I'm a lasagna boy!

Bug book

Susan lent me an anthology of writing about insects: Insect Lives, "Stories of Mystery and Romance From A Hidden World". It contains passages from Exodus, the selfsame that JZ swore pointed to manna as being "insect shit!" in his trademark first-year lecture.

Amar Chitra Katha online

I read a lot of these classic Indian stories in comic-book form from Amar Chitra Katha when I was younger; it's how I learned many of the stories from the Mahabharata, and about Ashoka and Tansen.

Keeping your brains on the inside of your body

The Bicycle Kitchen in L.A.'s Eco-Village offers advice, tools, and alley-cat racing for urban Angelenos.

Now playing at a XXX theatre near you

Maureen Dowd feels my pain.

It always makes me feel slimy and humiliated, as though I'm in one of those cheesy women-in-prison movies, with titles like "Caged," "Slammer Girls" or "Reform School Girls."

First you have to strip, unzipping your boots, unbuckling your belt and unbuttoning your suit jacket while any guys standing around watch. Then you have to walk around in some flimsy top and stocking or bare feet. Then you have to assume the spread-eagled position. Then a beefy female security agent runs her hands all the way around your breasts, in between, underneath - again with guys standing around staring.

Flying on business, I've gone through this embarrassing tableau two dozen times in airports all over the country in the last couple of months. I've been searched more than Martha Stewart. I watched a Transportation Security Administration screener brusquely insist that my friend take off her blazer even though she had on only lingerie underneath - a see-through camisole - and the man behind her was leering.

Airport screening procedures are more reactive than imaginative. There's an attempted shoe bombing, so all passengers must shed their shoes. Two female Chechens may or may not have sneaked explosives onto Russian planes, so now some T.S.A. genius decides all women are subject to strips and body searches.

I get flagged for extra security every time I buy a one-way ticket, which seems particularly lame. Doesn't the T.S.A. realize that a careful terrorist plotter like Mohammed Atta could figure this out and use his Saudi charity money to pop for round trips even if the return portion gets wasted?

In two articles in The Times, Joe Sharkey has chronicled the plaints of women angry about new procedures in airport security that have increased both the number and intensity of the airport pat-down, or "breast exam," as one woman put it.

He described the experience of Patti LuPone, the singer and actress, at the Fort Lauderdale airport, who resisted taking off her shirt and got barred from her flight, and of 71-year-old Jenepher Field, who walks with the aid of a cane, being subjected to a breast pat-down at the airport outside Kansas City, Mo. (Do we have intelligence telling us that grandmothers are part of Al Qaeda now?)

Even a stripper complained in an e-mail message to Mr. Sharkey that she found her experiences degrading: "On one occasion a screener flat out asked if they were fake."

Somebody tell me what quantity of explosive material they have found through these strip searches, because I've got a hunch it's zero. How many billions are they wasting on this?

Maybe we're not at the Philip K. Dick level of technology yet. But how about some positive profiling? If airport security can have a watch list for the bad guys, why can't it develop a watch list for the good guys? Can't there be a database of trustworthy American frequent travelers who are not going to secrete things in their bras? After all, no one is going to sneak anything in there without our knowledge. Can they at least get a screen?

I know it's not just women who are uncomfortable; a guy I know said a male screener at the Miami airport recently stuck a hand down the front of his pants, making him feel "totally manhandled." And I heard the sad tale of a red-faced Washington businessman who took off his shoes, only to show the room the red painted toenails he had forgotten to wipe off.

Barry Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. told Court TV that the new procedures are not only "an open invitation for harassment" - there are not enough female screeners, so sometimes men are doing the pat-downs of women - but they're also "not particularly effective."

I've never wanted to complain because I assume there are inconveniences that go along with greater security. But I would feel less creepy if I thought this were part of an effective overall strategy of protecting the country. I don't.

Iraq is draining money we should be spending protecting ourselves. Only 3 to 5 percent of containers coming into ports are checked, and only a tiny percentage of air, rail and truck cargo is inspected. Congress is turning homeland security money into another avenue of pork. Tom Ridge is still making fuzzy ads telling people to have a plan of action and referring them to his Web site, which hasn't gotten much beyond duct tape.

If we were buttoning up the borders and making the airlines safer, unbuttoning in public would be more bearable.

