World's worst airplane food: bring back the airsick bag

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World’s worst plane food

A “classic English breakfast” and pasta with a “bodily fluid-like"
sauce are among the worst offenders identified in air passengers'
photos





Safe to say this was one of the more interesting plane meals I've
had #jetstarairways #planefood. I've literally no idea [what it was],
it upsettingly tasted ok but that could have been the hangover telling
me that!' Photo: instagram.com/williamrae27



By Soo Kim

3:51PM BST 30 Sep 2015

40 Comments

Amused, confused and disgusted passengers have revealed some of the
most unappetising in-flight meals they’ve been subjected to on a plane
with pictures posted on Twitter and Instagram.


'


After living off rice for the last 10 days, I couldn't wait to have
 an 'English Breakfast' when offered it on the plane. But then, I got
this. #planefood #britishairways #whatisthat #fullenglish' Photo:
 instagram.com/chriswilko


The snaps have ranged from several unidentifiable, sloppy masses
and questionable pasta with “hard pellet-like things” to one British
Airways meal described as “the most disgusting plane food ever” as
well as a sad, skimpy cheese sandwich from Virgin Australia. One
disgruntled Virgin passenger once sent
"the world's best passenger complaint letter"
to Richard Branson, which went viral after it surfaced, in which he
described his "culinary journey of hell" on a flight from Mumbai to
Heathrow.

• The British Airways solution to bland airline food


'


This was supposed to be some sort of Italian pasta, and I can
only compare the sauce texture to a bodily fluid. I could not, after a
 lot of effort, identify the hard beige pellet-like things in the sauce.'
 Photo: Kathryn Siegel (submitted to MailOnline)


One user posted a picture of his meal for others to guess what it
could be, while another user, williamrae27, admitted the meal he
had "tasted okay" even though he couldn't identify what he
actually was eating.





Photo: instagram.com/timoberg78

Images of other contenders for the world's worst airlines meals
can be seen on AirlineMeals.net.





A hamburger served on North Korea's Air Koryo, which was ranked
the world's worst airline by Skytrax earlier this year Photo:
AirlineMeals.net





Helpful hint: avoid the mushroom omlettte on the menu Freebird
Airlines. Photo:AirlineMeals.net





Swimming in what looks like the water at the bottom of your
dishwasher, Ukraine International Airlines offers up a sad fruit salad.
Photo: AirlineMeals.net

However, a few users revealed some of the more enjoyable and even
"delicious" meals they've had on airlines including Qatar Airways and
Qantas.





'Pea and Mint soup aboard #Qantas #qf598 #perbne
 #businessclass #avgeek #aviation #paxex #planefood
 #flying #planes #lifewelltravelled
' Photo: Twitter / @PeterLoh

Blogger's note. This was a cut-'n-paste job, obviously, as posting
links is not only dull, I am sure no one ever bothers to read them.
This does all sorts of bizarre things to the formatting, so it takes
a while to screw around with it before I can post it, with a few
flubs left over. I've had airplane food that was pretty much inedible,
but you can't even LOOK at this stuff, and it probably has
that steamed-dirty-socks-combined-with-disintegrating-brussels-
sprouts reek and institutional metallic taste,like something served
off a green plastic tray in a mental hospital.

Makes me feel just a little bit better that I can't afford to fly anywhere.

SPECIAL BONUS SHOTS! These may be
geography lessons. I've never seen South
America done in mushy peas.

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Bondi dreams (Muskoka in the fall)

When does the time change? Did it change already? Why don't I remember?

Nude women! Come take a look

Highly giffable: but it's getting to the point that I'm giffing everything that moves. A lovely 3 minutes of movement that predates film, with the female subjects going from prim to playful. Might have been seen as pornography then. I just pasted it on Facebook as an experiment to see if they'll take it down. They left up graphic photos of Stephen Harper wielding a very realistic dildo.

Time machine: the birth of TV

As you've probably guessed by now, this isn't exactly an educational blog. If you want to learn everything about the birth of television, go on Wikipedia NOW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television

There. I promise you that this Wiki entry is a small book that goes on for many thousands of words, without too many pictures. And pictures are what this blog is all about (if it's about anything - I'm still trying to figure that out). 

