WASHINGTON — Under fire from flight attendants and others, the Transportation Safety Administration’s new rules allowing air passengers to carry small knives, baseball bats, golf clubs, and other sporting goods onto airplanes got a vote of confidence today from the National Arbitrariness Association.
The N.A.A., whose stated mission is to “enhance the randomness, disorder, and confusion of American life,” called the new list of approved items “just what the doctor ordered.”
“We love that the list appears to have been put together with no organizing principal or logical system,” said N.A.A. executive director Carol Foyler. “It combines the virtues of making no sense and being impossible to remember. Knives, bats, golf clubs, billiard cues—it’s like they made this list using refrigerator-poetry magnets.”
Ms. Foyler’s only criticism of the list, she said, was that she “would have replaced billiard cues with fencing foils. That would have been even more random, in my opinion.”
On the whole, though, she called the list “very solid, from an arbitrariness point of view—especially when you consider that they are still banning bottled water.”
John S. Pistole, the administrator of the T.S.A., denied that the list of approved items was arbitrary, telling reporters, “This agency is committed to redoubling our efforts in the war on water.”
Mr. Pistole said that thanks to the ban on bottled water, the T.S.A. had foiled over seven hundred Evian-based terror plots last year alone.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/03/new-tsa-rules-draw-praise-of-national-arbitrariness-association.html#ixzz2MmTmeqqR