Tag: travel

TSAfail 2010, link-dump

For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance

"Yes, but starting tomorrow, we’re going to start searching your crotchal area" — this is the word he used, "crotchal" — and you’re not going to like it."
"What am I not going to like?" I asked.
"We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance," he explained.
"Resistance?" I asked.
"Your testicles," he explained.
‘That’s funny," I said, "because ‘The Resistance’ is the actual name I’ve given to my testicles."

Full Frontal Nudity Doesn’t Make Us Safer: Abolish the TSA 

Bipartisan support should be immediate. For fiscal conservatives, it’s hard to come up with a more wasteful agency than the TSA. For privacy advocates, eliminating an organization that requires you to choose between a nude body scan or genital groping in order to board a plane should be a no-brainer.

Man opts out of porno scanner and grope, told he’ll be fined $10K unless he submits to fondling 

He opted out of showing his penis to the government, so they told him he’d have to submit to an intimate testicle fondling. He told the screener, "if you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested." After faffing around with various supervisors and supervisors’ supervisors, he opted not to fly, collected a refund from the American Airlines counter, and started to leave the airport. But before he could go, the supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor told him he wasn’t allowed to leave the checkpoint once he entered it, that he was already in for up to $10,000 in fines, and that he would have to return and allow the man’s minons to palpate his genitals before he’d be allowed to leave the airport.

Lobbyists join the war on terror 

The degradations of passing through full-body scanners that provide naked pictures of you to Transportation Security Administration agents may not mean that the terrorists have won — but they do mark victories for a few politically connected high-tech companies and their revolving-door lobbyists. […] But this is government we’re talking about. A program or product doesn’t need to be effective, it only needs to have a good lobby. And the naked-scanner lobby is small but well-connected.

National Opt-Out Day

It’s the day ordinary citizens stand up for their rights, stand up for liberty, and protest the federal government’s desire to virtually strip us naked or submit to an "enhanced pat down" that touches people’s breasts and genitals in an aggressive manner. You should never have to explain to your children, "Remember that no stranger can touch or see your private area, unless it’s a government employee, then it’s OK."

The goal of National Opt Out Day is to send a message to our lawmakers that we demand change. We have a right to privacy and buying a plane ticket should not mean that we’re guilty until proven innocent. This day is needed because many people do not understand what they consent to when choosing to fly.

TSA Opt-Out Day, Now with a Superfantastic New Twist!

By the way, it is the official position of Goldblog that everyday is opt-out day. There’s no need to wait until November 24th. But come November 24th, here’s an idea you might try to make the day extra-special. It’s a one-word idea: Kilts.

Rape Survivor Devastated by TSA Enhanced Pat Down

Coming back from Chicago, Celeste, like increasing numbers of travelers, was forced to make a difficult choice – either allow strangers to see her naked or allow strangers to touch and squeeze her breasts and groin in full view of other travels and TSA agents. “This was a nightmare come to life,” Celeste says, “I said I didn’t want them to see me naked and the agent started yelling Opt out- we have an opt here. Another agent took me aside and said they would have to pat me down. He told me he was going to touch my genitals and asked if I wouldn’t rather just go through the scanner, that it would be less humiliating for me. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I kept saying I don’t want any of this to happen. I was whispering please don’t do this, please, please.”

Stop the TSA’s Nude Scanners!

Bold legislators in New Jersey and Idaho have introduced bills stopping the new porno-scanners, but that’s not enough — we need to pass these bills in every state! So I set up a thing to make it super-easy to contact your state legislator about it. Just add your name and zip code to our petition and we’ll automatically email your state rep.

Fly With Dignity

An organization seeking advocacy and recognition of the TSA’s and DHS’s actions against our privacy and right to refuse unwarranted search.

Complete List of Airports with Whole Body Imaging/Advanced Imaging Technology Scanners

In the next yard there were dogs that barked at me, and a llama.


picture of part of a thorn, taken by tony

Burrs in back the building, glass shard sharp, spiny as dried up sea creatures, something ancient, full of dusty venom, and camoflaged, invisible on the rough brown ground. The washroom was back there, a gray cinderblock building as inviting as a brick to the head, but my shoes were in the van. He found me there, helpless, caught like a confused fox in a trap, both feet pierced, and picked me up and put me on the stairs, where I could safely sit and pluck the curved thorns from my abused feet with my fingernails. My Sir Walter Raleigh, story told and modern, with a black knit hoodie instead of a cloak, a gesture as comfortable sweet as sitting by a fire.

