Passengers will soon be able to puke into designer bags on Virgin Atlantic.

Oz Dean, owner of the much-admired Design for Chunks barfbag design site, has struck a deal with the airline. Graphic designers can enter the annual Design for Chunks competition. This year, there's a difference: they can see their artwork exhibited on 500,000 real Virgin Atlantic inflight sickbags.

The top 20 designs from this year's competition will be printed and distributed globally on Virgin Atlantic flights for a period of 6 months. The potential audience is 2.1 million passengers.

Do the maths: that make one bag for every 4.2 passengers. A pretty fair usage rate.

Bagophily.com predicts a surge in Virgin ticket sales, with avid bag collectors ransacking seat pockets in search of mint-condition bags.

Thanks to Rune Tapper for this news.

A barfbag with the letters "B O B" written on it, found in the toilet of a United plane to Los Angeles, forced the 747 to return to Sydney.

"B O B" might have meant "best on board" (flight attendants' slang for attractive passengers). Or it might have been "bomb on board" (which is why the pilot did an about-turn).

But it might just have been a reference to Bob the Barfbag (left), who stars in Graham Curran's www.vomitorium.co.uk website.

According to The Age, Aussie prime minister John Howard supported the pilot's decision. The first time a barfbag has attracted official recognition at Head of Government level?

Perhaps if United were to provide decent bag designs, they would have fewer problems with bored passengers and crew graffitizing their bags. A well-designed bag would cost a fraction of the $1 million cost of diverting the aircraft.

Jablos Kotztüten-Museum, www.kotztueten-museum.de: an excellent virtual museum devoted to the humble airsickness bag, curated by Georg Jablonowski. Sadly, in German only. Includes not only Georg's collection, but also informative and witty displays to entertain young and old alike. Entry is free -- click on the ticket on the museum homepage to enter. Don't miss the museum shop, which has all the items you need to make, store and display your bags.

aces01

Check any bag in the Gallery, and you'll see a name underneath it, like the aces01 on the left.

That's the name of the bag image in my filing system. The scan of the bag front is called a (as in aces01a.jpg). The back is called b, and other parts are c, d and so on.

The second bag from a particular airline is 02, as in aces02a.jpg.

Logical, eh?

But why go to all this trouble?

To help other bag collectors identify and compare bags. The world bag collecting community (a small but, er..., elite group) wants to put together a worldwide directory of bag designs. And www.bagophily.com has been designated as the reference collection.

Would make my mother proud...