No special bags for King Abdullah of Jordan. In a demonstration of solidarity with his subjects, the Hashemite King reaches for the same bag as plebs who board a flight with the Jordanian national carrier.

The photos (courtesy of Hamburg-based baggist Oliver Conradi) show His Majesty about to board a limo after deplaning at Hamburg Airport.

Oliver also reports that the flight crew were served with catering from that famed creator of precooked emesis bag contents, McDonald's.

Still, at least the Royal Jordanian bag bears a royal insignia to tell His Majesty what airline he's flying. Despite massive increases in the US defence budget, George Bush still uses plain white bags on Air Force One. So does Vladimir Putin on the "Putini". I wonder if Queen Elizabeth uses a bag bearing the royal standard?

Famed German baggist Walter Brinker paid a long-overdue visit to the bagophily.com headquarters on 14 February. He met the bagophily.com senior management, inspected the archives, and shared bag-collecting gossip with staff.

Walter (left) is pictured here with bagophily.com's Senior Baggist, Paul Mundy. Paul is seen holding a prized item from Walter's collection: an ancient German bag saying "Nach Gebrauch, nicht aus dem Fenster werfen, sondern auf dem Boden stellen" (After use, do not throw out of the window, but place on the floor).

Unfortunately despite the best efforts of bagophily.com's caterer and wine cellarer, Walter remembered to take this bag back home with him.

This is the second of a series about bagophiles in their natural habitat. Want to have your picture on bagophily.com? Send me a jpg, and I'll put it on the web!

Air Koryo: This rare item says "For your refuses", above an illustration of a plane strewing garbage into the flightpath of a migrating waterfowl.

For those masses of dogshit bag lovers out there, the I Love My Dog website is a must-see!

Learn how to pick up pooch poop without pooping your paws!

The most coveted bag on the planet has got to be from the Space Shuttle. Massachusetts baggist Steve Silberberg actually has one: he says it comes with a Wash 'n Dri moist towelette inside.

"Unfortunately I don't have another one or know how to find another one," he says.

Fellow American bagophile David Shomper has tried to get these bags from NASA in Houston and Cape Kennedy, without success.

Several weeks ago, I wrote to Sir Richard Branson at Virgin Atlantic asking for a set of Virgin's Limited Edition bags for each member of the barfbags egroup.

This morning I received the following response from Virgin's media department:

Thank you for your letter to Richard, which he has forwarded to me to reply to. Thank you also for your support of our new sickbags, a project we all enjoyed immensely.
As I am sure you can imagine since the launch we have received many requests for copies of the bags. However, unfortunately we are unable to accommodate these requests, as we particularly wanted the sickbags to be covetable. To that end we made them limited edition, and apart from a few select competition prizes, only available when flying on Virgin Atlantic.

Ah well, it was worth a try.

Actually, I have to confess that I have succumbed and bought the Virgin Atlantic bagset on Ebay. The first bags I've ever obtained honestly! (The rest have either been stolen, or acquired from others who have similarly purloined them.)

I have a policy of not buying or selling bags, but the likelihood of getting free bags from Virgin was slim, and the temptation was just too great...

You can admire the full set of bags here.

I also have a single bag from the series (catalogued as virginatlantic19) available as a swap. This offer is for collectors who do not already have a Limited Edition set (be honest!).

If you've ever been to the International Air Transport Exchange Days in Frankfurt (which I haven't), you'll be sure to recognize Brazilian collector Denir Camargo.

Denir is the source of many of the lovely Latino bags in the bagophily collection. He says he's been at every Frankfurt bagfair since 1993. He's also hoping to go to Gatwick 2005 (a British planelovers convention?) and Frankfurt later this year.

You can reach Denir through the barfbags egroup. Click on the photo for a larger version.

This is the first of a series about bagophiles in their natural habitat. Want to have your picture on bagophily.com? Send me a jpg, and I'll put it on the web!

China Eastern's bag design department clearly needs to boost its English language skills. They took three goes before they got the words "Water-proofed" right.

Check out all three designs here.

February's bagsite is Petr Manda's airsicknessbags.czechian.net. This young Czech collector has a rapidly growing collection of over 300 bags. A nice, clean design, easy to navigate... There's even a Most Wanted section, so you know what to send Petr for Christmas.