You're in Logan Airport that day and see Star wearing her idiotic getup grasping a handful of whatever she's grasping. Face it, would you get closer to her, geniuses that you are, or would some of you morons actually alert the authorities to something out of the ordinary? It's a simple question. What would you have done?

Probably gone "huh" and walked away. Those of us who actually live in and around the Boston are largely immune to the eccentricities of our neighbors. A friend of mine built a stick figure out of PVC piping to ride on the back of his tandem bicycle. I suppose the person at HD who observed him being very careful about the lengths of pipe he bought, and his measuring of his own body while he was doing so should have had him arrested at the point of a submachine gun or five for buying pipe-bomb components. Some other friends also build a trebuchet, maybe we should haul them off for building a mechanism to launch explosives at a distance. I saw a guy on a homemeade bike the other day with a disco ball mounted on a pole on the handlebars in place of a headlight. I have good friends who are really into crypto, locks, robotics, you name it. This is a city of weird genius; I'm sorry for the rest of you who have no experience with wild creative intelligence, you're really missing out.

By the way, what she had on her sweatshirt was conceptually the same thing as those idiotic "holiday" pins that light up and blink and play dreadful muzak, but without the decorative plastic cover. Maybe the one good thing that will come out of this is that people wearing those assaults on good taste will also be hauled off at gunpoint.

Plus if you won't reply when you do get asked, you deserve to get punished. Why should you be above the law? Because you're a minority? Because you go to MIT? So this means you can waltz around while ordinary peons get stopped and searched?

What law would that be? There is no law that requires I answer questions about my clothing that are posed by airport curb staff (clue: she answered the first question that was posed to her, she wasn't in the airport building, and she wasn't in the security line nor was she questioned by TSA staff.)

Given the sense of humor of MIT students - I wouldn't be surprised if half the school shows up at the airport with breadboards tomorrow.

I hope the entire city is aglow with little sparkly LED lights by the end of the weekend.

I haven't heard a rational explanation behind the un-labeled Play-Doh in her hand either.

Unlabelled? What is she supposed to do, carry around a little paper sign saying "This is Play Doh"?

Maybe she just quit smoking and needs something to do with her hands. Maybe she's getting carpal tunnel from being on a computer all day long. Squishing things in your hand is good for that. Maybe its a nervous habit. I tend to click ballpoint pens, myself. I suppose if someone saw me with a thin metallic rod in my hand and my thumb on a button, I'd get the privilege of being taken away at gunpoint, too.

I'm off to buy some knitting needles now. I have plans to meet up with friends this afternoon, so hopefully nobody will realize that I could easily use one to give someone an icepick lobotomy by jamming it into their eye socket, and have me arrested. Also I can't really afford $5K in bail right now.

If they've aimed the trebuchet at Logan (The Number One Airport For Terrorists), fuck yes they should be hauled away.

Really? On what charge? Pointing a catapult along a ENE vector?

Our. Lives. Suck.

They pretty much do, from where I'm sitting. I offer up my thanks to universe (and a quick tip of the hat to Bucky!) for the top-notch public primary and secondary education I received in a college town surrounded by deeply weird smart people.

Thanks for pitying the benighted millions, kitchengirl. We'll try to soldier on.

Good luck with that. Have fun living in a tiny world of incurious, unintelligent paranoia.

Why, yes. Yes, indeed. There may be a more general term for it than (snarksnark) "pointing a catapult"--what is Massachusetts' term for pointing, say, a gun at somebody, even if you are a wildly creative genius joker? Where I live it's called "terroristic threatening."

Your failure to understand what you are looking at does not make me a terrorist.

What exactly would they be "terroristic[ally] threatening" you with? The 12oz bottle of coke with mentos suspended by thread from the inside of the cap? The can of tuna? Maybe the rubber street hockey ball? It can't have been the baseball, because one of the boys was waiting with a mitt to catch it.

Possibly the head of lettuce, if we flung that like I'd wanted to then perhaps the park we were in might have been overrun by squirrels, they can be nasty little bastards when they want to. Those fuckers ate all my sunflowers just as they were starting to bloom!