Airport Security: A Modest Proposal

In light of increasing complaints on airport security measures (click here for example), we offer a modest suggestion: A special optional flight plan available to all travelers: pay less for your ticket in airport taxes, sign a waiver against suing the government if the plane blows up mid-flight, and you can skip the airport shakedown.

It's win-win for everyone. The only trick is to make sure terrorists buy the more expensive tickets with the pat-down included. Maybe something sacriligious to Islamic faith, like a pork-only menu on budget flights.

It makes about as much sense as the current system.

For more interesting observations on this issue, click here for Amazon customer reviews on the Playmobil  TSA Security Checkpoint pictured above.

Middle Brow Gourmandie

From our ongoing anthology Why I Hate The New York Times, in a book review about Americans in Paris in the 19th century:

"This is history to be savored rather than sprinted through, like a Parisian meal. It amounts to a meaty collection of short stories, expertly and flavorfully assembled, free of gristly theory."

The review  includes a good example of confusing diction and a curious way of seeing history from a Westchester perspective. The presumed dead and resurrected Washburne referred to was the US ambassador in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Fortunately everything was back to picture-postcard-perfect in a jiffy despite that  nasty little revolution: 

By the time German troops marched down the Champs-Élysées, on March 1, l871, more than 65,000 Parisians had died. The only prominent diplomat to do so, Washburne valiantly refused to budge even through the months of the Commune, one of the bloodiest chapters in French history. His was no paradisiacal Paris; as the atrocities mounted, the distraught Washburne noted that the city was “a hell upon this earth.” At one point the Seine ran red with blood. A team of 60,000 masons would be required to put Paris back together again. On Mary Cassatt’s arrival shortly afterward, the Hôtel de Ville looked like a Roman ruin.

And the review closes with this immortal line, after reporting on how Saint-Gaudens wrote of Paris, “Coming here has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am”:

Paris is the city to which good Americans go to learn that they really do love peanut butter.

And bad Americans? Is this is what passes for lively prose writing these days?