Metal detectors. There’s been a terrorist attack on my brain.
(sorry for the triple post)
Word.
All this is making me remember the Y2K panic, and how it came to nothing. Afterwards, Newsweek mentioned two pilots who flew an empty plane from L.A. to D.C. on 12/31/99. They had to go because the plane itself was scheduled to fly out of Dulles the next day. That’s how convinced people were of imminent devastation. This from the New Yorker cartoon anthology, on their fiscal decade 1995-2004: “Most topsy-turvy of all was the way in which the government, by avidly preparing for the brightly named Millenium Bug while bungling intelligence reports from murkier sources, readied the nation for entirely the wrong disaster.”
Oh, and Senor: If I’d had backpot when I was in high school, I would have been a lot happier.
I’ve flown on 9/11 three times since 2001. The most recent was yesterday. My only reservation was that it was the 5th anniversary, and 5s are salient in this culture, so I was a little concerned about copycat events. By “concerned” I mean worried about delays due to stupid people, not a hijacking or terrorism.
I flew from Nice to Heathrow to Vancouver. It was very calm, with no disruptions or visible extra security measures. I had a Tunisian visa in my passport and got no hassle. My bags were not opened. It seemed to me that there was a little more security than usual on the Canada-US connection today.
Dude, it’s the West Nile El Nino Anthrax virus. I hear it’s spread by gay Homeland Security agents flying in unmarked 767s with “NOPOPE” written backwards on them in Sanskrit by cursed Catholic Mummies. :eek:
Oh, and the Columbine thing just annoyed me to no end. I WAS one of the kids everyone picked on in high school, and I found it quite annoying to be asked (apparantly seriously) by various other students “You’re not gonna shoot me, are you? You know I was just kidding, right?” (doubly annoying the couple of times this happened before I knew what had happened).
This doesn’t even begin to address the fact that people were getting hysterical over violence in schools at the same time that occurances of violence in schools was actually decreasing. I think Ron White said it best when he said “Well, it’s not a parenting problem, Noooooo sir! It’s a video game problem, congratulations. Tell ya what, they shouldn’t be getting rid of these violent video games, they should give them to the California State Troopers, cause they are some of the worst shots I’ve ever seen before in my life! Give those boys a roll of quarters and turn 'em loose!”
Also, I loved how Doom on a Sega Genesis could somehow teach you how to become a crack shot with a firearm (having played plenty of shooting video games, and having shot a variety of actual guns, I can assure you that the video games have done NOTHING to make me a threat to anyone standing in front of me while I’m armed).
Oh, and those two little twerps in Colorado completley screwed up the airing order of the third season of Buffy, pushing one episode that takes place during high school out past the episode where they actually graduate and causing all sorts of continuity problems (as of two or three years later, the reruns were still being shown out of order).
And I’ve never understood why, if they wanted to off the popular people, they went to the library.
Because all of the really popular people are literate?
