Day of Aggravation

The day started perfectly nicely, waking at 8:30 and then managing to put myself back to bed until 10:30. I then pottered about, reading email, chatting online and eating porridge until 13:30, before heading into town with tisme - I was going to get the latest Lucifer TPB, she was heading over to help out backstage on eduard_green's play.

And then the bus, which should have taken 15 minutes to go straight to Forbidden Planet spent 40 minutes circumnavigating the entire city centre before dumping me a ten minute walk on the other side of the shops. I headed back in that direction only to bump into the cause of the problem - a peace march vacuously chanting slogans along the lines of "Peace, yes please." and "George Bush, we're not huge fans." Which, I have to say, was probably making a huge difference to the progress of global politics. Especially as the UN has already put together a peace proposal, Hezbollah have agreed and Israel are debating it tomorrow.

In addition to this, FP had sold out of the new TPB, as had DeadHead comics, so in a fit of rage I bought the first 5 TPBs of Ultimate Fantastic Four (written by Brian Bendis, Warren Ellis and Mark Millar - how could I resist?) and JLA issue 0 (which very nicely put together from a melange of different styles dating from modern times back to the earliest issues, and gives a nice sense of history to things).

I did manage to finally replace my trainers, which are now two years old and falling apart in about 15 places. And for £25, which isn't bad for what seem like a good quality pair.

Tonight I'm off to see Rich Hall, and thence to Absynth, where I shall dance to whatever insidious noise spidermonster decides to inflict upon us.

Airplane searches

Would anyone be able to find me some figures on how many people are actually _caught_ with weapons at customs?

Because as far as I can tell people are either caught in advance (like the plotters for the recent not-actually-reached-the-attempt-stage attack) or intercepted once on board when they do something obvious (like my clone, Richard Reid).

This being the case, all the increased security at customs does is act as a deterrent for people bringing really blatant things on board. Which doesn't strike me as worth the vast amount of hassle. If airport security were actually finding even the odd person tryng to smuggle sticks of TNT on board then I'd be all for it, but they don't seem to be there for that at all...