I love everything about early TV, because it constitutes my very first memories. I swear I remember sitting in front of the TV on the floor, my fat little legs splayed out, left on my own because those flickering black-and-white images from the DuMont network were a convenient babysitter. This is a body memory which  places me at around age two. Mid-1950s, in other words, so my recognition of Ernie Kovacs decades later proved that he wasn't just a nightmarish fantasy.

Though most prototype TVs looked like big radios with a round eye, this one looks like some sort of bird house, or maybe a barn. I wonder what sort of programming they had back then, and how close you'd have to be to the screen to see anything at all.

For some reason people were less intimidated by TVs that looked like radios. Early newspaper headlines talked about being able to "see the radio", a bizarre concept. This one, handsome as it is, still has a pretty small screen, but something is visible there that might even be people.

Viewtone must have become obsolete at some point, like my beloved DuMont Teleset with its swinging cabinet doors that were used to hide the bloody thing during the day when there was no signal. Slowly, slowly the screen is getting bigger, the cabinet less radiolike.

This is either John Logie Baird, or someone posing for John Logie Baird, an early television pioneer who experimented with trying to broadcast the image of a face. To me, it looks like Dylan Thomas after a night on the town.

And it looked. . . something like this. Please forgive the large colour watermark, but I can't crop a gif. I like that vertically-striped effect which sliced and diced the picture. It was no worse than the constant flipping which always afflicted our set, nearly as bad as the picture tube "blowing" which necessitated a visit by the TV repairman.

It is said that Felix the Cat was the first TV star. He sat on what looks like a turntable for days on end, some time in the late 1920s I think (look it up!). I don't know if the broadcast image was this clear. Probably not. The audience for this sort of programming was likely small, because no one had a TV set or even knew what one was.

"Her face at first just ghostly. . ." These are spectres, and no doubt the people behind them are long dead. I don't understand the bottom one however, as the picture was usually divided into vertical slices, and these are horizontal. Another experiment, perhaps.

I am sorry to have to include this, but according to the early TV site I lifted it from, it's an image of - WTF??? Looks like an ultrasound gone terribly wrong, or an xray of a woman who left her IUD in for 26 years.

How close to the TV would you have to sit? Even closer than we did when our Moms screamed at us, "Don't sit so close to the TV! You'll ruin your eyesight!" (Fortunately, my eyesight was already ruined, but I won't say by what.)

This is the first image I could find of actual entertainment on TV. Probably on the DuMont network, which featured Milton Berle doing sketches on a stage with curtains and everything. Well, that's how you did things, wasn't it? This isn't the radio, for God's sake. Get back on that stage where you belong!

BUT WAIT: THERE'S MORE!

This lovely little sucker, the G. E. Octagon, surely must have been some sort of prototype rather than a model people could use in their homes. Unless their eyesight was a hell of a lot better than mine.

Like the Dumont Teleset, which had a screen about 100 times larger than this one, the Octagon (made in the late 1920s) had foldout doors like a cabinet. Why? Inside were spindles, perhaps speakers, perhaps not, and two indescribable "things" that looked a bit like drawer handles.  I love things that baffle me just because I like to be baffled.

As far as obsolete technology is concerned, this is about as good as it gets. You'd have to treat this like a veritable microscope and put your eyeball right down on the glass.

People still rebuild these, refurbish them, and somehow get them going again, no doubt pulling in signals from Clara Bow, Ben Turpin and Harold Lloyd. Only problem is, there'd be no sound.

This is called the Octagon "motor", but how could a TV set have a motor? This whole scenario just gets weirder and weirder. Looks like a deformed metallic elephant to me.

This looks like a gramophone from Mars, or a meat grinder that can walk, but apparently it's some sort of experimental device for sending pictures. 

