Rant on airport security 'groin check' goes viral, but curb the outrage - safety is at stake
The words are immortal now. Not "honor thy neighbor as thyself," or "to be or not to be" - but "Don't touch my junk."
This phrase entered the lexicon over the weekend, when passenger John Tyner refused to undergo a full-body scan - or a patdown that included a "groin check" at the San Diego airport.
He told a Transportation Security Administration officer: "If you touch my junk, I am gonna have you arrested."
Of course, he captured it all on his cell phone, and it burned through the Internet like the swine flu all day Monday.
Don't touch my junk fits better on the inevitable T-shirt, but in any case the feeling's the same: Many law-abiding Americans like the 31-year-old software engineer resent having to go through a full-body scanner or a patdown.
For anyone who doesn't have a body like Rihanna or Ryan Reynolds, it's the Devil's quandary.
Choose the scanner and get irradiated as six TSA guards stifle their chuckles at the sight of all your blubs and flaws. Or get a rubdown more intimate than the ones they give at Happy Land Massage in Chinatown.
Those who haven't gotten much action lately might want to select the patdown option, which the TSA officer explained like this:
"We are going to be doing a groin check," he intones. "I will be placing one hand on your hip and the other on your inner thigh. Then I will slowly go up and slide down, two times in the front and two times in the back."
Would he put on some Barry White music as he did so? You could understand why Tyner tensed up.
Tyner never got to go on his flight Saturday; TSA officers hustled him out of the airport.
Of course, then you think about the Underwear Bomber who tried to blow up a plane in Detroit on Christmas Day - or the Al Qaeda wanna-be shoe bomber who tried a similar terror attack in 2001.
Groin checks or not, tight security is what we need now, unless you want another angry Al Qaeda kid with plastic explosives in his tighty whities sitting next to you on the way to Miami.
Hey, you don't want to get checked, don't fly.
I can't imagine most TSA agents enjoy zapping you or feeling around your privates. They don't want to touch your junk. They just want it to arrive safely at its destination.
jmolloy@nydailynews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/11/16/2010-11-16_junk_science_antipatdown_rant_goes_viral_but_curb_the_outrage__safety_is_at_stak.html#ixzz166Po8KWq
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This phrase entered the lexicon over the weekend, when passenger John Tyner refused to undergo a full-body scan - or a patdown that included a "groin check" at the San Diego airport.
He told a Transportation Security Administration officer: "If you touch my junk, I am gonna have you arrested."
Of course, he captured it all on his cell phone, and it burned through the Internet like the swine flu all day Monday.
Don't touch my junk fits better on the inevitable T-shirt, but in any case the feeling's the same: Many law-abiding Americans like the 31-year-old software engineer resent having to go through a full-body scanner or a patdown.
For anyone who doesn't have a body like Rihanna or Ryan Reynolds, it's the Devil's quandary.
Choose the scanner and get irradiated as six TSA guards stifle their chuckles at the sight of all your blubs and flaws. Or get a rubdown more intimate than the ones they give at Happy Land Massage in Chinatown.
Those who haven't gotten much action lately might want to select the patdown option, which the TSA officer explained like this:
"We are going to be doing a groin check," he intones. "I will be placing one hand on your hip and the other on your inner thigh. Then I will slowly go up and slide down, two times in the front and two times in the back."
Would he put on some Barry White music as he did so? You could understand why Tyner tensed up.
Tyner never got to go on his flight Saturday; TSA officers hustled him out of the airport.
Of course, then you think about the Underwear Bomber who tried to blow up a plane in Detroit on Christmas Day - or the Al Qaeda wanna-be shoe bomber who tried a similar terror attack in 2001.
Groin checks or not, tight security is what we need now, unless you want another angry Al Qaeda kid with plastic explosives in his tighty whities sitting next to you on the way to Miami.
Hey, you don't want to get checked, don't fly.
I can't imagine most TSA agents enjoy zapping you or feeling around your privates. They don't want to touch your junk. They just want it to arrive safely at its destination.
jmolloy@nydailynews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/11/16/2010-11-16_junk_science_antipatdown_rant_goes_viral_but_curb_the_outrage__safety_is_at_stak.html#ixzz166Po8KWq
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