So come and join the party over at the Magtastic Blogsplosion!

Remember I talked about us getting nominated for a magazine Oscar? Here come the BAFTAs.

Ling has won In-Book status at the D&AD awards for its groundbreaking covers. Judges included Terry Jones (founder of i-D) and Janet Froelich (creative director of the New York Times magazine).

Good thing cava's cheap in Barcelona.

UPDATE: We've celebrated by putting Ling online! See it (without the ads) with clickable pages over here.

For all fans of storytelling, computer games, short films, silliness and big screen mayhem. Come along!

Here's the blurb from the catalogue:

"You don't need cameras to make films. Instead, get a Playstation. Amateur filmmakers around the world are doing just that, subverting videogames to tell their own stories, and sharing them online.

Showcasing the very best in the growing genre of 'machinima', Andrew Losowsky and Nick Richards will blow you away with comedies, action sequences, moving dramas and jaw-dropping art, all made with a mouse and gamepad. Neither gaming nor cinema will ever be the same again."

NEVER THE SAME AGAIN!

Another thing inflight magazines don't do is acknowledge that you're on an aeroplane. In fact they actively try to make you forget you are. Who are they kidding? Passengers don't become fools the moment they step on board, so we decided we would create a double page at the back of the mag, filled with fun things to do on the plane.

From flirting with the person next to you, to walking like a spaceman to and from the bathroom, it would be a playful regular feature of in-plane activities to make you smile. We found a great illustrator at very short notice, and worked together to create something we called 'Pasatiempos' (Pastimes, Puzzles in Spanish) or 'L&ing' (Landing, geddit?).

Regular readers will know, we then beat Spain's biggest publishing companies, plus the behemoth of inflight magazines Ink Publishing, to win the commission to create our unique inflight magazine Ling for revolutionary Spanish airline Vueling.

And today, it's our Pasatiempos page that's been nominated for an SPD award. People use the phrase "Oscars of the [industry name here] world" rather a lot. So I'll just list some of the other nominees.

GQ, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Vanity Fair, Wired, Esquire, TIME, Metropolis, National Geographic, Fast Company, Marie Claire.

The nominated graphic was this one, though it could have been any of them really. Further examples are on the illustrator, Heads on Boards' site here.

I'm sure, in years to come, such industry shouts will be passé, but for a small company like ours, to have our only magazine recognised in a big awards thingy like this one, just reminds us of one thing: we were right all along.

We just got started. Watch this (air)space.

UPDATE: You can leaf through some recent issues here. Go full screen for the proper experience.

62. (Actually, 62 and a half, if you count the parachute jump.)

I recounted, twice, blushing harder each time. It's a lot of time in the air, several days of my life in lines for security, and more over-priced food and copies of The Economist than any man has any right to suffer. Its also more than 90,000 miles of flying, which is something like 24 times around the circumference of the globe. If you listen carefully, you can hear my bodyclock spinning.

Here's a spiderweb of my 2007 European routes:

And here's a graph of my airport consumption (click for detail). The fattest bit, unsurprisingly, is Barcelona:

In some more numbers:

29 airports visited
13 countries visited, in four continents (transit obviously doesn't count, and I didn't make it across to Asia while in Istanbul)
1 Business Class upgrade
2 missed planes (one for lost passport, one for when the clocks went forward in March - yes, really)
2 flights booked that I chose not to take

And finally, the awards:

Best airport terminal: Zurich
Worst airport terminal: Yet again, Charles de Gaulle, though Miami ran it very close this year
Smallest airport terminal: Henri Coandă International
Best airline accessory: the KLM shop in Schipol, with an entire fake cabin to sit in
Strangest gadget: the airblowery thing that tests for gunpowder residue on furreners in the USA. Iris scanning looks fun, too
Strangest sight: 200 people dressed like nomads, waiting patiently in Ataturk Airport for their connection to Kyrgyzstan
Best movies: Virgin Atlantic
Best inflight mag: Ling. Obviously
Worst food: the lack of anything hot on a six-hour flight, due to the strike on Air France
Best customer service: Miami Airport, where the security guard offered me a swig of some confiscated whisky
Worst customer service: Everyone else in Miami Airport

I should also point out that I took a *lot* of trains and buses this year. But yes, I've been a bad carbon boy, and my flatmates no longer know who I am. This year didn't start well - a flight on 2nd Jan - but it will be a little better. Next year will be a LOT better. That, or I'll start giving the safety demonstrations myself.

(Image from The Great Circle Mapper, graph from Create a Graph and inspired by the latest, ever-wonderful, Feltron Report.)

I had the good fortune to meet this giant of a man (in every way) a few years ago. The current incumbent at the Telegraph, Andrew McKie, writes his personal tribute here, and doubtless wrote the (always unsigned) official send off, glorious in its minutiae of the man's own genealogy, here.

Unsurprisingly, he gets coverage elsewhere too. I haven't yet bought his autobiography, though it sounds essential reading to anyone who likes words. Wit, racconteur, bon viveur, penniless and generous, lover of life and lover of lives. He stopped writing due to ill health and lack of confidence a few years ago; his legacy isn't well known, but hugely loved by newspaper readers around the world. Click some links, buy his compilations of obits, read his words, laugh. It's what Hugh Massingberd - who died on the same date as WC Fields, as I'm sure he would have known - would want.

A few choice excerpts from his own obit:
"He was known to have eaten the largest breakfast ever in the Connaught, so overtaking the previous record-holder, the late Aga Khan. If a waiter listed the menu for breakfast - eggs, sausages, bacon, steak, mushrooms etc - Massingberd merely nodded. When the waiter enquired which he wanted, he would say, "All of them", and then worked his way through them. I often invited him with two others to eat a brace of pheasants. Three shared one, he ate the other. I suspected he went to McDonald's, ravenous, on the way home."

"In front of me, I have Hugh's copy of a book of Telegraph obituaries, complete with underlinings, showing details that particularly amused him.

Among the passages underlined are: "Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Knowles (who as a subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear - he survived but the bear expired)."

"Commander 'Braces' Bracegirdle of the Australian navy was asked by one of his sailors for compassionate leave on the grounds that his home town was under flood water 6ft deep, and his wife was only 5ft 3in high. Braces silently handed over an orange box and stamps to post it."

"Big Daddy, the 28-stone wrestler (real name, Shirley Crabtree) whose leotard was made from the chintz covers of his wife's sofa."

Hugh knew instinctively that it is our peculiarities - our failings, our embarrassments - that make us who we are."

Buy the book, and be very, very scared.

(via Cool Tools, where there are more egs)

It passed through the hands of the writer, the photo editor, the designer, the sub editor, the editor and finally went through a whole proofing process. During all of which no-one noticed something strange about my feet in this (lowres on the preview) photo:

All of which adds a subtle touch to the whole thing that rather pleases me. Only eagle-eyed readers will recognise the true nature of our magic.

Anyone know a good Catalan tattoo artist?