This thing - no, it's not a coconut cake shaped like a juke box, it's a TV of some sort. This is from a fantastic site about the history of television, but the thing of it is, it's all in French. Still. I'll post the link to it in case you're French, or only want to look at the pictures.

http://radio-piffret.pagesperso-orange.fr/Histoire_de_la_Television.htm

Call this the badda-boom. I keep finding ever-more-bizarre things about early TV, the guts of which looked like some kind of sewing machine with a spinning disc full of holes. The image projected - somewhere - was a disembodied head named Stooky Bill. (So much for the Felix the Cat legend.) John Logie Baird looks proudly on his glass-encased Sleeping Beauty of a machine which, beknownst to him, will change society forever. If he was smart enough to build this, he was smart enough to Know.

This is the Wizard of Oz of television invention, pulling levers and throwing switches. Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, it went, as if driven by a giant hamster. 

I realize I've come at this subject in abstract fashion, but it's imagery I'm after, not history. Consider it an archaeological dig with the layers somewhat scrambled. I never much cared for chronological order anyway, and always walk through museums backwards, starting with the present moment and ending with the Dawn of Time. The invention and development of television is nothing less than a spectacular feat of human evolution, as important as the wheel, stone tool-making and harnessing fire. There were, of necessity, lots of experiments, lots of things thrown away, and things that look pretty goofily godawful to modern eyes. But to me, it's all beautiful: John Logie Baird and his creepy dummy head, all those sliced-'n-diced, quiveringly surreal, disembodied ghost-faces, viewing screens a couple of inches across, obsolete companies like Viewtone (a nod to radio, no doubt) and DuMont. And a glowing, flipping, flickering eye that raised me while my parents were off doing more important things.

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Oddity Archive: now I'll be up all night

Late night will never be the same. Having chopped my way through all 107 videos of the Commercials for Defunct Products playlist, I now stumble on to - or into - another LaBrea Tar Pit of mental distraction, the Oddity Archive. This one promises to suck me down like boiling mud, for it deals with a lot of my favorite obsessions: early TV, including my beloved DuMont Network; local commercials; public access programming (Stairway to Stardom, anyone?); early kiddie shows like the bizarre Ding Dong School;, TV signoffs featuring religious shows and "o I have slipped the surly bonds of earth"; and even the Emergency Broadcast System ("This is only a test. BOOOOOOOOOOOP" - doomsdayendofworldGODgetunderthebed).

This looks better than it really is, for it's very heavy on sarcastic, intrusive narration by "this guy", the one who presumably put it all together. Whoever he is, he hides behind a piece of cardboard with someone's picture pasted to it (picture changes with each video, I think). I'm assuming he's trying to avoid prosecution for using other people's videos. How anyone keeps control over any of that in this age of YouTube and Faceboob is anybody's guess. Though I see a lot of potential here, the constant interruption with wiseacre comments is jarring. I loved the 107 videos because they were just shown to us whole, unedited, punctuated with tons of really good, really long film headers (always love to make gifs out of those). Not only that, but there'd be 7 ads for Pream in one 15-minute video, and I wanted to see those ads, I really did. 

I'll be picking my way through these videos and likely giffing bits of them, because gifs mercifully don't have sound (yet - there's another format taking over which has the same few seconds of sound repeating over and over, and which I think will ruin the whole thing by driving us nuts). What I see so far has real promise, and I don't know how he got hold of some of it (thus the cardboard picture). But it reminds me of those old monster movie late-night TV shows  where every few minutes you'd hear a voice-over of some sniggering, sophomoric remark: "Oh! Look over there!", or "yeah, like the monster'd do THAT."

Meantime. . . crawls are great too, and this has to be among the most bizarre I've ever seen. 

POST-BLOG HANGOVER. After perusing a few of these videos, I have to conclude they won't be worth exploring. It's not just the fragmentary nature of the clips, it's the annoying YATTER YATTER YATTER of "that guy" who won't shut up, constantly commenting and putting on irritating voices and doing the "Look how lame this is! Yeah, like we'd ever buy that! How obvious can you get!" etc. etc. I tried watching it without the sound, but it's just too disjointed, and most of the visual is taken up with the piece of cardboard with part of a guy behind it. Lame. Too bad, because there are a few gems here, but it's not worth the frustration.

