AN AIRLINE WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR 2

 Originally posted on FaceBook by Rick Archer

 

Kulula is a low-cost South-African airline that doesn't take itself too seriously.

What a pity Kulula doesn't fly internationally - we should support them if only for their humour:

 

On a Kulula flight , (there is no assigned seating, you just sit where you want), passengers were apparently having a hard time choosing their seats, when a flight attendant announced, "People, people, we're not picking out furniture here, find a seat and get in it!

 

On another flight with a very "senior" flight attendant crew, the pilot said, "Ladies & gentlemen, we've reached cruising altitude and will be turning down the cabin lights This is for your comfort and to enhance the appearance of your flight attendants."

 

And from the pilot during his welcome message:

"Kulula Airlines is pleased to announce that we have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight!"

 

From a Kulula employee:

"Welcome aboard Kulula 271 to Port Elizabeth. To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt; and, if you don't know how to operate one, you probably shouldn't be out in public unsupervised.”

 

"In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child traveling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs If you are traveling with more than one small child, pick your favorite.

 

"Your seat cushions can be used for flotation; and in the event of an emergency water landing, please paddle to shore and take them with our compliments."

 

"There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane"

 

"Thank you for flying Kulula . We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride.”

 

As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Durban Airport, a lone voice came over the loudspeaker:

"Whoa, big fella. WHOA!"

 

"As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses."

 

Heard on Kulula 255 just after a very hard landing in Cape Town: The flight attendant came on the intercom and said, "That was quite a bump and I know what you all are thinking. I'm here to tell you it wasn't the airline's fault, it wasn't the pilot's fault, it wasn't the flight attendant's fault, it was the asphalt.”

 

Overheard on a Kulula flight into Cape Town, on a particularly windy and bumpy day: During the final approach, the Captain really had to fight it. After an extremely hard landing, the Flight Attendant said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to The Mother City. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened while the Captain taxis what's left of our airplane to the gate!"

 

Another flight attendant's comment on a less than perfect landing: "We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the terminal”

 

An airline pilot wrote that on this particular flight he had hammered his ship into the runway really hard. The airline had a policy which required the first officer to stand at the door while the passengers exited, smile, and give them a "Thanks for flying our airline". He said that, in light of his bad landing, he had a hard time looking the passengers in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment.

Finally, everyone had got off except for a little old lady walking with a cane.

She said, "Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?"

"Why, no Ma'am," said the pilot. "What is it?”

The little old lady said, "Did we land, or were we shot down?"

AN AIRLINE WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR 1

 This will take a couple of entries. These shots are of the planes of Kulula Airlines in South Africa. Unfortunately they just went out of business in May of this year due to financing problems.  Too bad, these guys and gals didn't take themselves too seriously. You have to know your audience. I really can't imagine too many of my fellow citizens appreciating their humor. I could be wrong. But I didn't come across anything in online comments that complained of lost luggae.

Anyway these are aome shots of the planes.

THE INNER LIGHT

 The map is from How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. I don't agree with all of his ideas but the map really caught my attention. The Irish called it the Three Martyrdoms. Dying for the faith, becoming a monk or nun. or going on a pilgramiage. Monks trained by Saint Columba were among the first. Monks they trained moved further on. Through northern England, nothern Europe, down to the heel of the boot in southern Italy.

Lancashire and Yorkshire, home of the Quakers. Northern Europe home to the likes of Hildegarde, Ekhart and Martin Luther. Go a little further Assissi is right in the middle of Italy between Bobbio and Rome. Assissi home of Saint Francis and his Sermon to the Birds and the Creche at Christmas.

As I worked my way through the waves of English immigrants IFischer; discovered that there’s something you can’t escape. Religious history and political history are Siamese twins. You can’t understand the one without the other. And it’s our loss.

Each section of Fischer's Albion’s Seed has maps that show which part of England the majority of the members of that migrating group came from. Most of the Quaker immigrants came from northern counties including Yorkshire and Lancashire. As I was looking the maps, the highlighted regions seemed awfully familiar. They were. The counties that were home to the majority of Quaker immigrants overlap the paths the Irish monks took on their way to Europe. A path that took them through what became northern France and southern Germany all the way to the heel of Italy’s boot.

Those monks and missionaries planted their respect for the Creator and their belief that the believer could have a direct and personal experience of God. Perhaps that belief wasn’t so unusual in mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Ekhart and Francis of Assisi. They all spoke of the Inner Light. Quakers continued the teaching and spoke of the Inner Light, but they went further in their beliefs. For a Quaker no intermediary between believer and Creator was necessary. No ordained ministers, no bishops. And at that point they parted company with just about everyone else in England. 

