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and keep your fists in your pocket at all times

Airliners confiscate contraband from travelers over the weekend.

Seized at airports during the Thanksgiving crush: 15,982 pocket knives, 98 boxcutters, six guns and a brick.

A brick? Remember people, bricks don't kill people, people kill people. And when you outlaw the bricks, only the outlaws will have bricks.

Regardless of what someone was doing carrying a brick onto a plane (a holiday gift for someone they hate? Re-enacting a cartoon?), it stands to reason that if bricks are barred from planes, then we must bar all heavy objects that could result in injury if used as a weapon.

Henceforth, frozen turkeys, cement blocks and copies of the Congressional Record will no longer be allowed on flights.

I still want to know where that passenger was going with that brick.

Posted by on December 4, 2002 09:09 AM |

Comments

A local radio disc jockey said his grandmother used to decorate bricks with Christmas themes and give them out as doorstops. Maybe it was a Christmas doorstop.

Posted by: Wilde | December 4, 2002 09:41 AM

A. Thank you for waiting until after I returned safely home from Florida before posting this.
B. I really have to say unless I'm really oblivious to the so called tightened airport security, it was extremely easy for me to get through the airport this season. In fact, I totally forgot that I had my pepper spray on my keychain and I walked right through the detectors and no one said a word to me. They didn't even question it.

I'm always really on heightened awareness of my surroundings at the airport when I'm flying somewhere. I'm way to neurotic to not question everything when I'm getting on a plane. I think security is still lacking pretty bad.

Reinacting a cartoon snort

Posted by: statia | December 4, 2002 10:00 AM

The thing that got me wasn't the brick, it was that they confiscated meat cleavers. Cleavers, plural. What, exactly, does one need to cleave at 35,000 feet?

(Insert airline food/annoying fellow passenger joke here)

Posted by: Tracey | December 4, 2002 10:02 AM

My highschool girlfriend kept a brick in the bottom of her purse at all times (believe me -- that's a rather difficult thing to forget about after you've caught a couple of purse-shots to the head...).

Posted by: Ferro Lad | December 4, 2002 10:33 AM

Travel horror story (on the part of the idiotic traveler):

The person was an artist. An artist who makes...ceramic replicas. Of guns. And who, in order to protect them, wraps them up in sleeves and packaging and every thing else known to man.

I had the distinct misfortune to be standing behind this person at the X-Ray line in October of 2001. The biggest problem wasn't the objects the person was carrying, but that they refused to open them up.

The X-Ray line? Shut down for an hour-plus to deal with the idiot.

Posted by: jesse | December 4, 2002 10:36 AM

Dammit, it wasn't a frikin' brick. I was trying to bring you your damn fruitcake. They just didn't believe me.

And you thought you were bad at baking.

Posted by: Tracy | December 4, 2002 01:14 PM

I have, for years entertained the notion of painting a brick to look like a fruitcake and bringing it over to someone's house as a joke.

I mean, it's not like anyone eats fruitcake anyway.

Posted by: -e- | December 4, 2002 04:47 PM