File under: Travelling While Brown.
I wear shoes that don't have any metal in them, so that I don't need to remove them when passing through airport security areas (Typical exchange: "Sir, we highly recommend you remove those shoes," in the same sotto voce a sommelier might use with the cuvée primiere and a sole meuniere; me: "These shoes don't contain any metal." and thinking to myself, "Can't they just violate me once the metal-detector / explosives-sniffer sounds the alarm?" But instead I'm summarily pulled aside. First the shoes come off (and, as I refuse to stand barefoot on carpet, a supervisor is summoned); then they ask me to remove the jacket, the sweater; then the belt; then "please unbutton the trousers." This is too much. They've put two different metal wands around my body, patted me down, and passed me back and forth through a metal detector. My OJ goes back through the X-ray machine, my laptop undergoes further scrutiny, and we all make our way to a small closet behind the line of waiting passengers. Here my shoes are screened again (because, they explain, I put them back on in order to walk to the closet; But, I point out, you were with me the whole time. Yes, but this is the procedure. That phrase recurs.); my belt, trousers, and sweater are again patted down and a wand sweeps over my body.
The underlying agony lies in the boring, boring manual nature of all this: after a mad scramble to install automatic explosives-sniffing devices, advanced metal-detecting scanners, and all sorts of traveller-profiling systems, where are we? In a back room at SeaTac, at Sky Harbor, at LAX, with two surly naturalized citizens triple-checking my travel documents and looking for any reason that I should be further detained.
Q: Does the ESP game work in Mac OS and Linux?
A: Not always. The ESP game is written as a Java applet, and the versions of Java included in some of the browsers for Mac OS or Linux are slightly incompatible with the current implementation of the game. We are working hard to make the game available everywhere.
Like Mad Magazine, but funny, these warning stickers for textbooks should come in handy in a Fight Club sort of way
First time as I can recall shots being fired west of Fillmore on Haight. And it was the cops that done it.
A San Francisco police officer shot and wounded a fleeing man Monday night after the man backed his car into the officer's partner and dragged the officer several feet, police said.The incident began on Haight Street, just west of Steiner Street, at 9:10 p.m. when two officers spotted two men, one of whom was wanted, in a passing vehicle. The men parked their car in a driveway and the officers stopped to question them, said San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens.
As one of the officers was questioning the two men, the driver suddenly backed up the car, knocking down the other officer, who was standing alongside the car, Gittens said.
The officer was dragged 10 feet, police said. His partner fired two shots at the fleeing car, slightly wounding the driver.
As the men in the car fled, the uninjured officer called for backup, police said. Responding officers located the wanted vehicle and chased the suspects, stopping them at Central and Lyon streets, where they were arrested.
Gittens said both men were known to the police. He said one of the suspects was wanted on an arrest warrant Monday night when they were initially stopped.
Police did not release the identities of the officers or the suspects. They also did not describe the severity of the injuries sustained by the police officer or the suspect, both of whom were transported by ambulances to hospitals.