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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Where have all the Swiss Army Knives gone? The pilot pursues the mystery of the confiscated "sharps."
Nov 7, 2003 | Be careful what you wish for. A couple of weeks ago I offhandedly dared you to create anagrams from a pair of tongue-twisting airline names. Lloyd Aero Boliviano, anybody? How about Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky Air?
If the former is ever desirous of an ad slogan, they can now consider this suggestion from reader John Robert Armstrong: "OILY BALLOON AVOIDER, ADORE ALLOY OBLIVION," the best of more than a dozen submissions, and which twice over puts the airline's 18 letters to cunningly poetic use. Or, as proposed by reader Matthew Zimmerman, imagine a placard warning passengers, "LIVE OILY LOON ABOARD." And after stowing your bags and tightening your belts, remember to "LAY OLIVE OIL ONBOARD."
As for Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky Air, a small airline from Russia, the best concoction was, "VIVA ALASKA SKY! (MOCK PERTH PORT)." Nah.
No surprise there are Internet sites -- Wordsmith.org is one -- that will do the rearranging for you, but I'm wondering if Salon readers aren't those same people who call National Public Radio every Sunday morning to try those annoying on-air word puzzles. Just not my thing, and listening to those challenges is like having maple syrup injected directly into my brain: "I'm thinking of a popular item for sale in a grocery store. It has seven letters. The first letter is the same as the fifth, and the fourth letter is the same as the third letter of the world's eighth largest country. What is the item?"
And so forth.
Those of you not excited by anagrams saved your enthusiasm for my piece about poor Nathaniel Heatwole, the Guilford College junior whose act of would-be social protest raised the ire of the Transportation Security Administration, and may soon be raising a judge's gavel in a courtroom. One e-mailer notes that Guilford is a Quaker institution with a rich history of civil disobedience. Heatwole is just "a pacifist," the letter explains, continuing a long tradition.
Maybe, but Heatwole's mistake, to me, wasn't subversion. To the contrary, his failure was exercising a total lack of it. Well-intended as he might have been, he missed the point, serving only to further nurture our irrational fears of box cutters. Yes, sharp objects can be smuggled onto a plane. But Heatwole neglects to ask the essential question: So what?
If you're going to fight nonsense with nonsense, hardly a rare maneuver among pranksters and our more clever challengers of authority, at least do it humorously. This particular act was neither constructive nor funny. Boyd Rice or Jello Biafra he ain't.
Antipodal as it may sound in the current climate, I advocate a more liberal -- which is to say sensible and rational -- policy toward the carriage of sharps aboard airplanes. As I wrote, the true deadly weapon on Sept. 11 wasn't a box cutter, it was surprise. And, as a few of you were astute to point out, the hijack model was forever changed in the process. Although discussed in a column several months ago, enough of you brought this up to warrant repetition: Never again in this country will anybody assume a purloined plane is headed to Cuba, Lebanon or anywhere but into the side of a skyscraper or government building. Thus I can't imagine anybody making it two steps up the aisle, to say nothing of through the cockpit door, armed with less than a bucket of pinless hand grenades balanced on his head.
And yes, by the way, I really did carry a fork in my luggage with which to eat ramen noodles in hotel rooms. On short, late-arrival layovers when restaurants were closed, this was often the only way to sneak a bite before a crack-of-dawn van ride back to the airport. All you need is one of those in-room coffee makers. You crush the noodles into the pot, and run water through the machine sans coffee. The fork is just a little touch of dignity.
When I was a commuter pilot for several years, my salary afforded only the fattiest, 10-for-a-dollar options from the local CVS or Osco. If I felt like splurging, the supermarket in Porter Square, a few minutes' walk from where I live, features a comprehensive art-noodle section that made those late-night feasts of desperation more palatable.
It just wasn't the same, though, using a plastic fork.
