All of the increased airport security (and more likely, fear of irate passengers) has apparently dissuaded the Arabs (and little old swedish ladies, and six-year-old kids) from hijacking any more airplanes.

How the mighty have fallen--instead of driving an aircraft full of Jet-A into skyscrapers at six hundred miles an hour, they've been reduced to driving barges into bridges at five miles an hour.

The accident occured when Joe Dedmon, the 61-year-old pilot of a towboat pushing two barges side-by-side, apparently blacked out at the helm, said Joel Henderson, a spokesman for Magnolia Marine Transport Co., which owns the boat.

"Blacked out at the helm," eh?

Sounds mighty suspicious to me.

Do they mean "chloraformed at the helm by Islamic scuba divers"?

Hmmmmm....?

Dedmon appears to have passed out for about two minutes and was unable to steer the barges through the river channel under the bridge, Henderson said. Nobody was on hand to take the helm from him.

Well, of course not, they slipped back into the river after they diverted the barge...

[slowly extracting tongue from cheek]

Thank you for the tongue-in-cheek comment, for a minute I was wondering if you were serious.

By the way, my theory on airport "random" searches is that they are searching for drugs -- which have been found on little old grannys and babies. They just don't want to admit what they are doing.

Sigh...

No, I think that(at least in the case of babies) they are looking for weapons. The theory being that while the baby wouldn't pack heat, his parents might find him a convenient mule.

But as the Israeli critic said, that's the problem with our security policy. We look for weapons. They look for terrorists...

The guy was probably driven insane long ago by people chanting, "Turn me on, Dedmon..."

That, and the one who insist on addressing him as Boston.

The colanders-for-hats crowd weighed in heavily on Usenet groups like ok.general when word of the bridge collapse got out, with speculations far weirder than this, but they dissipated quickly. And their tongues weren't in cheek - well, not that cheek, anyway.