Sean Hackbarth notes that widespread dissatisfaction with the efficiency of the government’s airline screening may lead to over 100 (of 429) commercial airports ditching TSA screeners once the government screening monopoly ends in mid-November.

The bad news first: two more Φ letters today. Neither, however, had the audacity to take the opportunity to tell me how great the person they hired is; for that, I am happy.

The good news: it looks like I’ll be spending about a week in France this summer at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, working on printing stuff for free software, like the semi-stalled Foomatic-GUI and the Debian Foomatic packages, thanks to the meeting’s sponsors (as I couldn’t afford the trip myself, that elusive tenure-track job still not having shown up at my door). It’s hard to believe I haven’t been to France in 14 years; I probably should brush up on my French, n’est-ce que pas?

Last week I asked readers to submit Schelling points for Memphis: places that you would go to meet somebody if you had prearranged the meeting time but not the place, and you just had to guess where that person would be (knowing that the other person would be guessing where you would be). I also asked about Schelling points for the U.S. and the world.

I myself would choose the gates of Graceland for Memphis, the steps of the Capitol for the U.S., and the top of the Eiffel Tower for the world.

In Memphis, Scott Hayes and Mike Hollihan would meet me at the gates of Graceland.

Randal Woodland would miss me, because he would be in the lobby of the Peabody, “even though I’m resigned to the fact that the person I’m meeting will probably be at Graceland.” Alexander Ignatiev and Chip Taylor will be there as well.

For the U.S., there will be no successful meeting. Scott Hayes will at least be in the same city as I will, but at the Washington Monument. Alexander Ignatiev will be in New York at Madison Square Garden. Chip Taylor and Scott Hayes will also be in New York, at the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, respectively.

In the world, Skip Perry will meet me at the Eiffel Tower. Alexander Ignatiev will be at Trafalgar Square, and Scott Hayes will be at the Taj Mahal.

Thanks to everyone who submitted answers!

Just a reminder: Brock is still soliciting your list of “Schelling points” for Memphis, the United States, and the world. To review: where would you expect to meet someone if you arranged to meet them on a certain day at noon, but didn’t know where exactly to go?

So far, we’ve gotten four answers (2 votes for 2 different locations) for Memphis* and two for both the whole U.S. and the world. Keep your suggestions coming at blog@lordsutch.com!

Back in February, Will Baude asked

If you had to meet somebody you’d never met before someplace in Chicago, but you hadn’t agreed on a time or a place, and you couldn’t talk to them in advance, where and when would you go, hoping that the other person would pick the same time and place?

Last week he answered, pulling together suggestions from readers. Will decided that noon on the steps of the Chicago Art Institute was the best answer, although the Sears Tower (the observation deck, I suppose?) was chosen by just as many readers.

I wish to pose the same question for Memphis. I’ll take it that the time answer is settled: you’ll meet at noon. If you had to meet somebody you’d never met before someplace in Memphis, but you hadn’t agreed on a place, and you couldn’t talk to them in advance, where would you go, hoping that the other person would pick the same place?

And lets suppose we extend the geographical area a bit. If you had agreed to meet someplace in the U.S., but had not agreed on a place, where would you go?

And finally, removing all geographical constraints: if you had agreed to meet somebody from a different country (but you don’t know which one), and you hadn’t agreed on a place, where would you go?

Send your answers to blog@lordsutch.com.

Stephen Karlson notes plans by the Chicago Transit Authority to create a new station in downtown Chicago that will finally link the State and Dearborn subways, and provide express service to both O’Hare and Midway airports. Speaking as someone who once made the mistake of trying to use the “L” to get from O’Hare to a hotel on the Magnificent Mile, which required changing from the Blue (Dearborn) to Red (State) lines, such a project can come none-too-soon.

These days, with the colossal pain in the ass that flying has become, I just drive to Chicago. It’s cheaper, even after paying to park downtown, and the extra time involved is only a couple of hours, if you compare flying direct on Northwest or American—going via another airline, such as Delta, will certainly kill any time savings of flying. (Amtrak usually costs more than flying.) The downside is that you have to drive both the most boring 250 miles of interstate highway in the eastern United States (roughly, I-57 from I-64 to I-80) and the second-most-boring stretch (I-55 and I-57 through Arkansas and Missouri)—really the only interesting parts are in the hills in southern Illinois and when you get to metropolitian Chicago.

