After hours couped up in a plane the last place I would have thought that anyone would have wanted to sleep would have been in another plane. But the Swedish designer, Oscar Dios, thinks otherwise and is in the process of fitting-out a retired Boeing 747 as a hotel. The thirty year old aircaft will be known as the “Jumbo Hostel” when it starts taking the fare-paying public again.
Stockholm Jumbo Hostel
Jumbo Hostel Interior
It has twenty five rooms, including the deluxe Cockpit Suite. The normal rooms will have three people, in bunks, to a room and each room will have shared bathrooms and showers. Flat-screen televisions in each room will double as arrival/departure boards – just right for the plane-spotters.
There are more Jumbo Hostel photos [^] at Wired, and there is more information at Official Jumbo Hostel Website [^].
The Power of Blogs
It is truly amazing the rise in the power of blogs as a communication medium. Blogs (or web logs) started in the pre-Web 2.0 days, sometime in the mid-1990’s, as being little more than online diary or journal, hand-coded in HTML. Now they are beginning to be seen as a valid method of communicating on a large range of ideas and issues.
One thing has brought it home to me how influential blogs have become. A few days ago it was announced that Private Harry Lamin [^] would be commemorated on a series of British Indian Ocean Territory Postage stamps [^]. The stamps mark 90 years of remembrance for the fallen of The Great War, the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day.
Harry’s "claim to fame" is in being the subject of a blog by his grandson, who posts the the letters that Harry sent from the Front on a blog exactly 90 years after they were written.
Is this a sign of how global our outlook has become that a group of islands half-way between Africa and Indonesia is recognising the sacrifices made by "ordinary" people and families more than 90 years ago.
This is a date that deserves remembering, regardless of what has happened since. It is a shame that Harry is being commemorated so far from home. But it is a revelation that he is being remembered in such a manner at all.
It will be interesting to see if there are any other people recognised in this release, there are no indications on the BIOT Post Office [^]. The Australian and British Post Offices have uncharacteristically decided to let this important date slip by unremembered.
Come 11th November, here at Brizbunny "We Will Remember Them".