frying pans don't kill people...

sez alton brown:

i flew to allentown pa yesterday, to perform at a food and wine festival. nice place allentown, not at all like the billy joel song and in the 18 hours i was there i enjoyed myself just fine. then came the airport. now whenever i do egg related demonstrations i generally carry my own pan, in this case a ten-inch caphelon skillet. since i was just overnighting, i’d put the pan in my carryon as i have for perhaps a hundred similar jaunts. today however, the tsa bully decided that my pan was a weapon and would not be allowed on the plane. i asked if he could show me something stating that skillets, along with guns, road flares, chain saws and cutting instruments, could be construed as a threat and therefore sizeable. the goon simply stared at me and said he wasn’t going to let me take it. i mentioned that i was a culinary professional and that i had walked this exact pan through 20 other airports from lax to dallas to miami. and then i saw it; the same mean little squint i’d seen in those bullies when i was a kid. this guy could do whatever he wanted for whatever reason he wanted. i surrendered the pan and can only hope that one day his wife will liberate herself from his tyranny by introducing it to his head at high velocity.

i’m not saying that a plane couldn’t be hijacked with a frying pan…i’m sure in the hands of a trained ninja, it could deal out as much death as an ak-47. i’m just saying that people with authority should have to play by a set of rules…published rules. if as a nation we’re going to have to tolerate being probed, scanned, profiled and frisked before we can get on an airplane, so be it. but it seems to me that we deserve a little consistency. otherwise we open ourselves up to a whole new brand of bully…bullies with badges…not to mention really nice omelet pans.