Awesome. I love shit like this. It amuses me much!

Though it brings back memories of when my Dad was working on reinforcing part of a motorway over here (He used to work for a Maintenence company, which he now is one of 3 chairmen for!).

Anyway, as it stands there were some lunchbox strapped to the pillars one morning upon him and his team returning to work. No one knew where they had come from and no one recognised any of the boxes. They shut down the whole site and the above motorway, interviewed every single person on site including threatening one guy with arrest for trying to phone his wife. (For using a mobile phone at a bomb scene.)

Turned out that the IRA had tried to blow the motorway up! The bombs were all removed and destroyed in controlled explosions. The next day everyone went back to work

haha, nice. At least in that case it was a the real deal... a bunch of lunchboxes... yea. A 9" robot? Not so much. And lol @ someone using a mobile phone near bombs.

btw, how long ago was this? I was under the impression that the IRA had pretty much stopped the whole 'blowing people up' thing.

Yeah, that was presumably years and years ago. They have (largely) given up on bombings. There are still some splinter groups out and about though, so you never know. The IRA did have the habit of calling the police a little in advance of any bombing so the area could be evacuated, so they rarely actively sought to make victims (although of course, they did). On the scale of assholes, I rate that as slightly less assholish than blowing yourself up in a subway or blowing up a full commuter train.

In my opinion, anyone that targets civilians is a fucknut. Military, police, government, all fair game. A pub? Not so much.

What about banks? Greedy multinational companies?

Sign me up for the RAF!!*

*for the historically challenged, I'm not talking about the Royal Air Force

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

Attacking an economy is a valid goal, imo... just don't blow up a bank when there's a bunch of migrant workers cashing their minimum wage checks. Hmmm...or perhaps that's the best time? So, yea, targeting infrastructure is ok... though I can't think of a good time to target bridges... you're likely to kill someone pretty much all the time. Even one family of four in a car on a bridge at the wrong time will turn your cause from an act of freedom to an act of terrorism. Or whatever. Not that I support that kind of thing.

/me looks around for big brother

Loved the late disclaimer.


It's the equivalent of saying "anyway, not that there's anything wrong with that" wfter going on a rant about gay people. Well, maybe not, since you're not gonna see black choppers for saying that.

Oh, I probably didn't mention it yet, but on our most recent trip to Colorado, we were requested to go through the rape-me machines... i mean, backscatter x-ray machines. We both refused and were thus subject to the 'aggressive' pat downs. May I say that I feel no safer now that my nut sack has been violated by the TSA? Though the look of surprise and consternation on the guy's face when we said 'no, I opt out' was well worth the price of admission.

Haha @ airport trip. Way to stick it to the man! Too bad about the nut grabbing though. I bet they don't get a lot of people refusing to go through the scanners, up to the point that if you say 'no' you probably become at least a suspected terrorist right then and there.

Stupid question: I'm sure the padding was only done by men on men and by women on women, but what was the policy for the scanners? Do men only check men, and women only women? Or wasn't it clear.

And what if you're gay? Can you request to be padded by a woman in that case?
I assume they also have some sort of don't ask don't tell policy when hiring the people who do the pat-down?

Given the medieval don't ask don't tell policy in the army, I'd be extremely surprised if the instructions for padding people down included any reference to gay people. Gay people, what gay people? Everybody knows they don't really exist. Just a scary story to get the children to go to sleep.

They first asked me to go through the scanner. i told the man that I opt out and he did not understand what I was trying to tell him that I refused to go through the machine. After I explained that those machines store images and I was not going through he finally understood what opt out meant. Which made it much easier for satis when he told him that he opted out. And to answer your question it was a man operating the machine when they asked me to go through it. And then I had to wait for them to call a woman over to molest me. what makes no sense to me is they rub up your legs 4 times. why 4? wouldn't you know after 2? one on each leg?

haha. Yes, the policy for pat-downs is male on male, female on female. The potential for homosexuality was, of course, never brought up. As for who operates the scanners, I'm 99% positive that they don't swap operators back and forth for women vs men. The operators don't sit next to the machine. As far as I know, they're in some closed room somewhere.

As for the '4 rubs per leg' thing, I didn't get that, so I assume the woman was full of shit and just wanting to get as much groping in as possible.