Airport Security — Solved. (Badly)

Security at the airport is annoying for a panoply of reasons. It’s woefully inefficient, funneling hundreds of people into a narrow pipeline of security stations, which guarantees long delays, missed flights and tremendous irritation. It wildly overreacts to any new botched and half-assed terrorism attempt — is there anyone who truly feels safer knowing his fellow passengers have had their shoes x-rayed? And of course, there is the increasingly invasive searches and surveillance technology, conducted by a bureaucracy that has been allowed to run unchecked and increasingly amok.

We know all these reasons. But there is another reason why airport security is annoying that I think has been overlooked: the anticlimax. Security screening consists of a wait of anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours or more, during which you are forbidden from relieving the tension by joking about the one subject — terrorism — that is on the mind of literally every single person there, which is rather like being forced to wait in an elephant paddock without mentioning the elephant. This is followed by a mad shuffle to dump purses, jackets and laptops into trays, take off shoes and demonstrate that your shampoo and conditioner can’t be used to blow a hole in the fuselage of the plane. All of these things are really only the preamble to the personal screening, in which you either pass through a metal detector or stand in front of a scatter x-ray machine before being summarily waved through.

That’s it?

The reason that this process seems so onerous is that we get nothing out of it — that our time appears to have been frivolously and blatantly wasted. It is hard to think of any routine activity in which so much waiting delivers such little payoff. Therefore, one idea for making security more tolerable and thus, perhaps, more effective is to give people more for their money, as it were. I have a few ideas on this score.

Make the Screening Longer

Yes, this is an insane idea, but given that our present system is so massively inefficient, making it nominally more so in the interests of passenger satisfaction makes some sense. If passengers felt that TSA personnel were really making a big deal out of them — or, if you like, really taking them seriously as a potential threat — they would probably find the process more fair and more justified. My ideas for expanding the screening process:

Personal interviews. Every passenger has to submit to a brief, two- to five-minute interview. These would include standard questions about the traveler’s destination and purpose of visit. The screener would then have the option of exchanging small talk with the traveler, perhaps comparing pictures of grandchildren and such, or of engaging them on the subjects of politics, economics and current events. Screeners could draw upon a list of prepared questions that appear designed to elicit potentially dangerous or subversive views but whose answers would, in fact, be completely ignored, their only purpose being to permit the traveler to express him or herself and to let them know they are taken seriously.

Actors. Airport security suffers from an inherent problem: its successes are invisible. Nobody ever sees a terrorist plot foiled or a suspicious passenger with no carry-on baggage summarily hauled away for questioning. Thus, the common perception is that airport security is a fiction, a charade put on solely to deliver the illusion of safety rather than the thing itself. Well, perhaps it is — and if it is, let’s make it a good illusion. Scattered randomly throughout the day at every major airport should be actors whose sole purpose is to pose as passengers, be “unmasked” as potential terrorists and swarmed by security personnel and then arrested, in as showy a manner as possible. There should be variety: while suspicious travelers will nervously eye the Middle Eastern men, a young, pregnant white woman should suddenly rip open her coat to reveal that she is wired head to toe with explosives, screaming that she’ll blow herself, her unborn baby and all the rest of these goddamn people to kingdom come unless someone gets her ex-husband on the phone RIGHT MOTHERFUCKING NOW. There would then occur the most spectacular display of security prowess as a (carefully rehearsed) crack team of agents wrestle the woman to the ground, disarm her and drag her, howling and shrieking like a hyena on fire, to the nearest holding cell. An agent will then return to assure people that everything was under control and that all were safe. You know what would probably happen then? The whole room would spontaneously break into applause.

A lot could be done with this idea. The TSA could stage foot chases, martial arts battles of a dozen or more combatants, and even mock shootings. You would walk through an airport en route to a flight knowing full well that anyone around was capable of doing literally anything. I don’t think this would make people terribly afraid, but it would make them more alert, and enforce the principle that security procedures are there for a reason.

Of course, these ideas only make a flawed system more tolerable, while actually increasing its cost and inefficiency. So, in the interest of a constructive debate, here are actual suggestions for improving airport security.

TSA On the Go

Have you ever been to an Apple store and noticed there are no cashier lines? Instead, hipsters in black t-shirts and carrying portable credit card readers roam the floor and conduct transactions on the spot, wherever you happen to be. This is how airport security should work. Rather than a thin, urethra-like line feeding a paltry security station, the screening area should be vast and open, with TSA screeners equipped with the latest metal detector wands and other portable scanning gear. They would proactively find travelers in the crowd, quickly check them over (no one’s taking off their fucking shoes, thank you very much) and issue them a signed and dated stamp indicating that they have cleared security and may enter the terminal. No one could board a plane without that stamp, and anyone failing the brief security sweep would be led to a more thorough station — in fact, the same station to which we foolishly submit every traveler today.

