Four Hour Work Week may have found a novel way to skip through the lines at the airport, get onto your plane faster, and get a more professional screening experience. Lose your ID. That’s the key to getting tagged for extra security and getting past the normal cattle chute screening. So long as it saves time, I have absolutely no problems with getting my baggage handled by a professional security screener.

Sure, your stuff will get checked a little more, and you’ll get patted down, but instead of just some minimum-wage X-ray jockey, you’ll get an official TSA screening officer. As far as I’m concerned, federal agents can fondle me all they want if it gets me through traffic and back to my departure gate in 5 minutes, rather than half an hour or longer. I’m not doing anything wrong, I know I’m not doing anything wrong, and they’ve swabbed my bags for explosives before (because I had a pack of batteries in my luggage), so I know it’s harmless.

I just wonder if it’s consistently a time-saver.

Tags: traveling tips, tsa, airport security, cutting in line, travel, airlines

Margaret O’Callaghan had a need for a new type of kitchen utensil.  The round-bottomed ladle and the spatula are just not good enough when you’re dealing with things like crock pots and serving dishes.  That’s why she invented the scrudle, a combination ladle and spatula designed to scrape the deliciousness from any sort of cooking […]

Every day, Tom Baker deals with the issue of traffic.  Given Southern California’s massive concentration of cars, it’s no wonder that Baker would get frustrated dealing with the daily traffic routine.  That inspiration resulted in these great images of Los Angeles without the cars.   Here’s the full image gallery, and it’s awesome.
I love the […]

Have you ever wondered where salt comes from?  I mean, salt is in everything from fertilizers (potassium chloride) to the dinner table (sodium chloride), but where does it actually come from?  Why, salt mines, of course!  They’re not just for horrible industrial accidents or mad scientist lairs anymore.  English Russia has a great look inside […]

For some reason, the kids these days love the Twilight saga.  Believe me, it pains me to call it the Twilight saga, because to me a saga is a great, sweeping work of masterful literature, not a teenage vampire romance novel.  Either way, the latest movie based on the Twilight books, New Moon (officially The […]

People worry about all kinds of crises as the world ends, but as the movie Zombieland taught us, sometimes it’s our snack foods that are most important to our happiness.  For Tallahassee, it was his beloved Hostess Twinkies.  If your favorite food is the humble Eggo waffle from General Mills, then you’d best head to […]

I love goofy little websites like this.  From the Wal-Martians to quality engineering, I love a nice, odd corner of the Internet to investigate.  If it’s something that can result in some comedy thanks to random word generation, even better.   That’s why when Mysterio offered to predict my holiday gifts, I jumped at the […]

Linguist d’Armond Speers is an odd bird.  How else could you explain someone that taught his son Klingon as his first language? For the first three years of his son’s life, Speers spoke to his son only in the fictional alien language Klingon from the Star Trek universe.  His reasoning?  It was an experiment to […]