Len at Musings of a Philosophical Scrivener notes that the Disney theme parks have stopped providing special assistance passes for handicapped guests. Why? The passes were being abused by able-bodied individuals who, for the price of a wheelchair rental, found they could skip to the front of long lines.

There was one family with many kids we kept seeing waiting near us at several rides to get on without standing in the line. We quietly observed that the kid in the wheelchair looked like he was perfectly mobile, but who knows? Perhaps he had a heart problem or more trouble walking than we could detect. Well, our questions were answered as they left a ride and the mother asked, “Who wants to sit in the wheelchair next?”

Sunday’s New York Times has a long article on the growth of low-fare airlines on the eastern seaboard, a trend that has largely bypassed Memphis, as this Memphis Flyer cover story from several years back documents. Although minor low-fare player America West and sorta-kinda low-fare (I’ve never seen one of their flights be cheaper than Delta) airTran do serve the market, no-frills big daddy Southwest has stayed out of Memphis for reasons generally unknown—although nearby Tunica Airport has hopes to lure Southwest to the Memphis market when it opens its full 8500-foot runway and full terminal in the next two years. There have also been indications that jetBlue will add Memphis to its lineup sometime in the coming year.

One of the jobs I’m applying for next year is a post-doc in lovely State College, Pennsylvania.

“Where’s State College?” you may ask. Funnily enough, as Kevin of Wizbang! notes, at least one U.S. Airways Express pilot apparently has the same question…

David Levy reports to Tyler Cowen on Brazil’s laughable implementation of its response to US-VISIT. What I don’t get is: if it’s an indignity for Brazilians (and virtually everyone else in the world who enters the United States) to be photographed by U.S. authorities, how on earth do they reconcile the fact that their own passports include photos?

I’m less convinced by the need for fingerprinting, but I suspect fingerprint matching algorithms are much more reliable than face matching ones, and it certainly seems worthwhile to verify that visa applicants are the same people who actually enter the country.

Memo to Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, et al.: the first one of you to include the ability to search only for hotels with high-speed Internet access will get my business. Bonus: I’ll even pay your ridiculous booking fee at least once, instead of using your site to search and then booking directly with the chain’s site (my standard MO).

In lieu of this ability, I’m stuck either going through a satisficing exercise with the hotel chains that do offer high-speed access at their properties (like the consistently excellent Drury Inns), or at least the ability to search for it at individual locations (like the Hilton hotel family), or digging through hundreds of search results—something I don’t have the inclination to do, even if I do have the time at present.

I safely arrived at my dad’s house in a secure, undisclosed location in southeastern Marion County, Florida last night. Traffic on both I-10 and I-75 was horrible, albeit fast moving—though I-10 could use an extra lane from Pensacola to I-75, as left-lane traffic was continuously stacked up trying to pass the few stragglers in the right lane.

Anyway, if you’re a regular SN reader within, say, a two-hour radius of Ocala (roughly anywhere north of I-4, south of I-10, east of Tallahassee, and not in the Atlantic Ocean), the first beer’s on me.

Michael Jennings has a fascinating post at Samizdata that explains, in part, why I’ve been to Stansted and Gatwick more times than I’ve ever been to Heathrow—and also, in part, why I haven’t set foot in any of those airports (or, for that matter, anywhere else outside North America) in 12 years.

To some extent, the practical problems Michael describes have been reduced by code-sharing and mergers; for example, I could now fly to Britain from Memphis—the relative boonies in American aviation, at least when it comes to "hub" airports—in several dozen different ways, the most convenient of which is probably to take the every-other-day Northwest/KLM flight from Memphis to Amsterdam then any of a number of flights to major British airports via KLMuk from Amsterdam.

I’m not a huge aviation buff, but growing up around the Air Force it’s hard not to at least have some passing interest in the topic. Apropos of that, Michael Jennings has a long, informative post about the Boeing 757, which will no longer be produced after 2004.

Also at TransportBlog, Patrick Crozier has a post that attempts to compare the safety records of various jet aircraft. As he notes, the figures are “a bit dodgy because there will be quite a few of the more modern planes that haven't crashed yet.” Or, in econometrician-speak, there’s right-censoring of the survival data. Nonetheless the figures suggest aircraft are getting safer over time, as we’d probably expect (due in part to better materials, more rigorous safety inspections, and improved automation of aircraft).

