More air travel hijinks

As I wrote yesterday, this week there have been two separate incidents where a Qantas jet flying out of Singapore has suffered engine failure and had to return to land there. That must have been horrible: imagine being in that plane, not being able to get away from Singapore.

Such facetiousness aside (Singapore is a lovely, hygienic, tidy citystate, even if its mascot and thus representative animal is a half-lion, half-fish that is constantly vomitting, if the main statue/fountain in Singapore is anything to go by), that's not the only aerial silliness this week.

A young chap got on a plane at Hong Kong International, disguised as a 55-year old geezer from the States, and flew to Canada. And not just an old geezer; my father is older than 55 and certainly doesn't look as ready for the grave as the disguise did. Somebody should have noticed that old white guys don't have the silky soft hands of a 20-year old Asian man (and if they do, they should have them confiscated, the digusting perverts), so he got on the plane, and was only spotted when he went to the lavatory and removed his disguise.

It seems a shame to prosecute him, since he can legitimately claim to have been performing in a homage to the scene in Total Recall where Arnold Schwarzenegger "get[s his] ass to Mars", but I suppose they'll throw the book at him for this. Those book-flinging psychos - don't they have any respect for an elderly gent? (Who turns out to be a young Chinese scamp, but that's beside the point.)

Meanwhile in the US, if you don't want to enter the high-tech-X-ray-undressing-machine so the bored security staff can stare at what you look like without clothes on, you can now undergo a bout of heavy petting - well, a pat-down where they cop a feel of you, pushing up between your legs until they "feel resistance".

To be honest, if you put your hand between my legs, you'll feel resistance pretty damned quick, and it's not as if this approach would catch anyone foolhardy enough to have an exploding suppository, like the chap who blew himself up last year in the Middle East. So it doesn't seem like a security measure, as much as a punishment for anyone who doesn't want to go through a not-necessarily perfect attempt to make the plane secure, while irradiating all the passengers.

Then again, if you like being groped by men in uniform, more power to your elbow.

Ahem.