I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

[note: I shudder to think how few fellow bloggers out there will even get the reference from the title, and how few actually have downloaded Beatles songs to their Ipods. But my creeping geezerhood is subject for some subsequent rant.]

Like many contemporaries I still begin my day scouring the newspaper, in my case the LA Times. It's a 40-year habit that's difficult to break, and it helps me digest breakfast, but (aside form the crossword puzzle) it's largely a waste of intellectual energy. Since I'm concurrently playing the newsradio station, which is up-to-the-minute, there's very little novel information to be garnered from the dead-tree product. This exercise is occasionally interesting when, serendipitously, I am reading some sentence that is precisely echoed by the newscaster (usually because both are derived from the same wire-service report). But, given the ubiquity of the news media, in addition to the headlines trumpeted on the Internet server sites, most of what appears in print is hopelessly stale.

More interesting than what I find on the front page, though, are the buried news items that either don't seem important to the editors or broke too late for anything but inclusion on page 29. Usually these snippets are trivial space fillers, but occasionally they are early warning signs of some upcoming calamity. For instance, the 1981 NY Times article about "gay cancers mystifying doctors", or the 1972 oblique mention of some arrests outside the Watergate complex. Just two weeks ago on page 27 of the Times was a report of a major earthquake in South Asia. The next day it had graduated, of course, to banner headlines.

There's an item that's been popping up lately, in repeat mentions, that seems to be moving up in rank, commensurate with its potential importance. It seems airline pilots have been reporting increasing incidence of lasers being directed into their cockpits as they try to land. This is "potentially" dangerous the articles say, for it could blind the pilots and cause catastrophic landings. I say, uh-oh. Big uh-oh.

So, how long will it be before one of these dancing lights does its dirty work? While airport security still wallows in the inefficiency of the Federal bureaucracy, spending 90 per cent of its time amassing all the nail clippers in existence, and occasionally worrying about bazookas shooting at jets taking off, no one had considered the simple little laser beam pencil that can be purchased from any Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue. This is just the kind of relatively low-tech tool that terrorists can utilize for maximal devastation. How long will it be before some jet nosedives into the runway thanks to that little device? That's a concern worth some real shudders.

At least the Feds are looking into it, but I ask, how can they minimize the consequences of this kind of mischief? Why are such potent lasers so readily available? Why can't the windshields of cockpits be coated with some sort of reflective material that would absorb the intensity of these lasers? Until some answers are provided, we are going to be in for some bumpy rides, or at least many worrisome ones. Every flight I take now, however smooth and well-protected with x-ray security scrutiny and on-board marshals, will be haunted by the specter of some maniac off the runway possibly trying to sabotage the landing. And I thought the prospect of cell phone use throughout the flight was appalling enough to reintroduce me to Amtrak. Now I may not want to travel at all.