My shower this morning had water pressure that would be inadequate for drip irrigation, much less for shampooing one’s hair. Several times, the water inexplicibly stopped flowing altogether. Coupled with my discovery of several long hairs in the bathtub (indicating that the room hadn’t been very well cleaned) and the plug in the bathroom that makes everything I plug into it come crashing to the floor after a few seconds, color me less than impressed.

The going rate: $135/night. I’ve stayed at better places for a fifth the rate. But at least the lobby’s fancy…

I’m back from a trip to San Antonio, where I spent a week with hightly-filtered net access where I was training. I quickly discovered that of my two favorite blogs (the Volokh Conspiracy and Calpundit), one of them, Calpundit, was blocked, as it was considered a “personal site” by the filtering software.

I saw no evidence of any systematic bias against “liberal” or “conservative” blogs. But the decisions about which blogs were “personal sites” seemed so arbitrary. When I go back in September for more training, I'll try a more systematic study of what blogs are blocked.

Oh, and I couldn’t get to my email either, since “external email sites” were blocked as well. When I returned, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I only had 29 copies of the Sobig worm waiting in my mailbox.

Downtown San Antonio itself is quite lovely. If you’re ever there, I highly recommend dropping by Jim Cullum’s Landing for half-price margaritas and live jazz.

I would, however, like to strangle whoever came up with the stupid marketing slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas”, which appeared plastered all over T-shirts and shot glasses in every souvenir boutique I saw.

By some miracle, I’ve made it safe and sound to Ann Arbor. I spent Friday night with my friend Eric Taylor and some other wild and crazy guys in Bloomington, Ind., and most of Saturday night over at Dean’s blog party with all sorts of interesting folks in the western Detroit suburbs. I think I can safely report that a good time was had by all involved in both occassions.

I’m also relieved to see that Brock has been picking up the slack for me while I’ve been away (what timing!). More posting from me will appear in a little while…

By the way, if you are reading this in Ann Arbor, and you have a line on a room that’s available for the next four weeks, drop me an email at chris+aa@lordsutch.com. And, if you’ve replied to my email about the Bazaar, I’ll try to get back to you in the next day or so.

Random, not-very-sober thoughts from the Midwest:

• I got to meet Dan Drezner for a beer Friday afternoon. He’s definitely cool enough to be blogrolled everywhere.

• Thursday, I got the chance to see Dirk Eddelbuettel again (we had a nice dinner at Wildfire near my hotel). Always fun to hang out with a fellow Debianista social scientist.

• The Iowa crowd is a riot.

• If I ever figure out women, you’ll be the first to know.*

• And last, but not least: seven drinks is waaaay too many in an evening.

* If you think this applies to you in particular — probably, although it applies to at least four others by my count.

Bloggage will be light for the next few days, as I’m in Chicago for a conference. No doubt at some point Dan Drezner and I will commisserate with each other on being dropped from the blogroll at Virginia’s spiffy new digs.

Speaking of Chicago, it’s a good thing I wasn’t planning on flying into Meigs Field today…

Dan appears to be back; no sign of lowly me, however. Ah, well. :-). And for all zero people who cared, my panel on Thursday went OK.

Fresh on the heels of their fare decrease, Amtrak is apparently having problems with passengers wielding polycarbonate knives. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Now you know why I'm driving to Charlotte next month.

Bitter passes on news that our friends at the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, better known as Amtrak, is cutting fares by up to 25% on certain routes (but not the ones anyone rides). You too can enjoy the pleasure of slowly travelling on someone else's schedule at prices comparable to fares offered by the major airlines. But at least nobody's going to be futzing with your package on the trip (or at least, they won't be TSA employees).

By the way, shouldn't that really be www.tsa.homelandsecurity.gov or something?

I pass this link along without any comment whatsoever, except to say that I do not recommend attempting this at home (or at least without my personal supervision).

Virginia Postrel comments on the relative efficiency and competence of the TSA.

At some level, it's too early to judge them (the initial "startup effect" makes everything seem competent the first six months or so; go to a McDonald's or Best Buy the month it opens then come back a year later, and compare the difference), but I agree they did seem a bit more together than the old-style crews when I flew to Savannah last weekend. They also had big signs telling everyone what to do ("take your laptop out of your bag, put your coat on the conveyor, don't brandish weapons and/or start shouting in Arabic"), which helped the process somewhat. And, so long as these people can be fired on the spot if they can't figure out the difference between silly putty and Semtex, I'm cautiously optimistic.

But I'm still not flying again anytime soon, so nyah!