a thaumaturgical compendium

Read over this experience with the TSA. Sure, “No, you don’t get your shoes,” isn’t the same as 14 hours of “sorta” torture, but it still sucks.

Someone noticed that box cutters could be used as a weapon, and that airplanes could be used as a weapon. We can’t undo that. But do they think that any of the security theater has an impact on real safety. How stupid are they? Or more to the point: how stupid do they think we are?

A trip to LA. No problem at the Buffalo Airport: my wife and I go through the automatic check-in, show our boarding passes and ID at the security check point, go through X-ray, and board the plane. In Cleveland, we switch planes. Before the doors close, someone comes to our row and says he has a ticket for my seat. Happens all the time: obviously, he is mistaken. I pull out my boarding pass—no, wait, it’s my wife’s boarding pass. The other one must be… also my wife’s boarding pass. I look back at the last two boarding passes, and they too are identical. So, I’ve managed to get through security in Buffalo (obviously, my ID and the ticket did not match), as well as board two planes, basically without a valid ticket. The US Air flight attendant: “Oh, sometimes this sort of thing happens. Don’t worry about it.”

On the return flight, I’m going through the security maze at LAX, and get pulled aside. I am used to this. I am clearly a flight risk. I think bad thoughts sometimes. I look to the right and can’t see my laptop. I start toward it and the TSA agent tells me to stop. I explain that I came in with a laptop, and it is not there now. She says, of course it is, right behind your bag. I feel dumb. I still can’t see it, because to do so I would have to leave my zone of permission, but I trust that it is there. “Why are you so paranoid?” she asks, accusingly.

I stand in the same spot for about five minutes. They have no space to search me. She makes a lame attempt at conversation, “One way ticket, huh?”

“Nope,” I say, “returning whence I came.” (No, I don’t use the word whence, at least not with TSA agents, but you get the idea.)

“What do you mean? You are on a one-way flight.”

“No,” I assure her, “my wife and I,” (I gesture to my wife who is very patiently waiting on the other side of security), “are returning home. We flew here just a couple of days ago, on round-trip tickets.”

I debated telling her the truth, but quickly thought the better of it. If they learned that I had evaded their crack security (or is that security on crack?) in the first direction, no doubt they would consider me even more dangerous this time around.

The agent darts over and asks someone how she (my wife) got through. This is an absolutely idiotic question. They have no idea who she is; after all, she cleared security ten minutes ago, flagless.

Eventually, they put me into the search, where I am poked and prodded (why yes! those are my testicles!) by a latex-gloved professional poker & prodder. If they wore all latex, and carried whips, this whole process would be a lot more amusing, and a lot less humiliating and annoying. The whole search takes another fifteen minutes since my prodder, I kid you not, has run out of fresh latex gloves and has to go and find another one. I while away the time thinking up witty remarks that, if uttered, would put me on the “do not fly” list. When I grow bored with that, I think of all the ways I could hide bladed instruments in my carry-on—as part of the computer, in the extendible metal handle of the roll-aboard, as part of a razor, in a car seat—not to mention how easily I could conceal a taser, baton, or aerosol. I watch a security person punch in the code at the door, a code that anyone with acceptable vision now knows. (Next time you are at the airport, see how long it takes you to learn the code simply by sitting next to a door on the jetway.)

And I think. If I were a terrorist, I think I would buy a round-trip ticket. I think I would charge it on my American Express card. If they scribbled an S on my boarding pass, I think I would probably choose not to fly that day. I wouldn’t board at LAX, I’d board in Albany or any of a dozen airports where the screeners would rather do anything in the world but actually pay attention to their X-ray machines. Or, I would shoot the plane out of the sky with a shoulder-launched missile. Or, I would fly a private plane into a large airport (say, JFK), park at an FBO, and walk across the tarmac to a restricted area. I’m not a criminal mastermind; any half-wit like myself realizes that this is what is necessary if you want to attack another plane. Yet we support this crap in our airline terminals.

I’ve said it before, America. Suck it up. Walk it off.

It must be really hard to be a satirist these days, what with the real world being so absurd. Still, what’s left but to laugh:

...

Fafnir: It isn’t me takin your sandwich Gilbets it is the government. That sandwich is a Class-3 Controlled Sandwich.
Giblets: Nuts to the government! Giblets is the only government that matters here an all sandwiches are permitted! Eat what thou wilt is the whole of the law!
FAF.: But the federal government gets to regulate stuff even in local Gibletsy governments because it gets to regulate interstate commerce.
GIBS.: The government is stupid! Giblets’s sandwich is not commerce, it is Giblets’s sandwich and he is going to eat it!
FAF.: But just cause you’re gonna eat the sandwich doesn’t mean it’s not commerce. How does the government know you’re not gonna do somethin commercy with your sandwich like feed it to livestock or let it have sex with a prostitute? Wouldn’t you be drivin down the price of sandwiches in the black sandwich market?

...

Should have posted this earlier, but now here it is. This year the School of Informatics (my institution) is one of the groups supporting the OII Summer School, and our newest assistant professor, Pauline Cheong, will be among the faculty. Our own grad students have fellowships available to them. Tracy has done a better job on the brief than I could have, and so I copy it in its entirety below. As she recommends, you should talk to your advisor, here at Buffalo or wherever you are, if you are interested.

