert was turning out to be a long one, so James whips out his game and challenges me to play. He thought he was going to repeat the butt kicking he administered earlier that morning, but I had a new trick for him and decided to play ball control instead of the aggressive pass-happy style I normally employed.


The game makes loud noises when you score either a touchdown or a field goal and a double beep noise at the end of the half or the game. So in order to not be detected and have the game confiscated we used the cover of the concert to play.

We start playing, this is a tight game and so far so good. We're being careful to make sure that much of our game playing coincides with either the choir or band performances. The band is playing loud enough during their segments where no one more than five rows away from us suspects what we're up to. We're also benefitting from the fact that the auditorium is dark except for the stage lights and the couple sitting next to us is more concerned about kissing each other (no mistletoe required) rather than being annoyed about our titanic electronic football battle.

It's in the fourth quarter of the game and we're tied. I decide to try to eat up the entire quarter while scoring the touchdown that would win the game for me. So as I'm concentrating on the game the choir starts singing Angels We Have Heard On High.

I'm so focused on killing the clock and timing my drive so that I score with no time left that I'm not noticing that Mr. Addison (the then choir director) is directing the choir to sing the song softly at a low volume. Just as the choir gets to the 'Gloria' part of the song, I score and the double beep sound reverberates over the entire auditorium.

I look up and see our principal Mr. Pace and the assistant principals Mr. Henry and Ms. Broussard craning their necks from the front row along with several teachers trying to ascertain where the noise came from. They'd confiscated a bunch of them over the last two months and knew exactly what that sound was. They also knew at that moment some electronic shenanigans were going on somewhere in the auditorium. I see to my horror Mr. Henry get up from his seat with a not too pleasant expression on his face to begin his search and confiscate mission.

Fortunately for us when I scored the game was over. I quickly handed James his game with a satisfied smirk on my face as he put it away in his jacket pocket before Mr. Henry reached our section of the auditorium a few moments later. We were also fortunate we weren't ratted out by our fellow Falcons, otherwise we would have been spending a few minutes in the Principal's office.

But hey, I beat him. And James, if you're reading this, if you still have that game I hereby challenge you to a rematch at our reunion in 2010.

Domino!

One of the things I miss about home is sitting down with a group of my friends and playing dominos.

Dominos is as much a part of African-American culture in Texas as strawberry soda, barbecue, football, and Juneteenth. I first learned how to play the game watching the seniors in my old Sunnyside area barbershop. They would be there for hours even after they'd gotten their hair cut playing and talking trash to each other.

My barber Charlene Washington taught me how to play. I wasn't in a hurry to go home after she cut my hair one hot summer afternoon and she needed a partner to help her whip up on some trash-talking old men. Once I figured out the rules and strategies involved after a while I became as lethal as she was.

The basics are that you play to 150 or 250 points and can play with up to 4 people.

The game starts after the dominos are shuffled and all players select seven dominos to make up their hand. The person holding the highest double domino starts the action. That domino becomes the 'spinner', the only one you can play on four sides. Every other subsequent play in the game you have to match one of the dominos on the open ends with play proceeding to the right.

If a person doesn't possess a domino that will match any of the open ends they are passed or as we called it 'knocking'. First player to get rid of all their dominos wins the hand and the process starts all over again until they reach the target score.

Scoring is done in multiples of 5 with the maximum for one play being 30 points if you're playing with a Double Six domino set.

I understand Latinos and peeps in the Caribbean are as crazy about the game as African-Americans are. Some have elaborate tables made specifically for playing the game with cupholders built into them to hold drinks.

During my freshman year at the University of Houston me and my running buddies discovered one day when we didn't have the funds to bowl that the UC had a set of dominos we could check out to play. For the next three years we got a group together on a regular basis and started playing dominos on our lunch periods, some early mornings before class and sometimes after class.

And what entertaining games they were. We took trash talking to a new level when we playing. It got so raucous sometimes that we had other UH students watching our antics.

Of course, you know yours truly and her friends would come up with creative monikers for our domino games. I called all-out scoring in which points were scored in escalating fashion up to the big 30 point play 'Run and Shoot dominoes' after Mouse Davis' high-powered high scoring football offense. 'Four corners dominoes' was what I called it when somebody tried to limit scoring and 'lock up' the hand.

When it was your turn to shuffle the dominoes for the next game it was called 'washing the dishes'. Sometimes one of my friends would mimic pouring dishwashing soap into the mix or make pithy comments after selecting their domino hand like 'I can see myself' after the Joy diswashing liquid commercial of the early 80's.

Even when we scored we had comments for it. A five point play was a 'nickel'. A ten point play was a 'dime'. A fifteen point play was greeted with the term 'three's please' or 'her name was Trina' and a twenty point play was 'four on the floor'.

I used to mimic James Brown when I scored 25 points and say,"Heyyyyyy, hit me five times." If we made someone pass, it was 'who's that knocking at my door?' If you scored repeatedly in five point increments you hear that player say "fish and bread keep po' men fed." If somebody laid out an obvious sucker play in order for their team to score bigger points, your partner would warn "all money ain't good money." There were also the naughty erotic references made as well.

There were people like Craig and Raymond Jolivette who liked to add to your embarrassment after a loss and make you sign the score sheet after they beat you. They would write, "I got my azz thoroughly kicked by Craig and Raymond at the bottom of the page and make you and your partner autograph it. Of course if they lost, they had to eat crow and do the same thing.

Raymond Jolivette was definitely the most entertaining one of our bunch. He graduated from Smiley High and arrived at UH in the fall of 1981. He earned the nickname of 'Smurf' from us because of his 5'5" height and after the popular cartoon of the time.

He took the nickname and ran with it. His 5'1" Black Filipina girlfriend Victoria was called 'Smurfette' by us and he was a fun person to be around. I'm still telling Raymond Jolivette stories to this day.

There was one game we were playing in which I made a boneheaded play that was not only going to result in me and my partner suffering a thirty point blow, but cost us the game as well. Raymond took the scoring domino out of his hand, went to the back wall of the UC pool room where we were playing, ran to our table hollering 'Banzai' all the way before slamming the domino onto the table to heighten my embarrassment.

Ah, those were the days.