Like all new believers, the early Quakers were eager to share what they had experienced. They ran into immediate problems. They claimed the right to preach where they would and refused to tithe to the Anglican Church, the Established Church. Unless you accepted the 39 articles of faith you couldn't be liscensed as a doctor, lawyer, or teach in the universities. 

The preaching got them pilloried, whipped or imprisoned. The refusal to tithe led to confiscation of crops, stock and property. Often the value of what was taken was more than they owed the church. Quakers also believed in equality before God and played it out in the streets and the council chambers. They refused to take of their hats. Not even when they were before the king.  Most Quakers also refused to swear oaths. Their yea was yea and their nay was nay.

Enter William Penn. The son of an admiral in favor with the court of Charles II he converted in his early twenties. He managed to get himself arrested almost immediately for attending Quaker meetings. Young William traveled with George Fox not only in England but in Europe. He soon turned his hand to writing for the church. He turned out more than sixty pamphlets or short books, almost half of them on liberty of conscience.

One of the reasons I took more time with the Quakers had to do with a 1670 court case. Penn was arrested with William Meade and charged with preaching to a crowd of more than five people. They were denied the right to see the charges against them and the judge directed the jury to reach a verdict without the defense being allowed to present a case.

The jury returned a not guilty verdict. They were “invited” to change their verdict. The jury refused. The impasse continued over several days. When the jury continued to refuse to change their minds, the judge committed the defendants and the jury to Newgate prison. Penn and Meade for contempt and the jurors because he could I guess. 

One of the juror’s petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus. After all he hadn’t committed a crime, he just refused to change his mind. Eventually, after some polite judicial back and forth over just which court he needed to go to for the writ, the writ was granted. Those justices also ruled that juries had the right to be free of intimidation. The right to habeas corpus in cases of unlawful detention was also upheld. Even though the trial was held in seventeenth century England, these rights found their way into American law.

CREATION PAST THE SIXTH DAY

 

Some of us believe it never stopped.

Before I tackle the Quakers I would like to revisit where at least some of their beliefs came from. 

 Formidable looking character isn't he? Easterners like Augustin didn't quite know what to make of the fellow from Britain. A big man, obdiously well educated. Didn't mind sharing his beliefs with anyone who would listen including basketweavers in their shops or women at their spinning wheels. Talking to women about theology! Some of the early eastern theologians weren't even sure women had souls. Certainly didn't have any busines talking about that God stuff. Remember Eve!I doubt if Pelgius ever mentioned Eve. 

 I don't remember when or how I ran into Pelagius. Briton. Might have been Welsh. Christian, but not a follower of what would become the Roman version of Christianity. He may have started out as one of the last Druids. His tonsure resembled that of the Druids, head shaved up from the ears over the forehead, hair in the back left long. Very different from the shave the top of the head that was becoming common in the rest of the growing Christian world. 

I learned to keep my curiosity to myself when out Methodist pastor made one of his rare home visits. I started to ask questions only to get "he's a heretic!" OooKaaay. Back to the internet for you. Most of what we know comes from scraps and what was written accusing him of heresy. He was not a believer in Augustin's Original Sin. He apparently believed that a person could become holy, not by grace, but by immitating Jesus as much as possible. Anyway what do I know. I only know that what has come down speaks to me. And apparently spoke to others including William Penn the Quaker and a contemporary Otrhodox bishop, Timothy Ware. I've been tap dancing on the line between conventional Christianity, whatever that is, and the still not mainline beliefs that include most Quakers and what the conventionals choos to call paganism. Whatever that means. 

Look at the animals roaming the forest: God’s spirit dwells within them.
Look at the birds flying across the sky: God’s spirit dwells within them.
Look at the tiny insects crawling in the grass: God’s spirit dwells within them.
Look at the fish in the river and sea: God’s sprit dwells within them.

There is no creature on earth in whom God is absent….When God pronounced that His creation was good it was not only that his hand had fashioned every creature; it was that His breath had brought every creature to life. Look too at the great trees of the forest; look at the wildflowers and the grass in the fields; look even at your crops. God’s spirit is present within all plants as well. The presence of God’s spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God’s eyes nothing on the earth is ugly. Attributed to Pelagius of Britain late fourth century/fifth century.

“If God were to stop speaking the whole created universe would cease to exist. In the rising of the morning sun God speaks to us of grace and new beginnings, and the fertility of the earth is a sign of how life wells up from within, from the dark unknown place of God.” Born in the early ninth century this is from the teachings of John Scotus Eriugena, John the Irishman, from Ireland. John taught that all Creation speaks to us with the voice of God. He echoed an earlier voice from the island fringes,

Pelagius was said to have claimed he'd met pagans who were better "Christians" than some Christians he had the bad luck to meet. 

