The flight attendant on Frontier Airlines was really good about thanking us. At the end of the flight, she thanked us on behalf of herself, the other flight attendants, the pilot and first officer, the ground crew, their immediate families, their ex-wives who depend on their child support checks, any brothers-in-law who may be about to get their car repossessed, middle management, upper management, executive management, the janitor who is right now reading Hustler instead of cleaning a men's room in Concourse B, and "Humphrey the Bison who rode with us on the tail and winglets" of the plane. OK, I'm serious about the bison.
Basically, I like Frontier's "whole different animal" schtick. It's a fun thing that they have different animal pictures on the planes and have given them names and all that. From the window seat of Row 15, I was perfectly aligned with the Humphrey the Bison that was at the wind of the wing.
But there was something very weird to me about the phrase "who rode with us on the tail and winglets" to refer to a single bison. I had this feeling like, So they put Humph's head on the right wing - what's on the tail? His big shaggy ass? It doesn't seem right to me that they should perform some kind of dissection just to spread the joys of Humphrey around the plane. Southwest did not put Shamu through this kind of ... pain? Indignity? (And arguably, it's about time someone did give him a taste of his own medicine there.) Flagrant disregard of their own conceit that these pictures are actual creatures flying along with us on the plane?
(On more than 5 hours of sleep, I suspect I could come up with some comparison to the wisdom of Solomon and not chopping the disputed baby into two parts - which, by the way, always sort of makes me wonder whether the "one person divides, the other person picks first" rule can be made to work in this situation. It would almost surely have to be a lateral bisection, since the two ends are so dissimilar. I will leave applying the Biblical reference to the Frontier Airlines situation as an exercise for the reader.)
I am also well-disposed to the name Humphrey (which I also encountered this week as a blue macaw on the show Wonderfalls*) - my sister has a white Persian cat named Humphrey (brother: Fred) who has such a strong natural facial expression of self-satisfied, disparaging pomposity, especially when in repose, that I often think of him as "Harrumphrey."
(* In case you are wondering whether I have eschewed blog ads for the alternative of charging money for product placement, I have not. No doubt these frequent mentions of the show will stop once I have forgotten how good (and surprising and satisfying) the last several episodes were.)
(Note: handwriting this blog entry at Tam's desk, I realized that the way I form my capital H appears to have bee changed due to my linear algebra class. When studying for the tests, I came to write my H in the more efficient manner of left vertical line, then horizontal line that swings up to form the right vertical line because I found myself writing H a lot in the context of subspace H. I wonder if the change is permanent.)
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The entire group of Frontier animals can be found here. (Note that they named their mustang Sally and their cougar Sal.) I had wondered whether each plane in their fleet has a different animal, and that does appear to be the case. I rode home on the grey wolf plane.
4 comments:
It's hard for me to associate Humphrey with a bison. Our cat does live up to his name well (in the Bogart kind of way). He is also just the sweetest little guy you could hope to have swish your legs in greeting. Not to mention his sliding around on the floor (hard to get traction on hardwood when chasing a catnip-filled mouse!) Very un-bison-like behavior. :)
Jen, I also think your dear Humphrey would be extremely unimpressed with the typical bison diet - grasses, leaves, twigs, etc. - though Leo might be able to go for that kind of thing.
And your cat does have a certain Bogart-like gravitas that a bison is unlikely to match... :)
Do you think Leo would like Stu, the Eastern Cottontail?
Some of the names are obvious, but I do wonder how the other names got chosen. Perhaps the names of employees or was there a contest on choosing names?
Mom, good question. You'd think they'd have some kind of "kids vote to name Frontier's newest animal friends!" contest or something.
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