Terrorism and dieting

Today, I nearly made it into the national newspapers by shutting down airports all over the country. I blame the South Beach Diet.

See I'm absent minded at the best of times (e.g. I'm 46 and I just realized I forgot to have children). But right now I am into "phase one" of the South Beach Diet and this carbohydrate cold-turkey (;-)) thing is doing sssttrrrannnnggggeeee things to my mind. Moments of sublime calm (or is that starvation - I can never tell). And extreme forgetfulness. For example:

Example 1: Part of the diet is to arm yourself with tiny snacky treats. Like string cheese. Which, I have to say, looks exactly like tubes of plastic explosive. So I saunter up to airport security with four tubes of this stuff hanging out of my breast pocket. While watching my bags go into the scanner, I realize I am carrying (what looks like) detonators, pull it out of my pocket, and stare at it dumbly. The security guard says "what's that?" and I proceed to pass the "detonators" to her with some lame story about "cheese". She backs off and tells me to dumb stuff into the trash bins "over there"; i.e. far away from the security check point.

Example 2: When I arrived at the airport, I got my boarding pass, and forgot to check my bags. At the security scanner, just after the cheese incident, I dumped my huge black bag onto the conveyor belt and thinks "hmmm... what is wrong with this picture? .... D'oh!". So, in front of a security guard, I start pulling the bag off the conveyor belt while telling the guard, "whoops, forgot to check this one". Which, to the security guard would have looked like this:

• there is a strange, confused man going through my checkpoint.
• the cheese incident has jolted him back to reality
• he's just remembered that his other explosives are in the bag on the conveyor belt
• so he's just invented some bogus reason to pull the thing off the scanner

Of course, she stopped me. Happily, all she made me do was to scan all my bags, walk through the metal detector, then turn around and walk out back to the airline check-in. But, at this time of heightened airport security, you might have expected that I got taken away, stripped, probed, etc etc etc. That Pittsburgh gets shut down for a morning while they search from my accomplices. Which, in turn, costs the American economy hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue which I have to pay back toiling night and day, locked and chained in the basement of an accountancy building with anti-aging drugs keeping me alive for the centuries required for the task.

Example 3: Once past security, I buy some coffee and some bottled water and sit round waiting for the plane. Ho hum, dum de dum de dum, twiddling my fingers, sipping my coffee, time to go,walk on the plane, seal the hatch, wait on the tarmac. Hot in the plane, reach for the bottled water. Stewardess sees the container of fluid. "What's that!" she demands. "Er... water," I say, pointing to the label. "What's it doing on my plane?" she demands. "Um..." I offer.

She debated calling the SWAT team to disarm this terrorist from his chemical weapon. Then she looked me over and realized what a duffus I was. The water got dumped in a rubbish bin (in defiance of 1000 anti--terrorist regulations).

Example 4: when I landed I took the buss to the car hire place and, on arrival, remembered that I'd forgotten to collect my checked luggage. So I had to ride the bus back to the terminal, grab the bag-of-terror, then ride back to the car hire place. Made be half an hour late for dinner with my hosts in San. Fran.

So, there you have it. Proof positive Dieting causes incompetent terrorism. And loss of luggage.

The answer? MacDonalds for all! The BigMac can save the world.