Superficially, this is about a chap with no hair, whom I saw combing his hands through his non-existent fringe as he disembarked. The subject of the hair of bald men is a zen koan, a riddle with no ready solution, the purpose of which is to defeat the rational mind and thereby promote the use of some other faculty. I was very pleased to see my very own version of this koan, brought to life, as is went through Kuala Lumpur International.
The image that makes this haiga is another kind of koan: why do people fly insultingly dreadful airlines when they know what will happen? In the case of this photo, I had to reach Eindhoven for a new project, and this meant that I had the opportunity to try one of Europe's most famously insulting airlines for the first time - they were the only airline that flew direct to my destination. Who would have guessed that they kept us waiting on the tarmac (not in a departure gate) for 45 minutes? I struggled with the modernday koan as I waited.
The wrapper looks like Farsi (Persian) under the Chinese. The bottom script is backwards (note the 500 written backwards) and is hard to see with my old eyes but looks Cyrillic, could be Tajik. In any case both are likely from the Indo-Iranian language branches, just a guess based on next door neighbor countries to China.
2 comments:
Superficially, this is about a chap with no hair, whom I saw combing his hands through his non-existent fringe as he disembarked. The subject of the hair of bald men is a zen koan, a riddle with no ready solution, the purpose of which is to defeat the rational mind and thereby promote the use of some other faculty. I was very pleased to see my very own version of this koan, brought to life, as is went through Kuala Lumpur International.
The image that makes this haiga is another kind of koan: why do people fly insultingly dreadful airlines when they know what will happen? In the case of this photo, I had to reach Eindhoven for a new project, and this meant that I had the opportunity to try one of Europe's most famously insulting airlines for the first time - they were the only airline that flew direct to my destination. Who would have guessed that they kept us waiting on the tarmac (not in a departure gate) for 45 minutes? I struggled with the modernday koan as I waited.
Toodlepip,
Hobbes
The wrapper looks like Farsi (Persian) under the Chinese. The bottom script is backwards (note the 500 written backwards) and is hard to see with my old eyes but looks Cyrillic, could be Tajik. In any case both are likely from the Indo-Iranian language branches, just a guess based on next door neighbor countries to China.
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