You’ve got to shake it to wake it

One of my favourite pet rants in recent years has been the post-9/11 enhanced security at airport thing.

It just hasn’t made any sense.

And it certainly wasn’t going to stop any serious terrorists with martyrdom on their minds.

My own personal record low point when it came to exasperation at the sheer stupidity of it all coincided roughly with the moment when a security officer at Atlanta airport demanded that I take my boots off for scanning after I had picked up my hold luggage and was trying to make my way out of the airport after just flying in from the UK. At which point I’d say my chances of me blowing up my flight over the Atlantic were roughly, um, zero. However, she did have a gun. Under those circumstances, she could have told me to put a paper bag on my head and stand on my hands as part of a security check and I would have obliged.

All over the World forgetful airline travellers have been stripped of such fearsome weapons of mass death as nail clippers and small penknives whilst being allowed to carry much more potentially provocative items onboard unmolested.

Cigarette lighters are the classic example. Even after Richard Reid’s Marx Brothers style comedy routine trying to detonate his baseball boots with a succession of book matches, you could still take butane lighters onto aircraft. After all, there are so many legitimate things you could be doing in flight with a cigarette lighter

Another, less obvious, example of a potentially naughty thing people have been allowed to take onboard aircraft is duty free booze.

And, for reasons that will now be more widely understood, I personally developed a morbid fixation on Sheridan’s Coffee Licquer. It was something about that two bottles joined as one thing that really sparked my imagination.

It may look like an anally intrusive sex toy but it's actually a
premium brand licquer - or is it?

From a budding terrorist’s point of view, liquid binary explosives have a lot going for them

• They aren’t all that difficult to produce
• They look innocuous
• They are stable until mixed
• They are hard to detect
• You can hide them in Sheridan’s bottles

Further technical information about the fluffy and exciting benefits of binary explosives can be found on this commercial site here. I particularly enjoyed these two bits…

… can be transported around the world by any method, including commercial passenger aircraft. This makes our product rapidly available to those Customers who require safe, secure, single-purpose, demolition explosives throughout the world

And

… the explosive self-neutralizes after a period of time, becoming a non-explosive. This unique characteristic of our product is very important to those Customers concerned with the proliferation of explosives-based terrorist devices

Actually, if you root around the site a little bit you discover that the ‘self-neutralised’ explosive can magically become de-neutralised simply by shaking it, Orangina-style.

Unfortunately, unlike the imaginary explosive chemical vests our police went chasing off after in Forest Gate a couple of months ago or the ricin made from old cherry pips a couple of years before that this stuff is serious and can kill people.

And even though binary explosives have been around for fifty years the media has done a stand-up job of making them sound awfully exotic and mysterious. Because, as we all know, the most mysterious threats are the scariest threats. Why be scared of boring old Semtex when you can be really scared of ‘special liquids’?

These 'special liquids' have always been a credible threat and their existence hardly a big secret to anyone who has seen Die Hard 3. So, my question is why have all the security staff in airports been ordered to fuck around confiscating manicure sets for the last five years rather than focusing on stuff that can really kill people. What was that all about?

It’s the same old question time and time again. Are the people yanking our chains simply stupid or are they wicked?

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A top Orangina anecdote from Wikipedia that seems vaguely appropriate…

In France, Orangina is also famous for its advertisements: they almost always show people dressed into Orangina bottle costumes. The most famous one was the Orangina Rouge costume person, who was depicted as a mad chainsaw-wielding killer, attacking a family in a car who travelled through the forest. This was the origin of the popular French catchphrase: "Mais pourquoi est-il si méchant?" spoken by a child ("But why is he so evil?") to which the Orangina Rouge character replies with his equally famous catchphrase: "PARCE QUE! Ahahaha!" ("BECAUSE! Ahahaha!")