Naked Feet and Uncaged Liquids

Bizarro is brought to you today by Sultry Carnivores.

I'm really sick of that ad campaign about "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas," but it gave me an idea for a cartoon so I can't complain. To me, the funny thing about this cartoon is not the punch line, but the scalpel in the TSA agent's hand.

I travel a lot by aeroplane and, like many people with a reasonable I.Q. and a modicum of logic, I find the TSA folks to be exasperating. I've had harmless things taken away from me at security, the most notable of which was a plastic, space-age-looking child's raygun I had bought as a gift for a kid. The reason given was that the flight crew wouldn't have time to ascertain it was a toy if I tried to use it as a weapon. I'm not kidding.

The requirement of taking one's shoes off, even if they are flip-flops that could not conceal anything larger than a sewing needle, is another point of contention with me, along with the rule about liquids being in a plastic bag.

The concept of the bag rule is obviously to restrict the amount of liquids any one person can bring onto a plane; if you have more than can fit into a plastic bag of a certain size, you might have enough explosives to cause trouble. The logic of this is obviously flawed, five passengers could bring the legal limit and combine them on board, but more annoying than this blatent loophole is when you have only one tiny container and they insist you put it into a plastic bag. I've seen this on more than one occasion.

A friend of mine is married to an airline pilot and she says they say TSA stands for "Thousands Standing Around."

If they were actually making the industry safer, I'd be more tolerant of this kind of time-wasting nonsense, but studies continue to show it is just as easy to slip weapons past security as it was before 9/11.

I don't have an answer for this dilemma, of course, I just wanted to complain.