I no longer detest Bolero thanks to these guys!

Who's that boy?

Nice little slide show of Harold with Hal Roach. Notice how he barely resembles his screen persona. He was seldom recognized, which was fine with him. He wasn't the Hollywood type.

Stages of grief: you can't handle the truth

Studebaker Gold Hawk

The 1951 DuMont Teleset

One of the most gorgeous features of the treasure trove of old ads I just discovered on YouTube is a whole series of ads for the DuMont television set (which is what it was called back then). These ads were performed live on variety shows with singers, dancers and comedians doing their stuff. Some of the ads featured a male chorus singing radio-style ditties praising the superior clarity of the DuMont picture. I remember TV from the late '50s on, and in no way, shape or form was the picture "clear". It wobbled all over the place. It flipped. It developed noisy static and went all white and grainy. We didn't care because we had nothing to compare it to. This 1951 DuMont set must have been much more primitive. For all that, it has a much larger screen than the earlier models from the 1940s which were only a few inches across.

Back then, you didn't say "watch TV" - you said "look at television". It's one of those quaintitudes that disappeared at a certain point (like exclaiming "saaaaaay!" at the beginning of every sentence). But if you listened to the radio, you - what? Looked at television, as in "stop, look and listen". Or something. Even the terminology was unfamiliar. People marvelled at the new technology, but were a little scared and intimidated by it all.

By now you may be noting a certain bizarre feature of these very early DuMont commercials. The hostess or whatever you call her is not opening out the cabinet doors to display the "teleset". She always CLOSES the doors to cover the screen up. I think there's a reason for this. People just weren't used to having this honking big open eye, this shiny piece of glass staring at them in their living room. It was not uncommon for the uninitiated to believe that the people on television could see them. It was more modest, somehow, to keep that thing closed away until viewing time. It looked more like a piece of furniture that way. Maybe a radio.

No one knew how to display a product visually in those days - thus the catchy jingles sung in four-part harmony like a Barbasol ad. A woman walked in, shut the doors on the ghastly thing, and walked off. That was about all the movement people could handle in those days. These television commercials for televisions were meant to waft out into Televisionland only once, as everything was done live and couldn't be repeated. These ghostly remainders come from kinescopes, a primitive way to film a program directly from the camera monitor. I like the smudgy, shadowy, phosphorescent atmosphere of them, a sense of technological antiquity. In many cases they're all we have left of the baby years of TV, when the DuMont network reigned supreme before disappearing into the abyss of obsolescence.

This flickering image of a DuMont Teleset, with doors closed, appeared onscreen for nearly a full minute, with only the slick male chorus to remind us of what they were selling. Come on, folks - buy the new 1951 DuMont - uh - whatever-this-is.

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Gifsforum: where art thou?

This is one of the best film leaders I've giffed in a long time

But I'm still not satisfied with it.

Want to know WHY??

Because Makeagif, the program I use now, only makes a straight gif in a small size (or a grainy larger size). The time limit on them is 20 seconds.

Gifsforum, the beloved site I used for years, had all sorts of options: forward and reverse; color into black-and-white or sepia; captions top and bottom; three different speeds; and in olden times, all sorts of different effects so that your gif could look something like a film negative or an impressionist painting.You could also set it to tenths of a second and make gifs from full-length movies. The time limit was 30 seconds.

Then one day, my beloved Gifsforum simply disappeared.

What is even more frustrating is that I can't find ANY information on this. I don't know what happened. Gifsforum has a Facebook page, but it is three years out of date. Usually you'll get something on somebody's forum somewhere. I don't know why people aren't complaining or at least saying something, but they're not. There's nothing, and that never happens on the internet, does it? This was, as far as I know, the most popular and user-friendly gif site, was easy and fast to use and produced a great result. Then it disappeared and nobody said anything.

There are plenty of other sites, and most are shitty or impossible to use. Makeagif has improved quite a bit from its abominable beginnings. Makes me wonder if Gifsforum somehow melded together with Makeagif like Jeff Goldblum and the fly in the teleporter.

