You're totally screwed up by the pair of ceramic insulators that you stole from Birkenau, but the only issue that seems to bother you after having stolen a human jawbone from the Cemetery of Chauchilla is how close you came to getting caught with it at Customs in Peru?

Man, it's pretty easy to tell where you think that the humans lived....

That is _really_ fucked up.

Come on. Give the Pilot a break. He's doing his best Larry David impression here. My grandpa - a survivor of Buchenwald - would make the most horrible and hilarious jokes about dead people, skeletons and the genocide. Laughter is the truest and most perfect victory.

but he's totally disturbed about those Birkenau pieces. What I can't figure out is how/why he treats the human remains from Peru so lightly. He's not even laughing about them. I went to Quebec last week and brought back some unpasteurised cheese: my apprehension coming across the border seems to be more or less what he's feeling.

As a former physical anthropologist -- a fancy name for the guys and gals who study old human bones -- I advise you to do some research into the legality of bringing Native American human remains into the country. I think you might have committed a felony there, my friend. Start with a google search for NAGPRA and go from there.

Believe it or not, the worst part about it is the "Native American" part. I think it's only a misdemeanor for bones of white people.

... the reason the Birkenau pegs bother him more than the Chauchilla jawbone is because Chauchilla is apparently just a graveyard (albeit a really bizarre one) while Birkenau was the site of a mass murder. Duh.

I love that the pilot brings back things that a) he shouldn't, and b) are particularly morbid. The morality of bringing anything back is open to discussion, and on that grounds, fair game if not stolen (and even then everything in the British Museum was stolen). The difference between a museum and an individual is only how many people get to share in looking at the items in question.

The items from both the death camp and the graveyard are about the end of life. One, the forced, traumatic destruction of it; the other, a place where life's end was either celebrated or otherwise memorialized. Death is the final and ultimate expression of humanity, in the manner that we face it it can show great courage or utter weakness. How we deal death out to our fellow men says yet more about us. Taking items from places where these ideas are placed in the starkest relief seems natural to me, a sort of constant reminder of how lucky you are to both be alive, and not in captivity waiting for certain death.

I can only hope that my bones someday are enough of a curisosity to land on some person's curio cabinet, where my existence can go on, well past any expected life span. I would treasure the idea that at least my bones were immortal, since I am clearly not.

As someone who loves both airplanes and the outdoors, I'm frustrated by many of the same things as the pilot, but disappointed by the things the pilot writes about in this coumn.

One of my favorite places is Yosemite. Despite the admonishments not to remove cones, artifacts, and other items from the park (in fact, it's illegal to remove anything natural from a National Park), I regularly see tourists take "just one" thing with them as they head back to parking lot.

Since the cones are necessary for the already-stressed trees in the park to reproduce, and even if only a fraction of the four million tourists a year only "take one", the whole park is affected in ways only our children will know. Like the tourist who broke the Jeffrey Pine on Sentinel dome a couple of years ago, when something singular is taken, it can't be put back or substituted.

I admire and respect virtually everything the pilot has written here over the years, but on this, I can't hold my tongue - return these items, if you can. They're not yours.

I took some pieces of brick from Hitler's bunker. I visited in 1993, just before they dug up the last parts and erected tall apartment buildings there.

This was in Berlin, at the end of Voss street. Near where potzdamer platz used to be. There was the foundation of a building - looked fairly modern. The building above was gone, kind of a construction site, some dirt and ragged concrete and yellow tile. Along one side, there was another piece of wall embedded in the soil, older red brick, a foot or two outside of the building foundation. There was an arch made of the red brick - this wasn't a piece of foundation, this was a doorway or window, but it was underground, the top was a few feet below surface level. And, spray painted there, were the words Bunker Hier (bunker here) and an arrow.

I asked passers-by if this was really Hitler's bunker. My German was very weak but their English was better. Das Ist Hitlerbunker? I'd ask people if this was the place, and they'd direct me elsewhere, in all different directions. I'd heard this was common. They wanted to forget the whole thing, and they had no fascination with that era themselves.

Then finally an old woman talked to me and confirmed it. She said she was born just before the war, and after the war she lived in East Berlin, and it had only been a few years since she had lived outside of dictatorship. She told me about museums and other stuff to do. Oh, you must see the Pergammon museum.

So I took some pieces of brick. OK so Patrick isn't the only person fascinated with morbid souvenirs.

Well, an item I took from a small airplane wreck immediately came to mind when I saw what the article was about. I was a press photographer at the time and although the scene was cordoned off, they allowed me to get closer to take pictures. I saw something that looked like a stopwatch, but wasn’t, laying in the grass and put it in my camera bag. I never learned what the outcome of the enquiry was but I still wonder if the instrument could have been important clue in determining the cause of the crash. It happened more that twenty years ago and the instrument is displayed with other “souvenirs” in a printer tray. So now I have a opportunity to confess but I still feel guilty.