Austrian Airlines: Masters of Irony

I was in Macedonia over the weekend. Fifteen hours of travel on Friday. Twelve hours of return travel on Sunday. Thank goodness Saturday at Lake Ohrid was freaking great. On my return journey, Austrian Airlines gave me two reasons to have a good laugh within a couple of hours. On my first leg, from Skopje to Vienna, I gratefully received a meal -- American airlines take note: you get food even on flights out of Skopje -- only to have it slap me in the face with one of the worst examples of marketing over-reach in history. This is what the meal looked like. And, here, a little closer up, you can see the reassuring text that some ambitious marketer had printed on the label atop the plastic ramekin of industrial airline desert. This, in a nutshell -- or, in this case, in a ramekin -- is why marketers get a bad name. I'm always telling Flame-Haired Angel that marketing is the art of telling the best version of the truth. And then some dick-head comes along and calls some plasticated vat spawn "homemade", and I'm right back to square freaking one. Not long after my encounter with the undead desert, I changed planes in Vienna, for my onward flight to London. In the departure lounge area, many gates were boarding very close to each other. This pairing of two gates, side-by-side, struck me as likely the result of a dare: And, just in case you missed it... Not that I don't advocate Israelis and Iranians taking off their shoes and being fondled in close proximity to one another. ..