Hey, you know those massively-overpriced drinks that restaurants sometimes come up with the get into the newspapers? You know, the ones that are all, "The world's most expensive daiquiri - it costs five grand and is made from distilled hummingbird tears and diamond juice and liquidised parts of Donald Trump and garnished with George Clooney's back hair!"

Yeah, those.

Well, what better to buy the insanely gullible billionaire oligarch in YOUR life than a trip which comprises EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE rip-off drinks? A holiday company in the UK is offering the 'Ultimate Drinking Holiday' for the "true connoisseur", where you can sip on ten of the world's most obnoxiously-priced liquids, including a £110,000 wine and a £100,000 whiskey. There's everything in between in various far-slung locations, including going down to a £50 Singapore Sling, which frankly looks embarrassed to be on the list. The 'ten iconic places' you get to go to? I hope you like conspicuous consumption. A LOT. And yes, that "icon" of drinking culture, Dubai, is obviously on the list.

You can see the full itinerary HERE. Just don't ask for salt and lime for that £400 shot of tequila. Remember, we at Shandy Pockets have our own guide to the world's most pretentious cocktail bars.

If Cliven Bundy doesn't recognise the United States, we wonder if he recognises the micro-nation of Molossia, which is located plum within the state of Nevada?

The country is run by Kevin Baugh, who calls himself "His Excellency, President of the Independent Republic of Molossia." His laws stretch to the usual zany buffoonery of selk-elected leaders, such as banning onions and spinach, as well as "walruses, light bulbs and imports of anything from Texas except recordings made by singer Kelly Clarkson."

Anyway, the country will be officially welcoming its first tourist visitors on May 3rd, and if you want to find out more about this ker-ay-zee place, here's the Official Website of Molossia.

Much as we're anti lists on SP, we do sometimes get overwhelmed by the urge to catalogue, so imagine our delight this morning on logging onto The Guardian website, where a new toy awaited to help us with our morning's displacement activities. Their widget allows you to tally up your total visits to each country (we just put 100 for the country we live in - the UK for this exercise) and then it creates a colour-and-size coded globe to produce a quantitative map. GO HERE to try it yourself. Ours looked like this: 

Shandy Pockets recently ate its own weight in southern food and came up with this list of the best new restaurants in New Orleans. It's a hard choice, narrowing down the best culinary experiences in this town of food experts, but you know what? We're troopers, and we care about informing YOU, the reader. We're like martyrs to the cause, and if that cause involves high end restaurants, then it's hardly our fault now, is it?

Here's our list, written for our friends over at Zagat: 10 Hottest Restaurants in New Orleans

What an incredibly strange week it’s been for travel-based social media. Yesterday’s Twitter insanity over the United Airlines porn surprise saw every conceivable joke made in around 4 minutes flat, everything from black box recorders to missing Malaysian Airlines planes to the alternative ending to ‘Lost’. We at Shandy Pockets were responsible for a VERY childish remark about holding patterns.

If this storm in a diva cup somehow passed you by, the beleaguered airline somehow posted a response to a customer complaint that was accompanied by a young woman, resplendent and nude on a hotel bed with a model airplane protruding from her, well, front bottom. The story, complete with NOT SAFE FOR WORK photos, is summarised HERE.

Some wits suggested that this was a knowing marketing response to  all the headlines that American Airlines had been making as they had a 14-year old girl arrested for tweeting a fake bomb threat. The young Dutch girl, known only as ‘Sarah’, had set up a fake account and made the unwise decision to write: ““Hello my name’s Ibrahim and I’m from Afghanistan. I’m part of Al Qaida and on June 1st I’m gonna do something really big bye.”

So far, so ill-advised, BUT the world’s teenagers saw this as an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon, and suddenly dozens of threats started to appear on Twitter. These seem to be basic teen idiocy rather than a coordinated, socio-political campaign in support of ‘Sarah’, but given that the airline and authorities have to take each threat seriously, there’s a rather wasteful amount of time and manpower being stacked up this week.

On a lighter note, this astonishing video was hastily removed by Singapore Tourism, and rightly so. We’re just glad someone captured its glory before it disappeared.

