I'm surprised you didn't work an equation into your piece yourself, seeing as how trendy they are.

Still, well played. I wish I moved in circles where one could get paid for writing book reviews.

The Picard:

Double strength Earl Grey tea with milk and a shot of absinthe.

At Boston Logan airport this past June on a Thursday morning I was selected for special attention.

I got the most thorough search I've ever experienced, both bodily and through my carry-on bags. They also asked me about 1000 questions.

By the way, if a friendly TSA officer meandering up and down the checkpoint line asks you what your favorite candy bar is, apparently "Reese's Peanut Butter Cups" is the wrong answer.

I didn't get pissed off or anything... in fact I was kind of amused. I actually managed to get to the airport early enough that I had a few extra minutes. My good-natured amusement was not received well by the Protectors of Freedom. The guy who wanded and then patted my entire body thoroughly reprimanded me that I'd better "take this seriously."

The woman who went through both my carry on bags leafed through my journals with interest. When I asked her if that was part of the screening process she reprimanded me because she was "just doing her job" and I should refrain from making it any more difficult for her.

These people are supposed to be public servants, the TSA. Instead they act like the government stormtrooper stereotype you'd expect to see in anti-fascist dystopian speculative fiction. It's as if they're eagerly chomping at the bit at helping to inflict exactly the type of freedom-squashing backlash that terrorism is designed to elicit. You scare the people, the government cracks down, and the grass roots start to see the point in the terrorist's objections to power-hungry "imperialist" America. It's as if these TSA employees are hypnotized drones controlled by Al-Qaida and Bin Laden via mind control rays, and they do exactly what Osama was hoping they would do. Treat all air travelers like expendable, tormentable, dismissable cattle.

From now on I'm going to arrive two hours early for every flight so that if they pull me aside for a thorough body search I'll just strip nude right there in front of everyone. I wonder if they'll tase me.

I also happened to have a small camcorder in my carry-on. I wonder what they would have done if I'd turned it on during the baggage search and said "You don't mind if I videotape you searching my belongings, do you?"

A paranoid part of me wonders whether this search was truly random and, if not, what tipped them off. Part of me wonders about the post I made on LiveJournal a few days earlier about my flight out there which poked fun at the TSA. It was a "friends only" post but with the Total Data Awareness and warrantless wiretapping shit that's going on, maybe they're making a point to harass people who are critical of the TSA.

I'll probably be on the "no fly" list when this post hits their mainframe.

I was on the "watch" list from 2001-2005 but the only really thorough searches I got were in 2001 and maybe once or twice after that. Usually the "watch" list just meant that I couldn't check in using the automated kiosk without an "error" message popping up, which required them to take my ID and call HQ from the back room (while feeding me some lie about what they were doing for the first couple of years.)

I actually got really lucky in that I almost took along "Backyard Ballistics" in my carryon luggage, a book about making potato cannons and that sort of thing, to sift through for Burning Man ideas. I took it out and left it at home, though, and at the time I joked "I wouldn't want the TSA to catch me with this!" Good call.