DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So I’m standing in the security line at the airport. A woman ahead of me has had her carry-on rejected by the X-ray operator, for she has made the grave mistake of attempting to bring a tiny pair of scissors aboard the flight. The entire line of would-be travelers had come to a standstill while the airline security staff picked through the woman’s bag, emptying it piece by piece, magazine, toothbrush, socks, chewing gum… I waited impatiently. I even muttered. OK, I admit it, I said it out loud: “I guess she doesn’t read the newspaper.” I was incapable of understanding how someone could be so daft as to try to bring anything on board an airplane that would warrant a second glance from the armed guards at the security checkpoint, and I wanted everyone within earshot to know it. Finally the technician located the manicure kit that had caught the attention of the scanner. The technician confiscated the scissors, repacked the bag, and the line took one grudging step forward.

My wife’s bag rolled down the conveyor. “Got two files here,” the operator sang out. The line stopped again while my wife’s stuff was unpacked, the nail files confiscated, and the muscly soldier guys with automatic weapons rolled their eyes. “Sheesh, you don’t read the newspaper either” I said aloud, although somewhat more quietly than before.

The X-ray operator sang out again. “Pocketknife,” he said, handing off yet-another carry-on bag for closer inspection. I am surrounded by idiots! I began to scream, until I saw that he was holding my bag.

And so it was that along with a variety of manicure scissors and nail files and a lot more Swiss Army Knives than Switzerland has ever had soldiers, my tiny pocketknife, which I thought I’d lost years before, was tossed into a locked metal box behind the more imposing of the two tall guys with rifles. I wonder what they do with all that gear.

On a related note, why exactly are the armed guards wearing camouflage suits inside the airport?

It’s a floor wax! No, it’s a dessert topping!

Although he denies that he’s a “cheese whiz,” which incidentally is the best pun I’ve heard since MeFi went crazy with horse humor a few weeks ago, reader Chris Thompson wrote in to point out that the World Cheese Index indeed has entries for the letters I’d missed in my cheese alphabet.

Kraft’s Cheez Whiz is no doubt a fine product, and I have no intention of disparaging it here, even if it is listed on Ray’s List of Weird and Disgusting Foods and contains as many types of preservatives as types of cheese and in addition to making a tasty snacktime treat, doubles as an effective laundry detergent.

Monday’s piece on kibibits inspired my friend Bim to unearth (heh) this amazing illustration of the powers of ten:

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

I pretty much loathe Java applets but this one is worth seeing.

After an evening playing Scattergories, in which the challege is to supply words, all beginning with the same randomly-selected letter, for each of 12 categories, my wife and I spent an obsessive few minutes populating the “cheese alphabet,” just in case “cheeses” was one of the categories in the game. (It isn’t, we learned with regret at the next session.)

Purely from memory, we got this far: asiago, american, brie, bleu, camembert, colby, cheddar, devonshire, dry jack, edam, feta, fontina, gouda, gruyere, goat, gorgonzola, green, havardi, jarlsberg, Kopfkäse, limberger, mozzarella, monterey jack, parmesan, pepper jack, provolone, provel, queso, raclette, romano, swiss, toe, tofurella, velveeta, wensleydale

I’m sure there are cheeses whose names begin with i, n, o, u, x, y, z, but I’m equally sure I can’t think of them!