• 9/2 – At Georgia Tech
• 9/9 – Penn State
• 9/16 – Michigan
• 9/23 – at Michigan State
• 9/30 – Purdue
• 10/7 – Stanford
• 10/21 – UCLA
• 10/28 – at Navy
• 11/4 – North Carolina
• 11/11 – at Air Force
• 11/18 – Army
• 11/25 – at USC

Here are some excellent resources for following the Irish.

• The House of Twelve: a blog by a bunch of my buddies from Notre Dame, including a former Observer sports editor.
• FanBlogs’ Notre Dame Blog: a quick roundup of Irish news stories.
• Blue-Gray Sky: Another great Irish football blog.
• The Rankings: AP and Coaches’ polls.
• ESPN Clubhouse: Roster, news, photos, standings, all that stuff.

By the way, here’s the Notre Dame Victory March as performed by the Dixieland Ramblers. Very New Orleans sounding, but without the gunfire and failed welfare state.

The airline is overhauling its computerized-reservation system to add the ability to assign seats and offer international flights. Officials say neither change is for sure.

The earliest Southwest could switch to assigned seating, used by every other major U.S. carrier, is 2008, Chief Executive Gary Kelly said Wednesday. The system won’t be able to handle the tax and customs information required for international travel until the following year, he said.

It would be a mistake to move away from open seating. As SciGuy has discussed, it’s faster and more efficient than assigned seating. One of Southwest’s major competitive advantages is its quick turnaround time. Planes don’t make money sitting on the ground, so Southwest keeps ‘em in the air. By shaving just a few minutes off each flight, you can accumulate enough saved time during the day to fly one more hop. The flipside is also true: waste an extra few minutes on the ground every flight, and you run out of daylight pretty soon.

To see, let’s crunch some numbers. Let’s say a Southwest plane’s workday is 12 hours; the first takeoff is at 8:00 a.m., and the plane has to be on the ground in its final destination city by 8:00 p.m. Let’s assume 1-hour flights with 20 minutes on the ground in between flights. For simplicity’s sake, all flights are within the same time zone.

The timetable looks like this:

• Flight 1: 8:00-9:00
• Flight 2: 9:20-10:20
• Flight 3: 10:40-11:40
• Flight 4: 12:00-1:00
• Flight 5: 1:20-2:20
• Flight 6: 2:40-3:40
• Flight 7: 4:00-5:00
• Flight 8: 5:20-6:20
• Flight 9: 6:40-7:40

That’s 9 flights a day. To make it easy, we’ll assume 100 passengers per flight, each paying $100. That’s 10 grand in revenue per flight. Fly this route every day for a year, and you pull in $32.85 million.
Now let’s say you introduce assigned seating, and let’s say it adds just 5 more minutes on the ground, per flight. Now your timetable looks like this:

• Flight 1: 8:00-9:00
• Flight 2: 9:25-10:25
• Flight 3: 10:50-11:50
• Flight 4: 12:15-1:15
• Flight 5: 1:40-2:40
• Flight 6: 3:05-4:05
• Flight 7: 4:30-5:30
• Flight 8: 5:55-6:55

Because of all the dilly-dallying on the ground, Flight 9 won’t get in before closing time, so it gets cut. Using the same assumptions as before, annual revenue just fell from $32.85 million to $29.2 million, a loss of $3.65 million or 11.1 percent. And that’s just on one route. Extrapolate that figure systemwide, and you’re talking some serious coin.

Of course, this idea makes sense if enough passengers are willing to pay a premium for assigned seating. It would have to be a pretty big premium, though — 11.1 percent just to break even. I don’t think many Southwest customers would pay it, given the choice. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

[Hat-tip: Laurence]

You fargin sneaky bastige! I gonna take-a your dwork, I gonna nail it to the wall! I gonna crush your boils in a meat grinder! I gonna cut off-a your arms, I’m gonna shove ‘em up your icehole! Dirty sum-o-num-batches! My own club!

Here’s the audio for that one. And of course, Moronie’s statement:

I would like to direct this to the distinguished members of the panel: “You lousy corksuckers. You have violated my fargin rights. This sum-o-num-batching country was founded so that the liberties of common patriotic citizens like me could not be taken away by a bunch of fargin iceholes like yourselves. Thank you very much.“

Great movie.

The cast of characters in this little tragedy includes (in rough order of appearance):

Amy the bartendrix, waxing poetic about Harry Potter
Freddy, egging her on
Me, messing with Chris
Chris, threatening to kill me

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