I won't fly again till I can bring my bottled water on the plane

Oh, so ridiculous, this hysteria. As Patrick Smith, Salon's resident pilot/writer, says:

Half a decade after Sept. 11, having spent billions to upgrade air security, we're still needlessly obsessed with hobby knives and silverware, trying to thwart an attack that already happened and is all but certain never to happen again.

Is it any wonder that the specter of liquid explosives, the possibilities of which have been known to authorities for many years, should inspire a whole new round of reactionary panic and waste? It's too early, maybe, to be so cynical, but some of us have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were, ever since Richard Reid's would-be sneaker bomb commenced the silly and apparently never-to-end X-raying of footwear at airports across America. I presume the new security paradigm will call for the permanent banning of toothpaste, shampoo and drinking water.

What we need to get through our terror-addled heads is this: It has been, and it will always be, relatively easy to smuggle a potentially deadly weapon onto an aircraft.

Once more, with feeling, people: if you are worried about dying horribly, don't drive so damn much! That's your big death risk right there. Terrorists are real, but they're much better at terrorizing us than they actually are at killing us. Not that they don't kill. But that so many other things kill us too, the terrorist killing is really lost in the shuffle of car accidents, tragic drownings, heart attacks, stabbings, shootings, lung cancer, heat stroke, drug overdoses, hurricanes, people who climb Mt. Everest, and so on.

Puking update: Still puking. Almost daily. It's fun to be pregnant. Except that it's really, really not. On the other hand, we expect to produce the first baby girl in the family, come December.