There are some topics that you can only discover through a random occurrence.
To wit, on a flight today, as everybody was getting on the plane, the guy next to me called the flight attendant and nervously said, “There doesn’t seem to be an air-sickness bag in here,” pointing to his seat pocket.
He was quickly awarded a bag, which he thankfully did not need.
Later, Jacqueline said, “Maybe he was a collector,” in that postmodern tone that decodes to, “This would have been a joke in the relatively recent past, but in all likelihood there are actually air-sickness bag collectors.”
A Google search immediately surfaced several sites, including the Yahoo directory’s official recognition of the subject at:
Directory > Recreation > Hobbies > Collecting > Air Sickness Bags
And where there is collecting, we can also expect buying, selling, and trading. Indeed, an eBay search for “air sickness bag” had 28 active auctions for air-sickness bags as of 8:30pm PST on 1/8/2006. (It was a nice touch to see several listings qualify their items as “new” or “mint.”)
So the cat—or whatever it was—is out of the bag. I, and now you, know about the secret world of air sickness bag collecting and commerce.
I will admit that I have "collected" precisely one air sickness bag in my life. In fact I have it up on the wall at my office. It was from a Qantas flight a few years back and it caught my eye because it "doubled" as either a motion sickness bag, or a pre-addressed package to put your film in and send to be developed. "Either ... or", but still, I would not want to be the person who opened the bags at the developers.
ReplyDeleteAs I was about to post it occurred to me look for any references to it on the 'net ... and sure enough here it is:
http://www.geocities.com/jakkiez/bags/qantas.html
.. and here is a comprehensive collector's site.
http://www.bagophily.com