Bounded in a Nutshell

My, it's been a while since I've posted here. Apparently I've been distracted for the last month and a half or so.

So consider this report:

A pilot alerted airport police when he saw a bike with a sticker that read "this bike is a pipe bomb" parked near the passenger ramps of Terminal C at Memphis International Airport, according to the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority.

This provoked airport security to clear out large portions of the terminal; it was later discovered that the bike was not in fact a pipe bomb. The explanation, apparently, is that "This bike is a pipe bomb" is the name of a band in Florida.

So my question, or possibly concern, is whether this is what one learns in airport security training: that explosives will typically be labelled with helpful signs reading "bomb", "TNT", etc. Even accepting the notion that an object can be simultaneously a bicycle and a pipe bomb --- an assumption not without epistemological difficulties, I suspect --- does it really seem likely that such a hybrid object would be clearly proclaiming this fact? Particularly if it is, in fact, being used in a subversive fashion to destroy portions of an airport?

I mean, really, which of the following seems more suspicious?

1. A bike with a sticker that reads "This bike is a pipe bomb".
2. A bike with a sticker that reads "This bike is not a pipe bomb".
3. A bike with a sticker that reads "Cthulhu '08: why vote for the lesser evil?"

Maybe it's just policy that any mention of the word "bomb" (or any other term on the No-Fly Words List) requires further investigation. But this seems like too much tempest in too small a teapot.

Just making sure the system's working. Not much new here; I've been visiting family for the last week, and will be heading into southern Ontario shortly for another while. I've got a to-do list that I should really start dealing with one of these days.

...and that's about it. More later.

I was getting moderately fired up to write a post about the political situation in Canada and why so many people who are talking about it do not in fact know what they're talking about. Then I discovered that the Yarn Harlot has already written many of the things that I would have written, but more politely and comprehensively. So read her post.

Via Kevin Drum (who worries that the web is becoming too smart) I've found The Typealyzer. You tell it your blog's URL and it does a Myers-Briggs temperament sorting thing. By its reckoning and based on the Nutshell, I'm an ISTP... which gets three out of four right, but the wrong letter is very, very wrong indeed.

Of course, it's always been my conceit that this me --- the writing voice that I use, the one that you're reading --- isn't the me of the outside world. As such, perhaps this isn't an absurdly wrong result so much as a reflection of how I construct this particular version of myself.

Lance Mannion is one of the many strangers whose blog I read. There's a connection, sort of -- he used to live in the city where I live now -- but it's pretty slight. Mostly I read because he writes well. And today he's writing about his new cellphone.

Here's what I'm getting at.

What do families of four and five and more pay for cell phone service every month? What do college students pay for their cell service every month and why do their parents put up with it?

And how come we don't find this ridiculous?

And so, a momentary reassessment: why do I have a cell phone?

Originally, I got a mobile phone because of my car. My first car was not, shall we say, very good. And after spending a night stranded by the side of the interstate ten miles outside of the Atlanta Bypass, courtesy of a failed alternator, having a mobile phone seemed like a fine precaution to take. And once I got it, there wasn't any particular need for me to have a land-line; when I moved to a new place a couple of months later, my old phone number didn't go with me.

But then I moved to the Midwest, and went back to a two-phone solution. At that point, the rationale was that I travel around enough to make a cellphone practical, but I'd conceived by then a certain dislike of the sound quality on most if not all such phones. (It's better now, but even now there are some people whose voices I just can't make out on my mobile; it's worse if they're on their cellphone at the time.) So I had a land-line for the purposes of having actual conversations, and a mobile for making plans on the fly.

My original Midwestern cellphone fell apart (pretty much literally) after a year of owning it... or more than a year, since it was out of warranty, but less than two because I didn't qualify for a free upgrade. Which brings me to my current arrangement: landline plus Canadian cellphone. Useful in that people in both Canada and the States can call me domestically (less useful for my peeps in Germany, Ghana, etc. but one can't have everything); I've considered giving up the home phone but between internet service and the necessity of a local number of give local businesses it just doesn't seem worth it.

So yes, I'm paying a fair amount for my phone services. I can afford it at the moment, and I enjoy the convenience.

Today's discovery: Books from boxes by Maxïmo Park. Smiths-y poppy goodness.

Oh, internet. You bring me so many good things.

In unrelated news, typing without using one's left ring finger is difficult.