How I spent my Saturday night

Yep.

At about 3:45 New York time, I was standing at the boarding gate counter, asking when we would be getting on flight AA4455 to Washington. I had just been chatting with a pilot with a charming southern American accent who had said he had heard they were clearing the terminal. Then we all turn around at the sound of these blue-shirted fellows coming down the hall shouting, "Everybody out, please clear the area, everyone please leave immediately."

I am now intimately familiar with the seating capacity of the faux marble floors of the American Airlines check-in concourse at JFK airport. My bum still retains a slightly flattened appearance.

My flight took off while I was being "screened" for the second time and I was put on the next one that left at ten pm New York time. Having got up at five, Rome time, to get to Fiumicino for a 10:30 flight, by the time I got to see the wearily smiling face of my long-suffering colleague who had been dispatched to pick me up at Reagan, I had been up for 25 hours.

Obviously, this traveling schtick is for the young.

Over at Moonbattery, the following comment summed up my feelings:

I can't say I blame the screeners. They're following orders from Washington. That'd be where Napolitano says military vets and Christians are the true terroists and where the candidate for head of TSA thinks global warming is more serious than guys trying to blow planes out of the sky.

Thanks alot 52%. Our nation's security is in the hands of The Three Stooges and The Keystone Kops. I feel so safe now.

I have to say, though, that the behaviour of some of the passengers failed to impress. I wish I had not packed my camera in checked baggage because the shrieking bleach-bottle "blonde" woman, (I would put her at about 65 but judging from the state of her skin she was more likely a 40 year-old Californian) would have been worth a photo essay on the glorious results of permanently aggrieved American feminism/leftism.

She was not the only one shrieking at the airport guy who was doing everything he could to solve our problems, but she was the most memorably voluble about her rights.