Anyway, though this is a superb film leader and one of the best I've ever found, if I still had Gifsforum I could run it on fast, normal or slow speed, run it backwards, and run it in sepia tones. Damn.

Defunct and loving it

When I find a YouTube playlist called Commercials for Defunct Products I'm thrilled, but when I find out that this is a trove of 107 videos, each running 10 - 15 minutes, I am ecstatic and ready to begin firing up the gif machine.

In many cases I haven't even included the name of the product, but who cares? They gif up so nicely because they're unfocused and full of blips and those scratchy-looking things that have no name. There is quite a bit of repetition here, as most of them were taken out of that internet.org archive that I can never quite figure out how to use.

These videos heavily emphasize ads for obsolete cars, Studebaker and DeSoto among them;  Raleigh cigarettes (Raleigh coupons were the key to a good life in the early '60s and could furnish your whole house); more cereal ads than you even want to look at (including the fad of "fruit in the box", which must have been completely dessicated); and, of course, PREAM! I have given Pream its own post of gifs which isolate the reaction shots, in which baffled husbands (usually) have a "what the -?" look on their stupid faces, not knowing if their coffee is full of cream or powdered milk solids that don't dissolve worth a damn and probably sink to the bottom in a disgusting sludge.

There's one Pream ad that I just could not bring myself to gif: a shot of a whitish liquid squirting into a pail, with the announcer shouting, "Here it comes!" Turns out the guy was milking a COW, but. . .well. . . I won't say what it reminded me of.

These videos also include some of the oldest TV ads ever, obviously taken from kinescopes in the 1940s. TV back then was radio with pictures crossed with vaudeville, and the result was a bastard child that baffles us today. During ad time, the host of the show stepped out in front of the curtains (these shows were acted out live on-stage) and pushed whatever the sponsor was pushing, often home permanents or Stinko deodorant. (No, that's Stopette.) In one amazing clip, Arthur Godfrey sits on-stage with a massive headset on and radio paraphernalia all around him. Quite literally, radio on TV.

The ads show an interesting historical time progression:

- smudgy late '40s kinescopes of clowns running around on a stage;

- neat and tidy, Eisenhower-esque tableaux of families smoking Bel-Air cigarettes;

- spontaneous-looking early-'60s  ads involving "real" people talking into the camera while eating         cereal with dessicated fruit in it;

- "swingin' '60s" ads in hideous faded formerly-psychedelic colour;

. . . and finally. . . 

- '70s ads which are really very hard to describe, kind of like a frenetic polyester-clad high school musical.

One product, a deodorant called Tickle, looks exactly like a vibrator, sports an an "extra-wide ball" and depicts women giggling seductively with a voiceover saying, "Make yourself happy".

I'm only halfway through all these, not even, and I do them late at night. I made gifs all morning and don't have as many to show for it as I thought. The thing is, even with all the negative feeling I've had about Facebook lately, I had an out-and-out crisis when someone I've known since childhood posted a blatantly racist video about "the Muslims". That little word "the" obviously includes the entire category (though people deny it up, down and sideways - there's a lot of that going on these days).

So it's back to the gifs. If I do Facebook at all, I'm going to be VERY quick to unfriend and unfollow if anything bothers me even a little. It's my Facebook and I'll do what I want to. I will hide and chop and cut myself loose. I'm not going to read that list of comments down the side any more because most of them don't even apply to me, and besides, how will that make my life better? Some of the people I've been following are completely insane. One of them claimed to be married to the ghost of Louis Riel (even changed her Facebook status!). It was scary. And I am tired of people trying to argue me out of my opinions. Arm-twisting and veiled racist hate was never my cup of tea.

Dirty Aftermath. Oh OK. I'll show you the Pream commercial that made me wonder. It makes me wonder because when you milk a cow, the milk goes DOWN instead of sideways, and is usually done with two hands so you have TWO, well, what can I say, "spurts" going alternately. Don't you? Just what were they trying to show us here? This is made especially questionable when the announcer shouts, "HERE IT COMES!"

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