Appointments

Taking the Apple store menu even further, why not be able to make an appointment with a TSA screener? I don’t think this would be as efficient as the previous suggestion — waiting rooms always run late — but it couldn’t help but improve the current situation, and people would be in a better mood if they knew that a time and place had been set aside for them. And in fact, there’s nothing to say you couldn’t combine this suggestion with the previous one. Make the security experience more like the Apple store is basically the takeaway here.

You know, on second thought, I’d really rather have the actors.

The iPad and the Dog that Didn’t Bark. (And the Dog that Barked too Soon.)

The product Apple revealed yesterday was largely what most people expected. Called the iPad (well, that name probably wasn’t expected), it is slim and elegant, engineered with meticulous care to do a few things well: deliver the internet, display movies and photographs, play music and serve as an electronic reading device. The latter capability was revealed about halfway through Steve Jobs’ launch presentation, not quite an afterthought but lacking the marquee position of an A-list feature. As Jobs remarked several years ago when dismissing Amazon’s Kindle, people don’t read anymore; certainly they don’t buy books the way they buy music, movies and TV shows. Perhaps this justified the middling prominence of the iBooks application and its accompanying online bookstore, which aims (like the Kindle) to do for reading what iTunes and the iPod have done for music. And perhaps that explains why one of the day’s most significant announcements was made as little more than an aside. “We are also,” said Jobs, not sounding very excited, “very excited about textbooks as well.”

Perhaps Jobs soft-pedaled this announcement because he knew it wasn’t a surprise at all. The night before the iPad launch, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw spilled many of Steve Jobs’ beans in an interview with CNBC, breezily confirming that Apple was announcing a tablet computer running the iPhone OS, for which McGraw-Hill was collaborating with Apple to provide educational content. It might not appear entirely out of character for Jobs to lop McGraw-Hill out of his presentation, provided it had ever been included — Jobs famously dropped graphics chip vendor ATI from a keynote when they revealed upcoming Mac models before he could. And it prompts a mordant chuckle to imagine the look on Jobs’ face as he watched McGraw blithely steal his thunder. But I give Jobs the benefit of the doubt. It is likely that Apple’s negotiations with textbook publishers are still in progress, and that Apple will formally tout the iPad as an education tool at a later date. Because this arrangement is a very big deal — one that could potentially have a huge impact on both parties. Continue reading →

Tasting Notes of the Fall Meeting of the Northwest Illinois Scotch Whisky Society

Glen Brae 9 Year-Old

A peaty, smoky, slightly caramel nose gives way to discordant tones of apple, clove, cedar, and introspection. While some of the members present were delighted by its lightness and busy frivolity, your Secretary found it a disquieting dram, apt to give one thoughts of licking an exposed chair in a bus station, or happening upon a nude self-portrait one had no memory of ever taking.

Redpinnock 15 Year Diabolic Reserve

This notorious Speyside malt rarely makes its way overseas, and the Society was truly privileged to be able to sample it this summer. Does this whisky — distilled in casks lined with human skulls, tended to perfection by a master distiller who is rumored to be over 200 years old and completely mad — live up to its reputation? And how! A nose of peat, gravel, rainwater and bone scarcely prepares you for an explosive palette of oak, cherry, blood and iron, leveling off with a strong note of human fear. I don’t mind revealing that this whisky had an extraordinary effect on those in attendance: Mr. Rossini found himself reliving a harrowing childhood incident involving his Boy Scout troop, while Ms. Kreisler began to spontaneously recite what the members eventually identified as the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood,” a work she claims to have neither read nor heard of before.

Drumnadrochit Single-Cask 12 Year-Old

Despite some tantalizing rumors from our brother chapter across the pond, this is not a whisky at all, but an expression of untempered seawater larded with plant detritus and industrial refuse and allowed to mature, if that is the word, in a “cask” formerly used in the recycling of diesel oil. Further examination determined that the label was printed on an ordinary desktop printer, and that the signature it bore gave a clue to its true provenance. We salute the members of our Edinburgh chapter for another hearty jest at our expense. Such members, being devoid of ordinary human feeling, will no doubt delight to hear that Mr. Evans became violently ill after sampling this libation and was later found to have ingested a nearly invisible plastic filament that became entangled in his lower intestine. We wish Mr. Evans a speedy recovery and hope he is discharged from the hospital in time for next season’s tasting. We wish our Edinburgh brothers and sisters slow, lingering deaths.

