Oh, Oz, you must really love being flamed.

I'm on a UA SWU SIN run this weekend for five days away from my family and it has everything to do with Aeroplan and the purpose of this forum. UA, SIN and SWUs are ideal methods for those with the fortitude to obtain/maintain Elite/SE status on Aeroplan. (And I have real practical econoomic reasons to obtain/maintain status that my wife understands justifies this trip away from home.) UA is the most accessible "other" airline for Aeroplan members and the SWU upgrade run to SIN is one of the cheapest alternatives both in terms of time and money.

But this stuff is not common knowledge to most of us here. Most of my friends consider myself an obsessed expert on the topics in this forum (always calling on me for help when they run into problems with high air fares, like getting to funerals even though they don't 'qualify' for compassionate fares). But it took me a whole long time to realize how to use UA and SWUs effectively (and I might even with this knowledge still be stuck in Y for much of the journey.)

OK. There. Now. If you really are into stamps, AKA philately, we can now get totally off topic with even more obscurity. Don't collect stamps any more, but my interest in them as a kid ultimately led me to places like Bujumbura, Kigali and Ougadougou, where I could lick them on real letters. And smuggling old Federation stamps helped fund my travels in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe where I came of age some years ago.

Totally off topic, of course. But probably interesting to you (although possibly no one else here). But UA SWUs ARE of interest to the people in this forum. I won't burden the forum any more with my knowledge of the pre-history of Djbouti. Perhaps you, in turn, could focus your energies on more worthwhile endeavours.