Imagine what damage you could do with a tine.

Reminds me of the story of the pilot who was armed with a gun, having passed all the necessary qualifications, only to have the nail file on his clippers taken away.

He was, like, "Dude, I'm carrying a GUN"

They just shrugged and took his clippers.

"Well, the rules SAY..."

You ordered bacon and eggs at an airport restaurant? If I'm shelling out $5.95 for a bagel and a coffee, I can't imagine what your breakfast cost.

Actually, one of the biggest airport outrages is that passengers can't bring their own food onto the plane, but it's also one of the most transparent. If it were possible, I'd have a bag of homemade sandwiches with me for every flight, instead of shelling out for the overpriced stuff in the terminal, or the even more overpriced dreck on the plane.

I'm never organized enough to do it, but as far as I know you can bring your own food. A quick glance at the TSA checklist shows the ban on liquids (which will, naturally, include drinks) - but nothing that would prevent you bringing a sandwich.

For drinks, there is actually nothing preventing you from taking along an empty bottle and filling it from the tap. For that matter, you could presumably take along small quantities of some powdered drink mix.

Does anyone know differently?

Of course you can bring your own food. We bring kosher food whenever we fly. It's liquids they don't allow.

Wait. You expected them to use LOGIC when it comes to aiport security? Silly American.

http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/specialneeds/index.shtm

Additionally, we are continuing to permit prescription liquid medications and other liquids needed by persons with disabilities and medical conditions. This includes:

All prescription and over-the-counter medications (liquids, gels, and aerosols) including petroleum jelly, eye drops, and saline solution for medical purposes;
Liquids including water, juice, or liquid nutrition or gels for passengers with a disability or medical condition;

Seems if you get a doctors note you can take drinks thru security. So it really cant be that much of a security concern

"The knife from the airplane's First Class section. Taken from...the pilot! Who doesn't need a dull knife to bring down a damn plane, because...he can just steer it straight into the ground!"
Yeh! But whatever you do don't do something ridiculous like profile muslims.

Do these people not get that you can kill someone with a ball point pen?

Oh wait, earth logic....

Yeah, those plastic knives are especially useless on the typically frozen solid restaurant pat of butter.

Y'know what I think the TSA's real issue with profiling is? I don't think it's really the political correctness. It's the fact that if they were going to do real profiling, they'd have to hire actual security professionals to man the checkpoints, and train them.

The TSA's current approach is the exact opposite of that, and it's most likely cost-driven: rely totally on technology, and hire unskilled, untrained minimum-wage workers to operate it. In a sane world, the screeners would have some security experience and would be trained, obsessively, on how to operate the equipment, interpret the results, and know the intent of the rules and what they're trying to accomplish. Instead they are given a script to follow, and minimal to no training. Hence all the ridiculous rules about what gets taken away from pilots and whose boobs get felt up.

I quit reading Schneier several years ago because he came down with a bad case of BDS. But in regard to the TSA's airport checkpoints, he's absolutely right: it's security theater.

In the same week JD Salinger has died, here's a thought: the thing about bloggers/writers (pseudo) is, if I was constantly going thru my day to day uber-focused on how I was going to BLOG about THIS experience later...does it not take away something from the actual experience? Like those blue-tooth assholes and Starbucks cafe Rowling wannabes? It's the cyber-equiv. Just shut up Amy Alkon already. We get it. There are rude people. Do you REALLY have THAT much to say. Most of your stuff is recycled news. We used to call readers, FRIENDS. In real time. And fat people. And racists. And ignoramuses. The real threat to North American society is the puffed-up self-important navel gazing bloggers. These are the assholes the helicopter parents are raising. YOU need to go play in the traffic, for f*** sakes. Like Grandma said, who is 95 and has lived here for 75 years, in the same place, and is outside right now as my ass gets fatter and I type this, in a Canadian winter building a fence, "what makes you think you are so important....?

Aw, looks like Ally's havin' a bad day - musta just finished her bowl of "imabenasty-flakes"! And now needs a nice tall glass of PAYATTENTIONTOME!

Sreiously, Ally. What makes you think you're so important that Amy would actually listen to you?