Weesleekit Cask Strength (No age statement)

This unassumingly named, and now exceedingly rare, Eastern Highland malt packs quite a “wallop” — as the whisky world learned to its horror last spring, when a stray spark in the bottling plant set off an explosion that demolished more than half of the distillery and claimed dozens of lives. It will be the better part of a decade before the distillery is rebuilt and once again bottling; until that day, savor every drop of this pale, bold, exceedingly powerful dram. A nose of smoke, butane and lots of alcohol sets the stage for a taste that makes up for its complete lack of subtlety with a memorable attack across the palate. As this whisky numbs the tongue within seconds and renders all but the hardiest connoisseurs insensate with drunkenness, it made an ideal conclusion for the evening, which soon gave way to an exuberant revelry rarely to be found at our gatherings. Those photos of the event suitable for public viewing may be found posted to the Society’s website.

Hannoch 18 year-old; Glen Skye Masters Choice 14-year Reserve; Bogmannon Sherry Oak 10 year-old; Windex cleaning solvent (no age statement); Diet Rite Cola (canned September 2009); Dasani bottled water (expires February 2012)

Empty bottles of the above libations were discovered in the morning following the members’ enjoyment of the Weesleekit Cask Strength; however, as no member can recall consuming them, a report on their merits will have to wait for a future tasting.

Party like it’s 1995: the launch of Windows 7

Most of you reading this are probably old enough to remember the launch of Windows 95, even if that event, which took place a scant 14 years ago, seems to belong to another era. It is probably the most widely mainstream manifestation of techno-lust ever witnessed. Stories were legion of people queueing for midnight sales outside of CompUSAs, or wherever the hell people bought their software back then, or having Windows 95 barbecues and just generally getting all giddy about having a Windows that was actually usable. Probably a lot of the stories were made up, but it didn’t seem to matter; for the most part, they felt true. Hordes of people — hundreds of thousands, maybe millions — felt they were getting something new that was going to tangibly make their lives better. That doesn’t happen too often.

Anyway, whether you remember this or not, Microsoft certainly does. Every succeeding version of Windows has launched with an enormous fanfare, an attempt to demonstrate by sheer willpower that Windows is still very much a Big Deal. It’s kind of absurd when you think about it: retail sales of Windows represent only a trickle of the software’s vast currents of revenue. Most Windows installations are licensed to businesses or to computer manufacturers, and most consumers encounter a new Windows version either at work or when they bring home a new machine. It seems silly to expend so much time and money and hope — for these extravaganzas reek of a desire to impress, to delight, to awe — in order to market something that most people are simply going to buy, or otherwise acquire, anyway.

I tend to shy away from comparing Microsoft to the Borg or whatever other evil totalitarian entity strikes your fancy. But it’s hard not to look at a Windows product launch as one would look at, say, the annual pageant given on the birthday of some dictator in a banana republic. It is not enough for Microsoft to dominate, to be the single greatest presence in most people’s computing lives. They want you to love them, too. In Microsoft’s case, the desire is exacerbated by the fact that, for a time, people really did love them — back in 1995, when everyone lined up to buy what is still remembered as the most important consumer software upgrade ever.

Images of khaki-clad guys firing up the Weber must still be playing in Microsoft’s collective head, lo these many years later. How else to explain the company’s strategy for launching Windows 7? Its idea is to encourage people to host software parties, like Tupperware parties except that, presumably, the attendees will include men. Take a look at this, if you can get through it:

I frankly couldn’t. Blandness on that scale is almost beyond parody. I can’t watch that without thinking about those poor actors, hard-working folks no doubt, grateful for a shot at any high-profile gig, reading the script the night before, wondering how in god’s name to inject any kind of humanity or genuine feeling into something so anodyne. Their hearts must have sank anew on arriving at the set and seeing what appears to be a wall-mounted oven straight out of the Brady house. The only thing missing from the scene is Beaver, trotting in to grab a cookie and talk about how he can’t wait to install Windows 7 so he can use it to sync his Zune. It’s a shame Buñuel isn’t alive to see this.

Microsoft’s advertising has always been unusually revealing of the company’s culture, that peculiar brand of left-brainedness that is determined to be hip if only it could find the right algorithm for it. (People thought Jobs was being a snob when he said Microsoft had “absolutely no taste.” As usual, he was more right than most people realized.) There is something autumnal about this piece: it represents Microsoft wistfully and unashamedly reaching back into the past, trying to conjure up some lingering shred of that sunny autumn when the sun never set on Windows 95. Maybe they should look into licensing “Time Is On My Side.”

“45” What?

So iTunes is now selling “Digital 45s.” Now instead of getting simply an old favorite song, you get that song’s original b-side as well, and it only costs you … well, it costs exactly double the price of a single track. But you get nice virtual sleeve art.

I find myself wondering though: will kids too young to remember 45 records understand that the second song is supposed to suck?