Can you guess which country I took this photo in?
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I'm off for a stroll through town in a wee while. The skies are clear and there are a few things I want to check over, particularly the new 2m high protective barrier that's been put around New Scotland Yard to thwart suicide bombers.
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Yup, Terror's been in the news big time this week and, even as I type, there's someone blathering on the radio about a news story that up to 200 Bin Laden trained terrorists are living here and planning '911 and Madrid style bombings in the UK'.
Yup, Terror's been in the news big time this week and, even as I type, there's someone blathering on the radio about a news story that up to 200 Bin Laden trained terrorists are living here and planning '911 and Madrid style bombings in the UK'.
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Would that be Bin Laden trained terrorists such as the fiendish shoe bomber, Richard Reid?
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Would that be Bin Laden trained terrorists such as the fiendish shoe bomber, Richard Reid?
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Funny, I always assumed that he had been trained by Wile E. Coyote.
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Silly me. I think my error was something to do with the fact that the masterminds who had supplied him with his sophisticated exploding novelty baseball boots had neglected to fuse it properly. There's something about the image of a guy fumbling with a book of matches, trying to light his sneakers, whilst sitting next to other passengers that doesn’t quite gel properly. The least his handlers could have done is bought him a Zippo.
Silly me. I think my error was something to do with the fact that the masterminds who had supplied him with his sophisticated exploding novelty baseball boots had neglected to fuse it properly. There's something about the image of a guy fumbling with a book of matches, trying to light his sneakers, whilst sitting next to other passengers that doesn’t quite gel properly. The least his handlers could have done is bought him a Zippo.
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Curiously, even though my boots have been searched meticulously whenever I've flown since that episode, no airport security staff have ever had a problem with me flying with a cigarette lighter in my pocket. Having said that, I read last week that lighters and matches are finally to be banned from US flights from next month. Well, it only took a few years to get round to closing that tiny loophole. Clearly, the threat posed by key-ring mounted nail clippers was far greater and had to be dealt with first.
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Curiously, even though my boots have been searched meticulously whenever I've flown since that episode, no airport security staff have ever had a problem with me flying with a cigarette lighter in my pocket. Having said that, I read last week that lighters and matches are finally to be banned from US flights from next month. Well, it only took a few years to get round to closing that tiny loophole. Clearly, the threat posed by key-ring mounted nail clippers was far greater and had to be dealt with first.
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To be honest, I don’t know why I ever bother carry tobacco and a lighter when flying to the States. The anti-smoking thing is so severe now that even if there is a smoking area it's normally tucked far out of reach and comprises an unventilated, 1m square cubicle, jam-packed with really serious, and I mean serious smokers. The kind of wizened old people whose emaciated frames are only held together by an impressive collection of moles and skins cancers and whose every breath is a rasp. It's never very nice.
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There's something exceptionally ironic about smokers in US airports being treated this way; surrounded as they are by the spectacle of representatives of fattest nation on earth feeding themselves to death in food courts the size of small cities. I guess the Surgeon General has established that a death from obesity or aspartame induced brain tumours is somehow kinder than lung cancer. Ah yes, the balanced All-American diet; one that includes refined sugar AND a toxic sugar substitute, all in one meal.
There's something exceptionally ironic about smokers in US airports being treated this way; surrounded as they are by the spectacle of representatives of fattest nation on earth feeding themselves to death in food courts the size of small cities. I guess the Surgeon General has established that a death from obesity or aspartame induced brain tumours is somehow kinder than lung cancer. Ah yes, the balanced All-American diet; one that includes refined sugar AND a toxic sugar substitute, all in one meal.
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Maybe smoking is just the first item on a list. Maybe one day we can look forward to airports packed with row upon row of tiny unventilated cubicles, each dedicated to it own particular vice; hardened smokers withering in one, fatties breathing each others foetid bowel winds in another, car owners choking on their vehicle emissions in the next ...
Maybe smoking is just the first item on a list. Maybe one day we can look forward to airports packed with row upon row of tiny unventilated cubicles, each dedicated to it own particular vice; hardened smokers withering in one, fatties breathing each others foetid bowel winds in another, car owners choking on their vehicle emissions in the next ...
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... serves them right, the bastards.
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