I'd laugh at you if you weren't so pitiable.

@Ally in Canada, February 1, 2010, 8:00AM:

If you're going to invoke my name in your post, learn some grammar, you ignorant fool.

Today is a perfect day for Bananafish and Chuck Norris is not allowed on commercial flights because he is a dangerous weapon.

Gotta love a girl who tells me to "YOU need to go play in traffic" but types "f***" instead of fuck.

PS re: the traffic suggestion, clever and original insults are welcomed. When you have one, do come back and post it.

Hmmm...interestingly, checked my software and it seems "Ally" has posted here before as "Rosemary," but only seems to have gotten pissy now.

Rosemary, dear, a suggestion: Do read my book instead of going off in a slew off bad grammar about me and my work. I actually figured out why people are rude, based in anthropology, and in a way nobody has before. Robin Dunbar, whose research my theory is based in, told me he told a NYT reporter that he thought my theory was "the smartest thing (he'd) heard in an entire year." Made my day/month/year.

Ally, drink you some haterade this morning with your bowl of shitoneverything-o's this morning? Or did that toast with makemeanasshole spread with a cup of talkshitbecauseiamannoymousontheweb not settle in your stomach quite right?

Ally, there is no need to be a jackass. If you don't like Amy's blog, don't read it. It's really that simple.

I needed a few minutes to read because I cannot stop laughing everytime I read Amy talking about being on Muslim time. Yes, Ally, Amy has plenty to say and most of us read her every day because we enjoy what she has to say or at least the discussions she gets us going on.
As far as the food thing, we brough a Muffaletta on the plane in New Orleans but had to dump our water bottles. Food is ok. I guess the terrorists haven't figured out a way to make a bomb out of sandwich dressing yet.

"the terrorists haven't figured out a way to make a bomb out of sandwich dressing"

You've never had a Big Mac?

I agree, Amy isn't that important. But, Ally, are you nationally syndicated as an advice columnist? Do you have a widely acclaimed book on the market? So, there are various degrees of important. Amy may not be important, we agree on that, but at least she is not obscure. I'd say that nasty posting was the highlight of the last year for you.

Keep working at it. Maybe next year you can make the big time and have two nasty postings. Cheers.

I simply do not fly any more. Life is too short to put up with that nonsense. If I can't drive it, I don't go. Three or four easy days will put me anywhere in the US.

People tell me there are some things one must fly for. Oh, really? I tell them when I win the Nobel Prize my beloved daughter will be more than glad to pick it up for me. That shuts most of them up, as you can imagine.

I have said if I win the zigazillion dollar lottery, I'd like to visit Easter Island and Pitcairn's Island. There will be enough money to rent my own ship to take me there from Mexican ports.

You all are going to laugh at me now...

I always wear spiky hairpins when I travel. The big ones with rhinestones at the end. They are pretty sharp, and could poke out someone's eye or maybe even pierce their throat. Just in case there's a terrorist... I can hand them out to my neighbors and we can attempt to bring the terrorist down. I figure they are at least as dangerous as a butter knife, probably more so.

OK, I know realistically a wuss like me wouldn't stand much of a chance against a terrorist, but it still makes me feel better to know I could try! Better to be a wuss who goes down fighting, right?

The whole sharp-items thing has gone beyond silly anyway. With what we know now, there is no way in hell anyone is going to hijack an aircraft with an edged weapon. Even if they take hostages, the flight crew isn't opening that door. Nor are the hijackers likely to survive the severe beat-down that they will get from the pax. The only reason it ever worked in the first place was because we had all had it drilled into our heads, for decades, that the proper response to a hijacking was passivity and compliance. Those days are over. (And good riddance.)

Clearly the hijackers themselves know this, and they are focusing on incendiaries and explosives now. Fortunately for us, they haven't yet found anything that works very well. But it's an arms race. And the TSA is still hell-bent on finding tomorrow's solution to yesterday's problem.

Drat... Nor are the hijackers unlikely...

Double drat... I had it right the first time... OK, I'll go away and play with my toys now.

I think that fork looks pretty dangerous.

"imabenasty-flakes"

Flynne, I just snorted Diet Coke up my nose. That was hysterical!

