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September 29th, 2006
Fencing Pictures is proud to have Bill Ward on the FP Team! Bill is a television videographer/ editor specializing in high definition programming. His work has appeared on The Discovery Channel, HGTV, The Food Network, PBS and other networks. He is currently at work on a documentary chronicling the events of the 2006 season of Women's Saber team, culminating at the World Championships in Korea. Bill and his two children, Rebecca and William, admit to some familiarity with a saber.
Ahhh….Travel: Is there anything you can’t make miserable?
Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel. I must: I was on the road about 30-some weeks last year. Maybe the phrase I’m looking for is actually “loathe to travel.” It could be worse, though; I could be the “Ziploc Guy.”
If you’ve been on an airplane in the last month, you’ve noticed that your bottle of Diet Pepsi has been considered an incendiary device by the brain trust at the Homeland Security Office of Diminutive Barnyard Fowls. Not to mention the clear and present danger contained in your grandmother’s tiny little bottle of eye drops. All of these liquid items have been being confiscated at the safety checkpoints at nearly every major airport in the US and many abroad. In a complete coincidence, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) requests for security checkpoint bathroom breaks have nearly quadrupled since the “no liquids on board” ban went into effect. Go figure.
But now, air travel is much, much safer, because of the “Ziploc Guy.” That’s the poor TSA bloke who now goes around the checkpoint lines with a single 1-quart Ziploc bag. Not a gallon, one quart. He has to tell everyone that they can now safely carry on 3 ounce bottles of liquid, but only as many as will fit in his 1-quart Ziploc bag. (Of course, he doesn’t actually provide any of the bags, nor any TSA-Safe Micro Bottles™). And just like your laptop, each Ziploc bag then has to be individually sent down the X-ray line…presumably because the X-ray machines can now tell the difference between a 3-oz bottle of Lubriderm and a 3-oz bottle of nitroglycerin.
But only if it’s in a one quart Ziploc bag, not a gallon. And isolated in its own tub.
Your 16-oz bottle of Diet Pepsi? Still considered an incendiary device…if YOU bring it to the airport. If you go through the checkpoint and buy it from a CONCOURSE VENDOR, get this…it’s Absolutely Safe To Take On Board! Because we all understand that no concourse merchant could ever possibly have “special” bottles of liquid deliberately introduced into the their inventory for collection and use by elements bent on the destruction of all we hold dear. You know: politicians.
Postcript: (written in haste from beneath a dumpster in a nameless Torino alley)
We arrived safely in Torino this afternoon. At dinner, one of our traveling party disclosed that they had inadvertently transported an undetected 2 ounce bottle of hand sanitizer onto the airplane--without putting it into a TSA-Safe Micro Bottle ™, NOR a one quart Ziploc bag. Not a gallon, one quart. Write that down. When we returned to our hotel, there were two burly agents with American flag lapels in the lobby, scanning the patrons and murmurring into their suitcoat sleeve cuffs. I overheard “enemy combatant” and “Guantanamo.”
Footsteps in the alley…gotta go…ciao!