And an English Orthodox bishop, Timothy Ware seems to echo the assertion of Tom Cowan, a Celtic shaman that Creation is less a bringing into existence of some “thing” from no “thing” as a reshaping. And that God can no more not create than he/she can cease to exist.

I wonder if this way of looking at the world can be traced back to the area just west of Central Asia where the Celtic tribes and the tribes that overran Greece after the age of Homer are supposed to have originated. It’s a way of looking at the world that seems almost alien. We were and are taught that God created the world. Finito. Believing that Creation is ongoing pulls the rug out of a lot of assumptions. Creation becomes fluid, Infinite. Tantalizing. Blink and the world changes.

Or careful or you might find a Goddess taking up residence in your imagination, keeping watch on the seascape until you finally answer the door. At least she had the grace not to roll her eyes with an “it’s about time.”

And some of the modern Celtic followers see Creation not as spoken but sung. A great music echoing through the Universe. If the Creator stops singing Creation stops. Now if I could just get my head back where I was going before everything went to heck a few years ago. 

WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

 Or God/dess help us this poster is probably not only registered to vote but does. I don't know if this person just slept through science class or was homeschooled with workbooks that featured Adam and Eve and the dinosaurs. And yes these do exist. Or at least they did about twenty years ago because I saw them in a Portland "Christian" bookstore while my sister was picking up more Christmas decorations. 

Well I was planning to post about Quaker ideas on liberty and then The Politburo of Teabilly Mockery posted this little gem. This is why we can't have nice things. The Bible is not a science text book. Most of it was written almost two thousand years or more ago when a good many of our fellow humans believed the earth revolved around the sun. Those that bothered to think about it all. Matthew was, so it is said, a reformed tax collector. Peter was a fisherman. Paul was a tentmaker. 

We didn't "lose" the tech to go back to the moon, we just have to reinvent the wheel so to speak. And decide to spend the cash to do it. There is a great line in Apollo 13 when Jim Lovell is taking a tour group through. "A computer that fits in a room" imagine that. I probably have more computing ability in my phone than the Houston Space Center had to follow the Apollo missions. Catch the movie if you have the chance. Slide rules, computer monitors, smoking in the room, coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. 

Those shots of the earth from the moon were not composites they were taken by at least one astronaut with his very own camera. Oh and this should really blow his tiny little mind. Voyager I "woke up" and fired it's thrusters ot make a tine course change. Forty years old and more than a billion miles away from home. That blows my mind. 

I've known about this mindset for years but I simply cannot imagine living in a universe where you believe that just about everything is a trick of the devil or that the tiny little god you follow has filled your world with deceptions to test your so called faith. Is it fear that keeps your mnd and imagination in a straight jacket? 

Do I sound cranky this morning. Damn straight. 

BEING CALLED A LIBERAL IS NOT AN INSULT

 AOL comments used to be quite the experience. If you enjuoyed swimming in the castle middens in July in a heat wave. Anyway a blastfrom the past. 

 I’ve been dipping my toes in some of the comments sections over on AOHell (yes, Lisa there does lie madness). Considering how some of the posters feel about the Huffington Post, I wonder how they’ll feel about the merger with AOL. After all there’s no site I know of that’s crazier than AOL, so where can they go? :-)It can be useful place to pick up journal ideas sometimes though. There are folks on those boards who treat the word Liberal as if was an insult. I guess in their eyes it is.

I’ve got to tell you though, as possible insults go, liberal is about as mild as it gets. And since a few of them claim to be Christians, I’d love to ask them if they’ve read that pesky little verse about hating your neighbor. I seem to remember that Jesus said something along the lines of “saying that you hate your neighbor in your heart is the same as murdering him.”

I’ve been researching my family tree over the last year. And the ancestors seem to run heavily to New England dissenters and seekers, Mid Atlantic Quakers and the odd Maryland or Virginia Roman Catholic. I’m sure there’s the odd Anglican in the mix, too.

A distant cousin four centuries or so removed, Thomas Gerard, went to the stake with Robert Barnes in July of 1540 for being too Protestant. They hanged three Catholics the same day because they wouldn’t sign the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII the head of the church in England. Henry, it seems, was something of an equal opportunity oppressor when it came to religion. (did I really say that?)

Ironically, Thomas Cromwell who pointed out to Henry that if he was head of the English church he could basically grant himself a divorce and get on with the business of getting a male heir without interference from Rome had gone to the block two days earlier. He’d let the genie out of the bottle, miscalculated how far Henry was willing to go on the road to reformation.

