Aeroplanes
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Traveling by air is 'the only way to get around' in our 20th century Quick-Fix society. It's quick and relatively inexpensive providing you don't buy those little bottles of spirits and reasonably painless. Or apparently so.
The truth about aeroplanes is in fact, a whole lot more scary. To start off on a relatively small fault, the toilets are a national mental health hazard. I'm not sure whether this is just me being paranoid, but I am utterly terrified of aeroplane toilets. Needless to say, this makes the flight from Scotland to Australia (24 hours) pretty painful. Maybe its that I can't stand small spaces, or maybe it's that scary whooshing noise that they make when you flush them, or maybe it's the idea that now, somewhere else on the plane with all the others of its kind, is that bottle of coke that you drank about an hour ago. The idea of soaring through the sky at an altitude of several thousand feet, along with many other passengers and a trunk load of human excrement isn't exactly my idea of foolproof safety.
The food is also a bit suspect. In fact, it's probably a bit ambitious of me to call it food. It looks and tastes like something they scraped off the underbelly of a blowfly. The only good thing about aeroplane food is the fun you can have trying to unwrap all the separate little bits, and in most cases, the plastic wrapping tastes better than the food anyway.
These supposedly 'magnificent flying machines' have also killed quite a lot of people over the years. However, we tend not to notice this because they have also transported quite a lot of people to remote corners of the globe. If something is convenient, then we tend not to notice the downsides.
This is a trait that seems to spill over into all aspects of humanity. For example, microwaves have been known and proven to cause cataracts if you look at them (while they're switched on), but we don't really seem to notice this, because they're the easiest and quickest way to cook food. Who knows how many other examples of this there are existing out there in the great big universe? But the overall meaning is simple. This could be seen as the final, clinching proof that our 20th century quick-fix-no-fuss-no-mess-no-unnecessary-wasted-time society is slowly but surely killing us all.
The truth about aeroplanes is in fact, a whole lot more scary. To start off on a relatively small fault, the toilets are a national mental health hazard. I'm not sure whether this is just me being paranoid, but I am utterly terrified of aeroplane toilets. Needless to say, this makes the flight from Scotland to Australia (24 hours) pretty painful. Maybe its that I can't stand small spaces, or maybe it's that scary whooshing noise that they make when you flush them, or maybe it's the idea that now, somewhere else on the plane with all the others of its kind, is that bottle of coke that you drank about an hour ago. The idea of soaring through the sky at an altitude of several thousand feet, along with many other passengers and a trunk load of human excrement isn't exactly my idea of foolproof safety.
The food is also a bit suspect. In fact, it's probably a bit ambitious of me to call it food. It looks and tastes like something they scraped off the underbelly of a blowfly. The only good thing about aeroplane food is the fun you can have trying to unwrap all the separate little bits, and in most cases, the plastic wrapping tastes better than the food anyway.
These supposedly 'magnificent flying machines' have also killed quite a lot of people over the years. However, we tend not to notice this because they have also transported quite a lot of people to remote corners of the globe. If something is convenient, then we tend not to notice the downsides.
This is a trait that seems to spill over into all aspects of humanity. For example, microwaves have been known and proven to cause cataracts if you look at them (while they're switched on), but we don't really seem to notice this, because they're the easiest and quickest way to cook food. Who knows how many other examples of this there are existing out there in the great big universe? But the overall meaning is simple. This could be seen as the final, clinching proof that our 20th century quick-fix-no-fuss-no-mess-no-unnecessary-wasted-time society is slowly but surely killing us all.
