Keeping Out the Evil Snow Globes

Mark Steyn (who, by the way, did a great job hosting Rush's show last week) has a piece at National Review Online that's pretty good. You have to subscribe to read the whole thing, but the first three paragraphs were a good story in themselves:

I was at the airport in Auckland the other day and mooching around the duty-free shop. My little girl likes snow globes, so I picked out one showing some charming New Zealand sheep. No snow, technically, but when you shook it little stars sparkled around the ovine cuties. The Kiwi sales clerk swiped my credit card, wrapped it up, and then said, “Oh, wait. Are you flying to America?”

I should have known. She consulted her list of prohibited items and informed me that, in an expansive definition worthy of the great John Paul Stevens, the twinkly fluid inside the snow globe had been deemed to count as a “liquid.” In theory, I could smash the incredibly thick glass, replace the sparkly stuff with something more incendiary, re-glaze it in the airport men’s room with help from co-conspirators among the shadowy networks of antipodean jihadist glaziers, and board the plane to explosive effect. When I scoffed at this thesis, the lady said somewhat petulantly, “Well, it’s not my fault you’re going to America.”

Which is hard to argue with. If I’d wanted to fly a souvenir snow globe to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, or Belgium, there’d have been no problem. I could breeze through the metal detector with a pair of snow globes in each hand shaking them like Carmen Miranda. The jihad may never achieve global domination over the Great Satan, but it has already achieved snow-global domination.

Ever since I saw a frightened 4 year-old get wanded and patted down in Oklahoma City and have his backpack searched as his embarrassed parents looked on, I haven't had a lot of respect for the quality of airport security.