A great uncle a dozen or so times removed, John Gerard, spent a stretch in the tower in Elizabeth’s time for being too Catholic. He was a Jesuit who had been functioning as an underground priest. He managed to survive, finally went into exile for good and wrote his memoir

Members of the family have probably been called ranters, levelers, diggers, schismatics, heretics, papists, atheists and/or blasphemers. Remember, being called a Puritan or a Quaker was not meant as a term of affection. Heck, being called a liberal is relatively tame.

And that was while they were in England. Once they arrived in the New World each group became targets for the others. Roger Williams came into conflict with the Puritan leadership in what became Massachusetts and ended up founding Rhode Island.

Thomas Hooker was no believer in universal suffrage, but did believe that if you belonged to the church (and were a man) you should have the right to vote even if you weren’t a land owner. He and his followers helped found Connecticut.

Quakers who showed up preaching in Massachusetts were lucky if they were just kicked out of the colony. Come back and you risked being flogged at the back end of a cart while being paraded through the town. A few insisted on coming back a third or fourth time and finally faced a date with the village hangman. Not that many, but it's scary how fast the persecuted turn around and become persecuters.

I guess that set the pattern for what has happened over the years. As long as there was someplace else to go, we could get out of Dodge if we couldn't get along with each other. But, now there’s no frontier to run to; we have to stay where we are. Hopefully, somewhere along the line we’ll finally grow up (sort of) and learn to get along (maybe).

THE LIBERTY TO ORDER OTHERS-COLONIAL VIRGINIA

 Most of this material comes from David Fischer’s Albion’s Seed.

Well, I’m beginning to understand why a lot history got left out when I took US history. Twice. High school and university. :-P.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Dr. Samuel Johnson. Died 1784.

“I am an aristocrat, I love liberty; I hate equality.” John Randolph of Roanoke Virginia

These quotes help to capture the paradox of the love of liberty expressed by the gentry of Virginia. The gentry, who controlled between to seventy five percent of the land and other productive assets including a growing population of African American slaves, had an exceptionally strong sense of their English liberties. While many Englishman turned out reams of prose and poetry celebrating their heritage of English liberty going back to Magna Charta those visions often contradicted each other. New England’s ordered liberty that emphasized a liberty that often subordinated individual liberty to the community and the church was much different from the hierarchical vision of liberty that grew up in colonial Virginia and the broad lands of the Chesapeake.

Hegemony and hierarchy, the uprights that held the rungs of Virginia’s social ladder. Hegemony was a condition of dominion over others and a dominion over themselves. When a traveler named Andrew Barnaby spoke of the colonial Virginian’s he observed “the public and political character of the Virginians corresponds with their private one: they are haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power.”

In Fischer’s opinion that was the key of Virginia colony’s definition of liberty; the power to rule. To rule over others, not to be ruled by them. The opposite of the power to rule was slavery. You didn’t have to actually be a slave, just have lost your power to rule over others.

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,
Arose from out of the Azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. James Thomson

There’s almost innocent arrogance in this verse. Britain, protected by its namesake stormy Channel, has the right to rule; Heaven has spoken. Simply by being the sons of southern England’s landed gentry, Virginia’s gentry assumed the right to rule over others.

In Virginia’s hierarchical paradise, your status was determined by the liberties you possessed. The big land owners on the top rung of the ladder had the most liberty. They controlled most of the land and had enough power to negotiate favorable tax rates and limitations on the power of the colonial government from sympathetic governors. Granted the colonial government, at least in the first generations, didn’t have a lot of responsibilities. The patriarchal head of the new world manor regarded his dependents, those with less liberty as his responsibility. This protection could extend to immediate family, wards, house servants, visitors, farm workers and slaves.

Next came the thirty percent or so of the population that were small farmers and tradesmen. They were expected to bend the knee to the gentry and the established church, but they could give orders to the landless laborers they employed.

The laborers seem to have had at least one liberty. They could quit and look for a job somewhere else. But in a colony with large separated land holdings and few towns that may not have counted for a lot.

At the bottom of the ladder were the slaves. They had no liberties that the law was obliged to recognize. Anything they were granted was dependent on their masters. The masters had the liberty. They had none. Fischer uses a term, laisser asservir. It literally means the “right to enslave.” He doesn’t explore where the basis of the belief of the planters that they had the right to enslave others. It may go back to the whole concept of “Britannia Rules the Waves.” We have the right to do this simply because we’re British and it’s mandated by Heaven. I feel another headache coming on.

The ideal of hegemony was not only public, but personal. The ideal colonial member of Virginia’s elite was a master not only of others but of himself. To be truly free, you must rule your thoughts and actions; not be ruled by them. And while they believed in minimal intervention by the colonial government they also believed that part of their personal liberty was the duty to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of their station. Well, that’s one saving grace I suppose.

I’d love to go back to the 1780’s and invite the likes of Jefferson, Adams and Washington to a little get together.