For those devotees who feared that Bagophily.com might already be dead, the answer is "not yet".

Indeed, I have had little time to dedicate to baggy things recently. Blame a hectic travel schedule, a backlog of work, screaming clients, and a new house and garden.

But now comes a more serious threat: Google has announced that for Blogger, "FTP publishing will no longer be available after May 1, 2010".

Translated into language that the average baggist may just understand, that means that I'm going to have to move this blog to another server. That will undoubtedly mess up all the careful design I've devoted so much sweat and care to over the years. And if things go awry, this blog may disappear forever into the depths.

If I do manage to make the switch, Bagophily.com will come back bigger, brighter and better than ever before. Once I've got a break from travelling, worked off the backlog, assuaged my clients, and got house and garden in order. I promise.

"Folders are full to bursting", but that misses the pun in German: "brechend" can mean both "bursting" and "vomiting".

The Wormser Zeitung, a local newspaper in Worms, Germany, carried this article about Gerd Clemens and his bag habit on 31 March 2010.

The accompanying photo has a beaming Gerd with the usual photogenic bags: Finnaviation's barfing reindeer, TUI's bright yellow "Take it with a smile", and a selection of the Virgin Atlantic Limited Edition series.

As a result of the article, the media pack descended on the Clemens household: Gerd says that SWR, a TV channel, carried a story about him in its local news programme on 21 April.

"Wormser Zeitung"? Schoolboys will perhaps recall another reason to remember Worms, Gerd's hometown: the entertainingly named Diet of Worms, held in 1521, in which Holy Roman Empire worthies quizzed Martin Luther.

Who said you couldn't learn anything as a bag collector?

Click here for the original Wormser Zeitung article, or here for a PDF version. Bagophily.com recommends Google Translate for those whose German is not up to par.

If you are the sort of person who wants to travel hundreds of kilometres to a dingy warehouse in order to queue up in front of tables loaded with shoeboxes full of tatty, used barfbags, then this list of airline collectibles shows is for you.

Thanks to Dutch baggist Niek Vermeulen, who has been known to haunt such events, for this info. He can be easily spotted at the shows: he's the one wearing a yellow "Barfbags Wanted" baseball cap, haggling with vendors in the shadows.

Singapore collector Chen Ying Hao is featured in a half page in the 17 April issue of the Straits Times.

This insightful article details some of Yinghao's collecting tricks, including the shameful practice of pretending to be ill while aloft.

On the same page is an advertisement trumpeting "sensuality in the bathroom". Click on the image on the left for more.

Visit Yinghao's collection at http://airsicknessbags.sg/

Thanks to Straits Times journalist Nicholas Yong for this item.

Alaskan baggist Bruce Kelly tells me that he has crossed the 5000-bag threshold. "Not nearly enough to challenge the top 2", he laments. But he's off to Mexico to forage for fresh items, so expect his total to rise soon.

Hamburg collector Oliver Conradi has gone public with his bagnumbers - in the German tabloid newspaper Bild.

Oliver featured in a story about Hamburg airport, along with brusque credit-card promoters and hidden railway signage.

Oliver's most recent bagnumbers? 5792 bags from 1399 airlines, collected over 30 years. According to Bild, That's more than Niek Vermeulen, the current Guinness record holder.

Oliver is now 45, says the Bild journalist. A bit of mental arithmetic tells us that he must have started collecting bags at the impressionable age of 15.

If you have teenage children, perhaps it's time to warn them now about the dangers of baggery.

That is, if you don't want to learn of their exploits from the inside pages of a sensationalist tabloid rag.

This Times newspaper article says that Kirin (a Japanese brewer) is using bags to advertise its alcohol-free beer to sloshed salarymen riding home in taxis after their nightly male-bonding binges.

An advertising venture doomed to fail, I predict. If the said salaryman is sloshed enough to use one of Kirin’s bags, he is unlikely to remember the message it carries the following morning.

Nice try, Kirin. But perhaps advertising express flower-delivery services to appease irate spouses would be a better use of scarce bagspace?

Thanks to Steve Silberberg for this alert.