Yes, you can buy this toy and let your kid grope along as a junior T.S.A. agent. What's that you're hiding there?
Here's the link.
Sharkey's Immutable Law: Every truly bad idea eventually has its day.
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By JOE SHARKEY
Bio
- Joesharkey.com
- Joe Sharkey's work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years until 2015 he was a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He is now a weekly travel and entertainment columnist with the global website Travel.Buzz, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, He has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel, one of which is in development as a movie. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer. On Sept. 29, 2006, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 over the Amazon. All 154 on the 737 died. His report on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London magazine. He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson with horses and parrots. He is working on a new novel about an international travel writer who hates to travel. "JoeSharkey.com" is Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Joe Sharkey.
5 comments:
Are you joking?? I wouldn't waste this on my kid! This is good stuff! Just give me one of those cool grey uniforms that cover my pot belly, a cool képi with a red band around it and a neat CATSA badge (that's what we call 'em up here in the North, Pardner!) and one of these and I'll be Gropin' Granma Greg, the terror of the Northeast Territories! Or is that Granma Gropin' Greg, I haven't dee-cided!
Now where's mah durn horse! Pierre! Where you got to this time?
Should come with a pair of rubber gloves, a bottle of lube and a basic anatomy diagram then even a TSA agent could read despite failing to graduate high school. How about a dope desting kit that cannot distinguish raw chocolate from cocaine as I gather that is another hit !
If you had ten people -- let's demograph them roughly as four caucasian males, casually dressed as most travelers are these days, ranging in age from 20 to 64, three women, two of them black, also casually dressed and ranging in age from 40 to 73, one of whom is is a wheelchair, one small child of one of the women, a little girl of perhaps 8, one young preppy-looking Asian fellow constantly checking an iPhone and carrying a laptop bag, and a man in his forties of obvious Middle Eastern descent dressed in casual business style. Beard and mustache but no obvious religious paraphernalia or demeanour, looking relaxed, all in line at Security about to board a plane from Seattle to New York.
What do you honestly think is the best way for the TSA people to handle this group? (These are people who double as security at Walmart). More importantly, since doing things in an improvisational style is VERY inadvisable for these people, what should they be generally be TOLD to do by their supervisors?
There should be a strict set of guidelines. And here's what they should say: Have the four males remove their shoes. Don't bother with the women and children. No full body scans for any of them, no patdowns either.
Select one of the caucasian guys, maybe the oldest, and the Middle Eastern guy. Have them subjected to a very brief patdown. No touching of junk. Inspect their carryons fairly thoroughly, or appear to. Then, most importantly, have a TRAINED SPOTTER who seems to be just one of the security drones but WHO IS NOT, watch unobtrusively from a somewhat obscured location and very carefully observe the behaviour of THE MIDDLE EASTERN MAN. (The Caucasian is merely tossed into the mix with the intention of, err, making things appear "non-discriminatory” — a meaningless concept when 95% of all terrorists today are Islamo-fascist jihadis).
NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN, more like 99,995 times out of 100,000, the perp is NOT going to be a visibly Asian fellow; a woman; a Caucasian or a child.
If every security check proceeded like that, I dare say 80% of completely wasted time would be removed from the traveling process. Multiply that by several million iterations and you have improved the entire bloated, Godzilla-like lumbering process of air travel that has now become the norm into something resembling unsanity.
The smiling kid on the box is truly creeeepy!
Oh, that is so funny. Gotta get me a couple.
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