Malady of the month

Malady of the Month features photos and a layman's explanation of a different disease each month. Syphilis, aka "The Pox", has long fascinated me. A friend called up a few months ago, saying, "I found a book and immediately thought of you." I swung by to check it out, and it was a 1950s US government publication entitled "Syphilis"; I already had a copy.

X-Ray OJ

File under: Travelling While Brown.
I wear shoes that don't have any metal in them, so that I don't need to remove them when passing through airport security areas (Typical exchange: "Sir, we highly recommend you remove those shoes," in the same sotto voce a sommelier might use with the cuvée primiere and a sole meuniere; me: "These shoes don't contain any metal." and thinking to myself, "Can't they just violate me once the metal-detector / explosives-sniffer sounds the alarm?" But instead I'm summarily pulled aside. First the shoes come off (and, as I refuse to stand barefoot on carpet, a supervisor is summoned); then they ask me to remove the jacket, the sweater; then the belt; then "please unbutton the trousers." This is too much. They've put two different metal wands around my body, patted me down, and passed me back and forth through a metal detector. My OJ goes back through the X-ray machine, my laptop undergoes further scrutiny, and we all make our way to a small closet behind the line of waiting passengers. Here my shoes are screened again (because, they explain, I put them back on in order to walk to the closet; But, I point out, you were with me the whole time. Yes, but this is the procedure. That phrase recurs.); my belt, trousers, and sweater are again patted down and a wand sweeps over my body.
The underlying agony lies in the boring, boring manual nature of all this: after a mad scramble to install automatic explosives-sniffing devices, advanced metal-detecting scanners, and all sorts of traveller-profiling systems, where are we? In a back room at SeaTac, at Sky Harbor, at LAX, with two surly naturalized citizens triple-checking my travel documents and looking for any reason that I should be further detained.

ESP Game

From the ESP Game FAQ:

Q: Does the ESP game work in Mac OS and Linux?
A: Not always. The ESP game is written as a Java applet, and the versions of Java included in some of the browsers for Mac OS or Linux are slightly incompatible with the current implementation of the game. We are working hard to make the game available everywhere.

Warning labels for books

Like Mad Magazine, but funny, these warning stickers for textbooks should come in handy in a Fight Club sort of way

Both men were known to the police.

First time as I can recall shots being fired west of Fillmore on Haight. And it was the cops that done it.

A San Francisco police officer shot and wounded a fleeing man Monday night after the man backed his car into the officer's partner and dragged the officer several feet, police said.

The incident began on Haight Street, just west of Steiner Street, at 9:10 p.m. when two officers spotted two men, one of whom was wanted, in a passing vehicle. The men parked their car in a driveway and the officers stopped to question them, said San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens.

As one of the officers was questioning the two men, the driver suddenly backed up the car, knocking down the other officer, who was standing alongside the car, Gittens said.

The officer was dragged 10 feet, police said. His partner fired two shots at the fleeing car, slightly wounding the driver.

As the men in the car fled, the uninjured officer called for backup, police said. Responding officers located the wanted vehicle and chased the suspects, stopping them at Central and Lyon streets, where they were arrested.

Gittens said both men were known to the police. He said one of the suspects was wanted on an arrest warrant Monday night when they were initially stopped.

Police did not release the identities of the officers or the suspects. They also did not describe the severity of the injuries sustained by the police officer or the suspect, both of whom were transported by ambulances to hospitals.

G-Cans

The G-cans project in (or underneath, to be precise) Tokyo doubles as a tourist attraction; its design intends to prevent rainy-season flooding in the city.

War on war

We have a war on drugs, a war on poverty, and a war on terrorism, but why don't we have a war on single-occupancy vehicles?
Maps, 8-second maps, more maps, and advocacy are just the beginning. We should make transit free within the downtown -- Portland and Seattle already do. Federal regulations require a 25% farebox revenue contribution towards overall operating costs (and, in fact, most transit systems barely manage that!). Why not make MUNI free in the downtown area? Or across the entire system?

subfusc

subfusc: a. dusky drab; n. formal academic dress at Oxford University.
I read the adjective in Dorothy Sayers' "Have His Carcase"; although I knew the second, nominative meaning (probably also from Sayers, perhaps "Gaudy Night", a novel replete with Oxonian trivia), the description of a cheap overcoat threw me.

(Jack's) Elixir Celebrates It's Resurrection

If anything, I'd expect "Authentic" to appear in quotation marks. The "new" paint job at The Elixir (neé Jack's Elixir), at the corner of 16th and Guerrero, lacks the boisterous appeal of the old.