From The Land of Ultimate Convenience

Comes this delightful AP story on Yahoo! Finance about the horrible inconvenience of having to take off your shoes as you pass through the airport metal detector. Apparently there is nothing worse than having to go through the cumbersome task of taking off your shoes, putting them on a conveyor belt and then putting your shoes back on once they come out the other side. Luckily, as the article explains, certain oh-so-lucky people will no longer have to go through such a burden whenever they board a plane. Instead, for a minimal one hundred dollar fee they can step on a special scanner that checks their irises and fingerprints to confirm their identity, checks their fingers for remnants of bomb-making materials, and also checks their shoes for actual bombs. As of yet, there are no plans to add an anal probe to the scanner.

Of course, now here is my idea, how about instead we all go out and buy some nice comfortable slip-on shoes instead of...you know, giving away another big hunk of our personal freedom? We could even practice kicking them up onto the scanner on one side and jumping into them when they come out the other side. Or better yet, why don't they just shoot us through the scanner with our shoes still on our feet? That way when some terrorist figures out another way to get a bomb on a plane we will already be covered. Then again, I guess we could give this hundred dollar, fingerprint, eyeball, bomb residue shoe scanner a little more time. Hey, and if you lose a foot or something, they might even give you fifty bucks back!