terror on the high seas
Sorry, around here the management keeps going unexpected places. We shall try to be more regular about this. In my absence, another of "those Stanford people" has popped up at I Hate You Toonces, and my alma mater has also decided to formalize the old boys' network. This is the sort of thing that is likely to make Marlowe apoplectic (he wanted to join MENSA and destroy it from within), but let's see if we can give him an aneurysm by linking The Right Stuff as well. "Smart is sexy," hm. The listed schools seem plenty liberal, but all the same (perhaps because of crusty alumni) the site doesn't appear to be interested in same-sex relationships.
Yesterday's bag-searching rigmarole in the Reno airport culminated in the security guard pulling an eight-inch steak knife from the bottom of my backpack. "Ah-ha!" she said.
"Gaah," I said. "Sorry, I forgot all about that." I had taken that same backpack hiking a couple of weeks ago and had used the knife to cut myself hunks of savory Tillamook cheese. Another guard came over and took the knife, and I made hand gestures at her to indicate that she was welcome to it, just get rid of it, I wasn't a terrorist and didn't want to go to John Ashcroft's back room.
"You could go back and put it in your checked luggage," she said.
"No, no," I said, "that's all right."
"You're giving it up voluntarily, then," she said, perhaps so that I couldn't sue anyone later.
"Yes," I said, "I relinquish it," and that was that.
The alarming thing is that the knife had been sitting in my backpack for a couple of weeks, so it must have been there on my first flight from Tucson to Reno. Even with the current police state in our nation's airports, even without my attempting to hide it, the weapon got onto the plane undetected.
