Want to get around the asinine rules that you have to leave checked luggage unlocked so the security thieves can rifle through it?

Buy a starter pistol. You can get them for $10 mail order, $20 at your local gun shop. Tiny little things, hardly take up any room. You need not buy any ammo for it.

Now pack it in your luggage. A baggie is a nice touch in the very unlikely event they actually want to see it. When you get to the airport, tell then your checked luggage has an unloaded firearm. They will give you a form to fill out declaring it unloaded and safe to fly. They may want to see it, but probably not; they don't want to be flashing guns around the airport.

What matters is that they will insist on you locking your luggage. They want to see it locked; if a key, you keep it, they do not want your spare copy; if a combination, they want to make sure it is locked and you have twiddled the combination after locking it.

See, they don't trust their own thieves. They don't want their thieves to have the chance of finding a firearm, loaded or not. They want your luggage locked and out of reach of their thieves.

There is no honor among thieves, it seems.

Disclaimer: I bought a starter gun for this purpose, but haven't flown since. But others have done, and I trust their reports. Flying with firearms has well established rules and is not at all uncommon. After all, they are in checked baggage ... and locked away from the Thieves Society of Aviation goons.

I don't think I have ever thought that Bush or Cheney or any other high muckity muck actually intentionally lied about the whole business. What I do believe is that those high muckity mucks had the goal of raw with Iraq from the time they started campaigning, in Bush's case maybe because he wanted to finish daddy's war, or avenge the insult to daddy's honor, or to show daddy that he was all grown up. The reasons don't matter. What matters is that he had that goal, Cheney pushed the right buttons to make that goal the top priority, and the flunkies at the next step down got the message loud and clear: justify war. Find a reason. Discover what Saddam is really up to. And when their underlings got the word, the shivered and passed it on down in more explicit terms. It's like that old story about the engineers who proclaim some new plan as shit that stinks something fierce, and the word passes uphill until the managers hear (and pass on) that it is fertilizer and it is powerful. In this case, the word changed until it got to the bottom, where they just did what they thought was wanted.

No, it's not exactly lying. But it is dishonest, and nobody in that position of power should have that kind of blinders on, or hire only staff who have not an iota of independence.

Scots do it once a day, English do it once a day and once more on Sundays. Is that a significant difference? Did it get misread as or miscopied from 8 times a day?

As the others have pointed out in the astronomy lessons, this is one of the most poorly written articles I can remember, as far as factual content, only rivaling Hollywood where no one expects accuracy.

Get a grip.

I have missed the skimability of printed newspapers for ages, but I gave them up because I got tired of subscriptions where I couldn't call and complain about a missing home delivery until long after I had gone to work; I wanted them when I first got up, as part of my wakeup ritual.

Your eyes could skim an entire pages in seconds, pick up snatches of headlines and keep on going while absorbing lots of tidbits that added up to an awareness of events that can't be matched by any puny display. Web news won't be as good until a wall display can put an entire folded out double page of newspaper on show all at once.

In the meantime, as a stopgap, I have learned to click on far more google news headlines links than I intend to read, and then ruthlessly snap thru the tabs, reading just the headlines and first paragraph, then closing them before I have actually digested that -- and if my mind realizes seconds later that I should have read more, I use the "recently closed tabs" feature to resurrect the story. It's as close as I can get to skimming, where you skim and digest later and snap your head back to that last headline or even turn the page back.