Air travel and bodily gases...

Sperm: I'm thinking of trying the New York -SIN non-stop next year.

Dee: Talked to someone who took the flight from Sin-NY and she liked it. Movies galore. Not like NW which only has 10 movies. SQ has over 100! I don't quite like these direct flights though. My personal preference is to stop over at narita and have a bowl of Udon soup, have a little break before going onto the next leg. The new NW reclining seats aren't bad. Have lumbar massages on the chair. But still doesn't recline 180. You would think that if they got it down to 175, what's the extra 5 degrees?

Sperm: Ah yes, the Udon break at Narita is always looked forward to. Alas, NW has always managed to screw up its arrival and departure times, and without fail, the times when I was looking forward to a bowl of Udon is usually the times when my arriving flight is running way late. Unlike D the P, the Merm gets to travel in the back where the seat pitches 2 inches at most, where you have to use your knee to prop up the tray table when you eat, and somewhere over the Pacific, your knee and the seat in front become one, and the only massage you will get is when the son of a bitch in the seat behind you starts kicking you because you can't stop farting.

Above is an authentic email exchange between two pals from Singapore Airlines days. 'Dee the Pee' is a senior manager in a Fortune 500 firm and is now based in Bangkok. 'Sperm Face' hails from Ipoh even though his Cantonese is hopeless and definitely worse than mine. He is an engineer based in Florida.

I am blessed with the fortune of having made these lifelong friends during the airline days. To me, these friendships are equally if not stronger than those I made during school days. I consider these old farts, my treasures.

A check with the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary has this to say of the verb, 'fart'. Etymology: Middle English ferten, farten; akin to Old High German ferzan to break wind, Old Norse freta, Greek perdesthai, Sanskrit pardate he breaks wind; often vulgar: to expel intestinal gas from the anus.

A friend once commented that as age creeps in, the rectum muscles become more lax. So, each time he goes to pee, the intestinal gas always seems to find a way to escape from his behind. Quite embarrassing, he says, especially when he is at the public loo.

A mother of another friend wanted her kids to believe that ladies do not fart. None of his siblings believed it because his sister was farting every once so often.

Yet another friend, after a few years of blissful wedlock, found out to his disgust that, good gracious... his lovely wife was farting. He could not endure his wife farting in his presence and announced that he would have none of it, whatsoever. In his own words, 'limp c**k, man!'

Uh, me? In the presence of my own self and quite often my missus', I not only fart with passion, but I belch, burp, grunt, sneeze, snore, and snort too. I particularly enjoy farting and burping, and for that matter, peeing as well, while underwater.

Pity those marine creatures down there, though...