DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

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.

Hemp is an amazing plant. As I’ve written before, it grows easily without pesticides and makes high-quality food, fiber, and pulp. Get the scoop from the Hemp Industries Association.

Just in case there’s a question of my motives: I don’t smoke pot. This isn’t about drugs; it’s about the health of the planet. Hemp grows like a weed and could revolutionize commercial agriculture, but the Bush administration wants to outlaw it because the plant contains traces of THC.

As an illustration of the wrong-headedness of the DEA’s unhealthy fixation on Cannabis, hemp advocates point out that poppy-seed bagels contain traces of opium. But nobody in the Bush administration is trying to legislate your bagels out of the market. Why? Because it would be ridiculous. About is ridiculous as classifying hemp granola bars as “controlled substances.”

Today, though, the news is good. For a change, common sense has won. As the AP reports,

Rejecting one front of the government’s drug war, a federal appeals court ruled Friday the United States cannot ban the sale of food made with natural hemp that contains only trace amounts of the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. The decision overturns the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ban on the domestic sale of hemp food products.

See more coverage in the Chronicle’s story, Bush push to expand drug wars shot down by Ninth Circuit ruling:

The court said the DEA had no authority to reclassify hemp as a dangerous drug without first showing that it has a “high potential for abuse.”

In Awash in Pinot Noir, the LA Times describes a winery like none I’ve ever seen:

Working out of three rented rooms on the second floor of a Palos Verdes Estates shopping center with a staff of five part-timers and a college intern, [Castle Rock Winery’s owner Greg] Popovich buys wine on the spot market, paying a consulting winemaker a per-case fee to blend and bottle it in rented space in Napa Valley’s Calistoga. He then ships it to almost every state in the country through a network of independent distributors.

It’s wine without the winery. Without the vineyard. Without the winemaker, even.

Sam Adams Brewing Company used to outsource manufacturing of their lager, before they had a brewery of their own. An A-B employee friend of mine sniffed that Sam Adams couldn’t really be considered a real beer for that reason. But at least the Sam Adams folks had a recipe! The brewing was contracted out, but the final brew was not left to the whims of the hired help.

I mean no offense to Greg Popovich. In fact, I applaud him for selling $10 wines — anybody willing to challenge the epidemic idea that California reds have to cost $20/bottle is doing the right thing as far as I’m concerned.

I guess I’m stuck on the (admittedly outdated) idea that wines should be made by a family businesses with their own land, their own facilities, their own winemaker, their own mission. The idea of buying bulk wine and mixing it together somehow doesn’t conjure images of handcrafted vino.

Then again, nobody ever promised me handcrafted vino for $10/bottle.

Still, the idea of commodity wine just isn’t very appealing. The same thing applies to mass-market bread, coffee, olive oil, beer, and any of the other gourmet foodie-foods that have already enjoyed their renaissance.

Ironically, commodity Pinot probably pretty good anyway. Excuse me while I step out to Trader Joe’s… I’ll need to make this decision empirically.

All I wanted was a new water heater.

OK, well, I wanted a new water and I wanted it to last for 20 years. That doesn’t seem so difficult. In theory, all you’d have to do is:

• Install a second anode.
• Install a curved inlet tube.
• Upgrade the drain valve.
• Flush the tank every two years.
• Replace the anodes every five years.

But in practice, water heater science is not the aspiration of most of the guys who sell or install them. Or as one wholesaler said, “Anode? Why on earth would you want to change the anode?”

Then, too, there’s the fact that California’s regulations for water heaters have changed twice in six months. As far as I can tell this has had the effect of putting just about every model of water heater on permanent backorder.

We have the misfortune of needing a “shorty,” a slightly less tall model of water heater. This cuts the selection to, let’s see… one. We had one model to pick from. So, on the bright side, we didn’t need to spend any time agonizing over which of the one available model to purchase. But it took two weeks to locate one of the one model that we could actually buy.

The new unit doesn’t have a curved inlet tube. Our plumber was unsure whether a curved inlet tube could be installed, so I let it go. That was one of my must-have modifications, but I’m all about compromise, especially when not compromising might mean taking ice-cold showers for two months.

The anode upgrade turned into a bigger project than I imagined. What should have been a five-minute task turned into an hour’s hard work — for me! Most people, they let the plumber in the front door, and then they write a check an hour later. That’s the extent of the involvement. But not when it’s my water heater — somehow I ended up sitting in the driveway for an hour with a wood rasp, trying to reduce the diameter of the plastic fitting on the new combination rod to make it fit into the new tank.

So my hands were raw and I’d been breathing aluminum shavings for an hour, and then the plumber knocked out the old heater’s exhaust pipe with his head. Which meant I had to crawl into the attic, which I hate, and hold the chimney pipe still while the plumber re-attached the exhaust pipe from below.

Sometimes I think my personal hell will be to work tech support for a company that uses Outlook Express. But other times, like today, I realize that my personal hell will involve crawling around in my attic, getting tangled up in Romex, laying painfully across studs with all my body weight supported by three or four little two-inch-square patches where bones touch wood. One hand will invariably be pressed into a pile of fiberglass insulation. And don’t forget the dust cloud — fiberglass dust is mandatory in this hell. Or in my attic, whichever; they’re the same.

While I was up there the plumber related that he’d fallen through a client’s ceiling once. I had that to chew on that while trying to crab-walk out of the passageway pictured here, eyes watering, feeling scratchy everywhere, wondering how long it takes to catch asbestosis. All in all I think I’d rather have been troubleshooting Outlook Express. Especially at the moment when I scooted along a narrow piece of plywood and winced as an enormous splinter buried itself in my ass.