At least the pilot didn't have a spork!

There was a news story recently about how everyday items can be fashioned into deadly weapons. The one that stuck with me was a credit card that was sharpened to slice through paper, ala Rambo style.

I was carrying a mini-container of Axe cologne aerosol spray. On the way out I pulled it out to the side and it went through. On the way back, did the same thing on the way back.

The TSA guy came buy and put it in a brand-new Zip-Loc bag. What a fucking waste.

So anyway, I flew to Vegas on NYE and everything was okey-dokey. The next day I was returning, and suddenly they were very upset about a smallish swiss army knife in my toiletries bag. There's a kiosk where, for ten bucks, you can mail small things like that to yourself, so I used it. It took precisely three weeks to arrive, which bugged me... That attachment was purely sentimental, so it was never a big deal... But still, for ten bucks one kind of expects FedEx-speed deliveries.

An important moral to this story is that I didn't go to prison. Maybe that's because I'm such a stunningly handsome middle-aged man, or maybe it's because the whole thing is a pathetic piece of performance art anyway... Like when the used to mix up everyone's deadly bottle of explosive shampoos and mouthwashes right there in terminal. So tell me again why we're being bothered with this?

Jim P if you are wearing that axe cologne spray on the airplane then I'd say you deserve to be treated as a terrorist**. That cheap stuff is hideous even before it hits the recirculated air.

** okay not really. But as I suffer from allergy related migraines that Axe triggers I always get the urge to beat the people who wear it on the airplane with a sock full of quarters.

The 9/11 terrorists used razor-blade box cutters as weapons to hijack the planes.

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/992900/Office-Depot-Brand-Box-Cutter/

Back in high school, one of a group of friends of mine worked in a grocery store and always carried one of these. He used to call it his "knife." We used to laugh at him when he called it a knife and joke that the best he could do with that thing was give someone a paper cut.

In trained hands, almost anything could be a weapon. And most of it is allowed to be brought onto a plane.

** okay not really. But as I suffer from allergy related migraines that Axe triggers I always get the urge to beat the people who wear it on the airplane with a sock full of quarters.

I don't get migraines, but they trigger my allergies in a most unpleasant way. And some of these punks spray on so much of it you can smell them at 20 paces.

Not only does it burn the nose, it smells disgusting too.

Is there any woman who actually LIKES the smell of this AXE shit?

One time flying back from Las Vegas I got stopped and my bag searched for "something that looked like a knife". I could not for the life of me figure out what it was, because I'd gone out there just fine.

AFTER the TSA agent checked my makeup bag and was thisclose to dumping the entire contents of my luggage out it finally dawned on me - I had the TSA agent reopen my makeup bag and sure enough, I had a metal nail file in there - one of those cheap .59 cent ones.

After all that, know what he did? HE GAVE IT BACK TO ME. WTF? Why go to all that trouble if you're just going to return it?

Morons.

> In trained hands, almost anything could be a weapon.

So true. Even a rolled-up magazine secured with rubber bands could be a fabulous short-range force multiplier. A belt with a metal buckle can be a ferocious weapon.

Of course, trained hands (not to mention feet, elbows, and knees) ARE weapons, which can crush throats, break necks and skulls, fracture joints, punch ribs into lungs, remove eyeballs, etc., with relative ease and frightening speed.

Some martial artists file one or more of their fingernails to VERY sharp points, which are perfectly capable of piercing and lacerating flesh, especially if reinforced with nylon-based clear polish. The carotid artery and jugular vein are quite close to the surface and well-exposed.

I think the gubmint just wants to create the impression that SOMETHING IS BEING DONE! (even if that something doesn't accomplish much at all)

"I was carrying a mini-container of Axe cologne aerosol spray."

Ok this is off topic but I live near a high school and across from the high school there is this set of stairs that are hidden from view of the street. So naturally kids collect here for smokes and a slim jim and the place is littered with, well litter. One day I noticed something like 5 cans of axe laying in the adjacent bushes. I'm guessing their parents don't think they are old enough for cologne yet so they have to axe up in the spot before school? Good thing that cheap shit wears off in a couple of hours.