It’s been a proud last week for the travel blogging community. See how big and important it’s become!

Firstly, let’s welcome the esteemed movie of our travel blogging lives, American Blogger. OK, strictly it’s just about blogging in general BUT the dude does travel around in that sweet AirStream and meets a cross section of lifestyle bloggers.

Who happen to be his wife’s friends. Well, the best looking section of his wife’s friends. Well, her white friends. Well, her young white friends. It’s a line up of affluent eye candy, is what it is. I don’t doubt that some of these ladies can write, but when you take them in all at once, as in this now infamous trailer, it’s an overwhelming conveyor belt of suburban blandness that somehow also manages to be preciously pretentious.

Take your affluenza shots before viewing.

Added to this is an astonishing response by one Mr J Blair to the curious case of his girlfriend’s missing purse (via Mr David Whitley, many thanks for bringing it to Twitter’s attention).

Seems that Mr Blair’s “backpacking girlfriend” misplaced some cash during her stay at a Japanese hotel in Okinawa. Who knows what transpired, but what followed was this incredibly over the top tirade of don’t-you-know-who-I-am-ness.

The open letter is essentially just a massive list of Mr Blair’s achievements, not to mention the kracken-raising-esque threat of action from that most shadowy of all evil empires, the Professional Travel Blogger’s Association. No-one takes on the PTBA and lives to tell the tale.

The lexical petulance ends, rather bafflingly, by quoting Noel Gallagher, lead songwriter of popular beat combo Oasis, and patron saint of customer service in the hospitality industry.

“Your destiny will keep you warm.”

If that’s not a hint at sinister repercussions, we’re not sure what is.

SEE OUR TOP TIPS ON HOW TO BE A TRAVEL BLOGGER

Of the lesser-known hotel phenomena, one of the most interesting to observe is the that of the passive-aggressive floor gloat. It’s not always completely obvious, but be alert and you can spot it more or less every time you get in the lift/elevator with other people.

Generally, the higher the floor you have to go to, the swankier your room will be, and so letting people know that you’re on a higher floor than them, and therefore a better person in every conceivable way, is an art form, not one that your humble narrator gets to practise too much, though, let him assure you.

I do suffer from near-crippling floor envy, though, so I feel I can speak on this subject with some authority. The seasoned Floor Gloater, residing in a suitably high ranking floor, will hang back in the lobby and let the masses enter the lift first. Then they will wait, sometimes until the doors are closing, not doing anything in the hope that someone asks them which floor they need. They can then announce it loudly to the entire lift, ensuring that the people at the back, who may have missed the nuances of button pressing, are completely up to speed with the floor number involved.

If they are not asked which floor they would like, then Plan B comes into effect. This does involve button pressing, but with such a flourish that anyone sharing the confines of the lift would be hard pressed not to notice the superior ranking. A forefinger demonstratively going up and down the panel of possible numbers a few times usually suffices, though the more brazen might sometimes throw in a rhetorical “Now, what was my floor again…?” just to make sure.

The Floor Gloater’s worst nightmare is gambling on the superiority of a floor that is only second or third from the top. Imagine the humiliation of having gone through the above process, and then seeing the crowds disperse at their inferior heights, only for one person to remain, entering their floor only on the way up. This someone is somehow on the very highest floor, someone who, in the assurance that they could not be trumped, held back until the last possible minute to assert dominance.

This is the work of a true Floor Gloating Artist, executing a very specific and crushing floor victory over the would-be Floor Pretender, the plebs on the lowlier floors not even worthy of seeing this elite punishment being doled out. Had they even witnessed it (having missed their floor and having to wait for the car to go down again), its significance would surely be lost on them. They who haven’t seen such riches can, after all, live with being poor.

The cenotes in Tulum are underground caverns, often filled with deep pools of water. In some, there are diving platforms set up, and I stumbled into a particularly high one. Most people dived off the lower platforms, but this French guy leaped from the top, maybe 40 feet down into the deep green pool.

As another "business weekend" rolls along at Hampton Inns, Joe feels he may have been mislead all these years when Bill turns up with some unexpected guests...