barry burton
a Song
No first class for me yesterday. The Delta flight was on a Song plane, though. Bright colors in the interior, well designed informative icons, little screens for each passenger, and hip music [I use this very loosely and only in comparison with the music played on Delta planes] during boarding.
The little screens pick up 20 live DirecTV stations, but reception was sometimes spotty. Oh, but the video was normal aspect ratio while the screens were widescreen and the video was just being stretched to fit instead of using black bars on the sides… soo everything looked wide / fat / stretched / annoying. I think a cool idea if the bugs can be worked out.
There was also a little jukebox system you could access from the touch screen as well. Not much more music selection than usually playing on the plane radio stations, but I could pick which songs to listen to and pause and SKIP and all. I did skip by the way. Some random song I tried that just didn’t pan out. The volume buttons looked nice and new and the headphone jack was normal, so no two prong affair was needed, and the whole thing sounded much less static-y than the normal old airplane sound things.
Among the music choices: the full album True Love Waits: Christopher O’Riley Plays Radiohead, as well as the full Bright Eyes album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. The intro to At the Bottom of Everything was removed, so while the lyrics “And then they splashed into the deep blue sea / Oh it was a wonderful splash” were still present, it isn’t clear that a plane is actually doing the crashing and splashing.
If anyone flies Delta, check out their new safety video. The passenger in the video demonstrating how to remove iPod headphones when the use of electronic devices is not permitted looks just like me. Well maybe nothing like me, except he is a twenty-something male with my hair. I think this will throw off a lot of people who are genuinely trying to learn from the video because having to flip up the matted mass of hair in order to access the ear adds a whole new complication to headphone removal that most people simply do not need to worry about.
Last night I went to a wedding. One of my mom’s friend’s son. Never knew him that well but saw him a lot over the years. The reception was at the Birmingham Country Club, so yeah, very nice but very traditional. Incidentally, the bride was my old friend Barret’s little sister so I got to see him again. That was nice. He is in school in L.A. now. Also my suspicions that Mountain Brook is in actuality a giant clique were confirmed: it seemed like every random Mountain Brook person I’ve ever known was there. Ok not really but still. I talked to Rainer and Andrew for a while, seeing them was a pleasant surprise. I also saw Mrs. Anderson but I didn’t speak to her because I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t remember me, especially with the longer hair and glasses. She is the very nice but very eccentric rich lady that some friends and I used to do landscaping for. Ahh the fun of the Anderson summers… excuse me while I reminisce of times gone by.
