This is by far the coolest trick (that I’m way too chickenshit to actually try) that I’ve read about in a long time.

From Bruce Schneier’s blog:

If you are sitting next to someone who irritates you on a plane or train…

1. Quietly and calmly open up your laptop case.
2. Remove your laptop.
3. Boot it.
4. Make sure the person who won’t leave you alone can see the screen.
5. Open your email client to this message.
6. Close your eyes and tilt your head up to the sky.
7. Then hit this link.

Awesome.

While I’d love to to be the kind of person with the balls of titanium required to pull this prank off, I do prefer to arrive at my destination on time without a cavity search. Still, I’m totally behind shit like this.

Fear is what you make of it. Why not make it a joke? As far as I’m concerned this “Culture of Fear” shit that vomits out of my television every time I make the mistake of switching on the local or national news is one huge, shameless farce. It seems only fair for people to join in the fun. Anyone stupid enough to buy into the administration and media network’s mantra of “Live in Fear or Die” (a long, long way from the old “Live Free or Die” motto) pretty much deserves to be treated like the mindless sheep they are.

I was reading in the news this morning that Sichuan Airlines in China will now require it’s flight attendants to have martial arts training as part of their prerequisites.

To work as a flight attendant, young women, for the first time in the country, are to be required to have martial arts skills, sources close to Sichuan Airlines confirmed this week.

Next Thursday, the airline is to recruit 70 hostesses from Chengdu and Chongqing to work for a new flight route from Chengdu to Seoul in South Korea.

One of the priority conditions for candidates will reportedly be knowledge of kung fu, as staff with such experience are believed to be able to help the airlines further secure its aviation safety.

I think this is the best fucking idea I’ve heard in a long time. Screw air marshalls with low-impact guns. Screw those motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane—give me deadly kung-fu bitches on a plane any day!

I can just imagine some dude jumping up with his Gatorade-and-Ipod bomb, all ready to blow things to pieces, only to have both his arms broken and larynx torn out by the stewardess, who then calmly returns to doling out little packages of peanuts. Now that’s an airline with balls!

I’ve said it many times before—I hate flying. It fucking terrifies me and not in a distant, abstract way. Currently, I am aloft at 21,711 feet, somewhere over New York, partially through the initial ascent of a fourty-eight minute flight to Burlington, Vermont. Pure, gut-churning terror. No, I don’t want a bag of airline peanuts, thanks.

I find it ironic that in my life, whenever I take a vacation, usually in a state of just past bug-crazy, fully sick of New York City and all the human vermin that turn it’s wheels (myself included), that in order for to get away, to relax and do the things stupid people do when frolicking with the natives, it requires my ass to be hovering many thousands of feet in the air, traveling at 540 miles per hour as a preamble or perhaps as a penance for being such a horrid little man. Say five Hail Marys and then you can go play—something like that..

At heights and speeds such as these, I question the point of it. Five days ass-out, drunk and stoned out of my gizzard, surrounded by plants and barbecued meats for the price of slightly less than one hour of stomach-twisting terror at high altitudes, spiced with the chance of ending my life screaming incoherantly before being enveloped in a giant flaming ball of death. It kind of makes me want to stay home on the couch, safely fused with my PlayStation.

But no. Here I am, trying not to bleat like a baby goat getting castrated as the turbulence kicks the plane about. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why didn’t I take the train? Smart people who live long lives take trains. Personally, I prefer to live a long time and the closest I’d like to get to death by plunging fireball is watching it happen on television, laughing at the misfortunes of others.

I leave tonight to mingle amongst the natives in the forest. I’m sucking it up, hopping a plane and flying to Vermont to spend the weekend in a tent, likely in an intoxicated stupor with dirty, fiddle playing, hippy longhairs. Daveb keeps it real.

I’m not too psyched to be flying, but since my free time is short, it’s the difference between 11 hours and 48 minutes. Mind you, these are 48 slow, excruciating minutes of sheer intestinal bunching terror, but it gets me there fast. It would be nice if I could do this without the massive hangover I’ve been nursing all day, but I’ll have to make do and hope I don’t blow chunks all over a stewardess.

I haven’t slept in a tent in years. I assume that Vermont, being how it is this time of year, will require me to wear disturbing amounts of bug spray in order to remain sane. Going mosquito crazy is not pretty. I once watched a bunk mate at the stupid-ass Catholic sumer camp my parents used to dump me at go shit fucking nuts, screaming, crying and clawing at himself one night. It was mosquitoes. Being thirty, I’d really rather not end up like he did amongst my hippy peers.