As volcanic ash from the Eyjafjallajokull glacier drifts across Europe, we were struck by the gallows humour of this email, which arrived yesterday from a Crikey reader:
 
In a previous life I had occasion to see the maintenance report on a British Airways 747 that flew through the plume of an Indonesian volcanic eruption in 1982.
 
Typically, a 747 maintenance report resembles your common-or-garden telephone white pages in terms of length, readability and overall ability to pique the reader's interest.
 
In what can only be described as a classic example of droll understatement and unequivocal brevity, the BA maintenance report consisted of a single piece of paper on which the chief engineer had recommended, "Replace engines 1, 2, 3 and 4."
 
It places the annoying inconvenience of air travellers and the financial losses of airlines in a certain kind of simple perspective.

Can't they just put a big coffee filter over the intakes ,we gotta get to where we wanna go!
 
 
D
 

"The last wish of the Icelandic economy was to have its ashes scattered over Europe.
 
The ash cloud from a volcano in Iceland that has caused travel chaos across Europe has spawned numerous jokes on various Internet blog sites, Facebook and Twitter.
 
Iceland is only just emerging from the financial crisis and the North Atlantic island nation of just 320,000 has spent months wrangling with Britain and the Netherlands over debts incurred after its tops banks went under in 2008.
 
It owes the two countries some $5 billion as a result of its failed "Icesave" accounts, but many Icelanders fiercely oppose a repayment and say taxpayers should not have to pay for a mess left by private banks under the watch of other regulators.
 
"Icelandic taxpayer to Britons and Dutch: "Forget Icesave; Kiss My ASH!" one Twitter feed read.
 
Is Iceland getting the last word? Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph, wrote in a blog: "Call it Iceland's revenge, but it appears there is no more effective a way for a small country to get its own revenge back on a larger one, than to have an erupting volcano in its midst."