They blow in from the neighbors, said the woman inside, as she handed us plates of box-mix flapjacks, weak eggs, and hard, greasy bacon. Her eyelids were painted an oddly stereotypical blue, the living memory of an old TV show, her hair styled like she attends a christian church. We use chemical weed killer, she continued, but there’s no stopping the wind. You’re lucky it’s not spring.

Outside, after, as I gingerly stood on the gravel shoulder of the road, trying not to regret breakfast, I saw an RV drive by towing a tall net cube full of colourful plastic balls behind it on a trailer. It was familiar, as we had paced it on the drive down, neighbors on the highway, stopping in almost all the same places. The driver smiled at me in recognition, and waved, and it was like we were friends.

It was warm there, once the sun came up, as wet as it is here.

where we stayed in san diego

"four poster authentic Chinese wedding bed"

The Orient Express Suite at the Balboa Park Inn, almost directly next to the San Diego Zoo, found in a search for “honeymoon suites” on-line. (Please note their decription completely fails to mention the mirror on the ceiling over the bed. To say it startled us upon discovery is an understatement.) Never having been to a theme hotel before, I have nothing alike to compare it to, but in comparison to the La Jolla Hilton where we’d stayed the night before, it was obscenely comfortable and hilariously decadent. We also scored a New Year’s Special discount. Five stars. Zomg.

now to figure out how to get home from the double-tree inn with no american monies

Packing for Norwescon is driving me crazy today. Generally it’s simple; find what fits, throw it in a suitcase. Except today. To finish the task, I must paw through a month’s worth of dirty clothes, as my landlord continues to ignore my requests to buy laundry tokens. Every few minutes, I must quash my irrational desire to shake a tiny fist in the air and declare him damned to a similar fate. Bad enough that he’s ignoring me and nothing’s being done, must I really throw myself elbow deep into a land of mud, tree bark, sweat and stains? To comfort myself, I have begun eating a strawberry for every successful laundry find. The bad news is that I’m running out of supplies.

Later this afternoon, however, Christine will be by from Montreal, which is all kinds of good, and tomorrow I’m getting a ride down to Seattle, which saves me four hours of being on a bus.

what we’re doing for our octolunaversary nye

Largest Man-Made Mountain Could Rise Above Berlin’s Skyline

We fly to San Diego tomorrow, late in the evening, arriving at eleven. I write the words, I say them, and they feel like myth, like a story I might tell a child. We will pack today, wake up tomorrow, make breakfast, make love, do all the things we do in a day, then get onto one of those roaring machines in the sky and step off in San Diego in time for an incredible party for New Year’s Eve. How… How… fictional!

Today I’ve been figuring out the last pieces of our San Diego itinerary – where we’ll be staying on which days, how to get to Evolve from downtown – and having a surprising amount of fun doing it. It helps that Tony and I have similar tastes, and while it’s going to be incredible swanking it up in the luxury of the Hilton, we’re also excited about the The Dolphin Motel, where we’re staying tomorrow, which looks like it fell out of a snazzy movie set, (check out that neon!), and The Balboa Park Inn, right across the street from the San Diego Zoo, where the fiction and wonder continue, as we’ve booked… the Orient Express Theme Room! Swoon. SWOON.

Our trip is going to be so very transcendant, it’s surprising my head hasn’t fallen off.

This evening we’re gearing up by sorting out laundry, packing and electronics, and glueing long iridescent feathers to my purple hat. We still need to work out schedules with friends in L.A. and check the local weather and all those responsible things, but so far we’re doing pretty good, having settled in to wait for the dryer with West Wing, bowls of steamed vegetables, a saucer of fruit salad, and pumpkin cake with caramel sauce. Tomorrow we’ll look at what we’ve accomplished, shake our heads, do a bunch more of it, then pop out for last minute essentials, like matching bindi decorated with sequins, glass beads, or rhinestones from the Indian shop on Broadway for our dress up on New Year’s Eve, because we can’t be all rational thought and action.

A giant “digital cloud” tower structure that would “float” above London’s skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers, which also includes the writer Umberto Eco

We’re spending New Year’s Eve in California.

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2010 starts this week. Sweet. Weird, yet sweet.

THIS IS OFFICALLY THE FUTURE.

Again.

Current itinerary: Fly to San Deigo on the 30th, dance ourselves dead at EVOLVE, stick around until the 4th, visit the zoo, maybe ride a gondola, then take the train up to LA, visit with Antony, Crunchy, and Kevin, then fly out of LAX on the 6th. Holy mercy, do I love California. I swear I’m going to go lick the first palm tree I see.