DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This is Naxos Town, the main city on the island on Naxos. I was standing with my back to the gate of Apollo. The wind came from the left. The sun set behind me to the right. And the smell of drying octopus came from just down the hill.

One of the best things about my house is something I didn’t even know I was getting: a seedless mandarin tree. This is the best fruit in the world, or at least the best in my yard. I could eat five a day.

I watched nearly 90 movies last year. Once I’d added up the total, I stared agape. 88 movies?! At two hours apiece that’s the equivalent of four and a half workweeks… a month of workdays spent sitting in a dark room in pursuit of passive entertainment. (With a gallon of popcorn on my lap, natch. Some things never change.)

Here’s the conflict: I really like movies. I mean, obviously I like movies, or I wouldn’t have spent 176 hours last year watching them. For pure entertainment, it’s hard to beat the first Matrix.

After eight viewings, though, there is still no spoon. I’m looking back to wonder if I could have done something more constructive with that time.

Tonight, Tuesday, is cheap movie night at the local multiplex. For about the fourth week running, LoTR III tickets cost a paltry $3.50.

I haven’t seen the movie yet. I know I will someday. But not tonight. I just don’t want to take the three and a half hours out of my schedule. I think I’ll end up missing the whole big-screen experience of this film — a realization I have mixed feelings about. Maybe this push to accomplish all my new goals will fizzle out in a few weeks. In the meantime, though, the movies will have to wait.

When I had a film camera, I was totally paranoid about passing film through the X-ray machines at the airport. I always handed my film, exposed or not, around the outside of the device for manual inspection. The guards always helped out… until September 11, 2001, when airports declared war on carry-ons. (These days, they’ll X-ray a business card in search of weapons.)

Once at CDG in Paris I was carrying four rolls of shot film — my only souvenirs of a vacation in Italy. The guard was a mean-looking woman with a chip on her shoulder the size of the pistol on her hip. Well, OK, maybe she wasn’t armed. She had a glare that would kill baby seals though.

I smiled as best I could in the face of that face, and asked politely if I could pass my film around the outside of the scanner. Unfortunately I didn’t ask this question in French. Every story you’ve ever heard about the French being rude to Americans might well be true. Certainly this one is. This woman was a bitch.

She said “no” in a way that expressed contempt for me, my film, my vacation memories, and my haircut. I explained my concern about film damage and sentimental value. I appealed to her reason, and then to her emotions. I smiled again. She cut me off and pointed with short chopping motions toward the conveyor belt. I think she wanted to send me through there, in case I’d hidden a few more rolls of film in my colon.

I reacted badly. I became angry and possibly a little rude, thus justifying some of the stories the French people tell about those awful Americans. I asked to speak to a supervisor.

Needless to say, in that place I had all the authority of a gnat perched on the edge of a urinal. A second guard approached — not a supervisor, just an additional disagreeable guard. My request was denied brusquely.

Time stretched out. Maybe this is a side-effect of adrenaline, or of blood pressure doubling. A thermal photograph of Paris at this moment would have come back overexposed.

I realized I’d lost the battle. Still seething, I stepped toward the scanner. I was surprised to see both guards stay behind to beat up on the next person in line. In a decision that would leave me shaking for the next ten minutes, I pulled all the film cannisters out of my carry-on before dropping the bag on the conveyor belt. I set the film down next to the frame of the metal detector, stepped through quickly, and reached back for the film. I’d defied orders! I couldn’t look up; I already had visions of French airport police bearing down with clubs in the air. But they were still ten feet away, backs turned, harassing the unfortunate souls who had been behind me. I’d gotten the guard woman all worked up; she was probably even biting the heads off of French people at this point.

I grabbed my carry-on from the conveyor belt. (The guy operating the X-ray machine had been sitting too low to see what I’d done with my film.) And then I walked very quickly down the concourse, as if they wouldn’t be able to find me if they really wanted to. I hid out in a restaurant for 20 minutes, waiting for the Klaxon and red lights.

Because, you know, I could have had a knife inside one of those 35mm film cups. Or a pistol. Or maybe even a bomb!

Sigh. The moral of this story: don’t go to France.

Here is an image of damage done to film by post-9/11 X-ray scanners. Note that this film was in a checked bag; checked bags are zapped with a much higher dosage of radiation than carry-ons, I think about a million Sieverts, which is just under the threshhold where the elastic in your panties will melt.

Read more at the Kodak site: Baggage X-ray Scanning Effects on Film

And finally, you can read what the travel cops at TSA say about transporting film.

A report in the Chronicle’s Travel section last December proclaimed, “Airline passengers can lock their bags again, thanks to a private sector collaboration on design and production of new, specialized locks.”

Are the locks more secure than old, unspecialized locks? No.

Are they less expensive than old, unspecialized locks? No.

So what’s so “special” about them? In fact the new locks are flawed by design: they accept a master key, so they can be easily opened by any baggage screener in any airport in the country.

It seems ironic to me that the baggage screeners were given keys to these locks, when they’re the people that luggage locks were protecting us from.

Here’s a report of a baggage screener from Philadelphia charged with stealing from luggage. Here’s a report of screeners in Miami and New York stealing from luggage.

Most baggage screeners are honest, of course. And there are other people, besides the screeners, who have access to checked bags after the bags go down the conveyer belt into the bowels of the airport. I’m spreading the blame, because there’s plenty of it… more than enough for everyone. The Transport Security Administration, the division of the Homeland Security department that oversees baggage screening, admits it hasn’t completed background checks on all its screeners yet. We can at least be thankful they’ve fired the 85 screeners who turned out to be felons.

Instead of fancy TSA-approved padlocks, I use and recommend cable ties. Cable ties can easily be cut off by any TSA screener or determined thief — but at least I’ll know when it happens.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with TSA padlocks is that each unit sold generates a royalty to the private company founded by the guy in charge of the TSA. Isn’t that convenient? By day, the head of the TSA decreed that the only TSA-approved locks would be legal. By night, the same guy founded the company that licenses the locks. They call this “private enterprise working in cooperation to solve a problem for the government,” when in fact no such problem existed — they invented the problem, by requiring “universal” locks, and now they’re selling the solution.