My brother and I were a bit late getting to our flight with Sun Country airlines. We hadn't really eaten anything, and we were pretty tired because the flight was early in the morning. Had we not been in such a state of unrest and stress and low bloodsugar and the like, we probably wouldn't have payed a lot of mind to what follows in this post. But we were in exactly such a state, and this was pretty hilarious.

Looking to occupy myself in some way, I semi-consciously took out the passenger safety manual from the pocket of the seat in front of me. At first glance, nothing seemed out of place. The illustrations on those things are always pretty funny to me for some reason I can never seem to nail down.

But then,


Explicit warnings against remote control car use in the cabin?


A ballerina complete with pink tutu bracing for a hopeless crash into the side of a mountain?

And most importantly,


Willy Wonka?

Or at least some poor chap in a plum colored late Victorian suit with tails and a top hat and ascot? How did he get so far removed from the 19th century? Did the Murlocks strike down the flight to San Juan?

Why the hell is he on this?

I figured it's like the whole Concorde thing a couple years ago. The glass elevator, innovative and cool as it was, failed to draw enough of a significant consumer base, so Wonka had to pull its plug some years back, which is a feat in of itself, as the great glass elevator isn't even plugged into anything. Now he's riding high in upstart airline funds, though clearly some of his pilots are a little unexperienced or something. Because he's crashing. And freaking out about it.

So I stole the safety manual and decided to write about it. I took the above pictures in New York out of a fear that somehow the TSA would figure out what I had and would take it back and yell at me. Nothing happened though, so I naturally figured that I totally outsmarted them with my wily smarts and all, hahaha. That should learn them well for cutting off my $8 TSA approved lock in Chicago, those goddamned approved-lock-cutting bastards.

I showed it to my family; some of them thought it was funny, others only that it was only strange. It's all very confusing, you know. I haven't a clue what to say.