Saturday, April 19, 2003

My tax dollars at work

Today, I stumbled across the Transportation Security Administration's official list of permitted and prohibited items in checked or carry-on luggage. I'm sure it took a lot of thought, discussion, and tax dollars to come up with this...

So... I was a little disappointed to discover right on the first page of the list that my taxes went toward determining whether "Transformers" brand robot toys were safe to take on airplanes. Apparently, they are -- presumably, hijackers preferred the short-lived competing brand, "Gobots."

The list also contains quite a few comon-sense things. We all already knew that we were allowed to bring cameras, laptops, mobile phones, PDAs and all those things. And I suspect most of us had figured out that meat cleavers, sabers, swords and spear guns were 
kapu in the cabin, and plastic explosives and dynamite couldn't even be checked.

Other than that... hmm. The "personal hygeine" category appears to have needed the clarification. Yes, you can bring your cuticle cutters, eyelash curlers, nail clippers, tweezers, and, "in limited quantities," hairspray and deodorant. Looking good will help balance out being crammed into economy class next to an overused bathroom, of course!

But Transformers? 

Why I'm leaving Twitter.

I've stuck it out and continued participating on Twitter while Elon Musk has run it into the ground, made it progressively more inhospit...