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Showing posts from April, 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 t