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII), in association with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, plans to hold its 2005 Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) in Beijing from 7-21 July.

The SDP is designed to support advanced doctoral students engaged in dissertation research on the economic, political, legal and other social aspects of the Internet and related information and communication technologies. The Beijing SDP will not only be of greater value to students from Asia, but also students from around the world who wish to better understand the growing role of Asia, and China in particular, in shaping the development of the Internet and its social implications.

The programme will be conducted in partnership with: The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania; The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School; the Center for the Digital Future at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California; the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology; the School of Informatics at SUNY Buffalo; the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong; and the Singapore Internet Research Centre at Nanyang Technological University. All of these institutions will contribute to the teaching faculty.

More information about the OII’s SDP and this year’s programme in Beijing is available here.

I would encourage doctoral students who are interested in this programme to e-mail the OII at sdp AT oii.ox.ac.uk to register their interest and to begin speaking with their advisors about the potential value of this programme to the successful completion of their dissertations.

Thanks to the support of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and OII’s collaborating partners, a limited number of bursaries (scholarships) will be available. I would greatly appreciate your help in bringing this opportunity to the attention of doctoral students who might benefit from working with other advanced doctoral students and researchers in the field of Internet studies.

• I’d hire him, even if he is Overqualified.

• The War on Drugs has been won… by Target

• USB-powered “personal massager.”

• DoJ to double funding toward fighting terror pornography—wonder what they would have done with Sodom (NSFW).

• Is bringing porn to Denmark the equivalent of bringing coals to Newcastle? It seems not. Though the Netherlands, I think, has had a pretty thriving porn industry for a while. Anyone know where I can track down global exchange rates for porn?

• On a similar note: kids in Norway are running into the same problem kids are everywhere. With the ubiquity of porn, they develop a warped view of sexuality. Think of it as the “Oversexed World Syndrome.”

Someone asked recently what my advisees do. Well, I don’t have very many. I’m not a very easy person to get along with, and I am decidedly uncool. Add that to the fact that I am very demanding, and expect ridiculously excellent work, and that I have much of my time now eaten up with administrative tasks, and you don’t have a winning combo. Nonetheless, I’ve somehow ended up with a small number of pretty cool advisees…

Stephanie BelHomme (B.A.) – Normally undergrads don’t have faculty advisors at UB, but Ms. BelHomme has designed her own major, “Cultural Communication & Commerce,” and is focusing on (among other things) the role of global cultural transmission in the fashion industry.

Kara Kerwin (M.A.) – Ms. Kerwin is just about to complete her thesis on the motivations for establishing hyperlinks in weblogs. She splits her time between this and providing educational technology expertise to Hamilton College.

Jia Lin (Ph.D.) – Ms. Lin is working on completing a dissertation that looks at the use of weblogs as a way of measuring and eliciting urban culture, and comparing the creative potential among US cities.

Chien-Lin Liu (Ph.D.) – Mr. Liu is an unusual case, situating his work between the departments of communication and library studies. He has MLS and MI degrees from us, in addition to a masters degree in linguistics from Saint Petersburg University. He has just begun his program, but is interested in creating architectures for ad hoc clustering of heterogeneous PCs. He will be working closely with Prof. Brown-Syed.

Jack Rosenberry (Ph.D.) – Mr. Rosenberry is completing a dissertation that examines the role of online newspapers in encouraging participatory democracy. He also is a professional journalist and teaches at St. John Fisher College.

Sarah Whitehead (M.A.) – Ms. Whitehead is a new graduate student. She and I will be working on a project to measure the blogging “agenda,” and she will be part of the “social learning in games” research group next semester.

I had hoped, at one point, that my advisees could form a strong, cohesive bond as a group. Unfortunately, none of them hang around campus enough to make that very possible. I need to figure out a proxy for this.

When I started my job three years ago, people (who shall remain nameless) suggested that blogs were an interesting diversion, but would never be a subject of serious academic study. “Why not study decision support systems?” And while it has been nice to see wide coverage in the press, this just served to support the opinion, for some, that it wasn’t a phenomenon worth studying. How nice to get the latest issue of the Communications of the ACM and see this cover.

Even nicer is to open it up and find some wonderful articles focusing on some serious descriptive work. I am particularly taken by Kumar et al’s (the Almaden folks, natch) article that looks at some of the structure of livejournal, and it’s not just because they cite the work Jia Lin and I have been doing. Along with the Nardi et al piece in here, I think I now have a couple of very good articles to hand to the increasing number of people who knock on my door and say “where’s a good entry point for the literature on weblogging”? And, at the same time, there is something oddly fetishistic about the trauma of going mainstream: at the same time the comfort of knowing that if studying blogs was a folly it is at least a folly that lots of people more respectable than I am have fallen into, and at the same time, the feeling that you may have been so into what was happening right around your own board, that you have failed to see the next incoming wave.

Time to start paddling.

Layne showers after her sex scene is finally completed and Long stops in to tell her ‘how good she was in bed.’ It was Layne’s third movie she had done and she said that it was much better than her previous ones, “the last one was painful, I was bleeding for days. I feel fine this time, it just took longer.” After they joked around for a little while, Layne told Long, ‘I gotta take my shower. You should go talk to my husband, he’s waiting outside.’

Caption from one of the photos that won this year’s Documentary prize for the College Photographer of the Year: Sexual Tension. (Via Boing).