Law and Annie
Okay, I didn't feel very well last night (it's either a cold, or clinial depression), so I just sacked out and watched TV. Besides the scariest scary name in the new Simpsons "Tree House of Terror"ep (also noted by Atrios), one other thing perhaps of interest was the Annie Jacobsen "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" ep. (If you haven't seen it and don't want it "spoiled," don't read any further.)
The ep starts with an executive announcing that their company has been awarded a government contract for their latest cool new product (a new kind of land mine that the DoD has been testing), and that it wouldn't be Wrapped Too Tight Bob who would be heading the project. Bob calls his wife and whines, and then tells her to take his car and get the registration renewed. The wife stares at a tipped-over deck chair, and generally seems nervous -- has somebody been watching her?
On the way to run her errand, she stops for gas. Some Middle-Eastern men stare at her. One of them approaches her, but doesn't say anything. She gets in the car, gives her four young sons their ice-cream, and then drives away. The kids make a mess with the ice-cream. The woman gets stressed.
A couple of minutes later, the car explodes. There had been a pipebomb with a timer under the car.
The gas station attendant tells Goren and Eames (our heroes) about the Middle-Eastern men. He says that they were talking amongst themselves in Arabic, and that one of them had approached the woman, and then made a throat-cutting gesture with his hand.
The police get a fingerprint from the air hose, and track down the "throat cutting" guy. They find that he came here from the Middle East on a student visa that has EXPIRED! They take a SWAT team and break down his door, and question him (and scare his wife and son). He says that he and his companions were lost, and he was just going to ask the woman for directions -- but she seemed to be having problems with her kids, so he changed his mind. The gesture was to his friend, to tell him to stop yammering at him for getting them lost.
And what were they doing at that location, which wasn't anywhere near where they worked? It seems that they were musicians, and were playing at a school "One World" festival.
And what about the expired visa? The man's lawyer says that his client had requested an extension. And his visa had expired in the meantime, meaning that he was here illegallly? No, it was still being adjudicated, which meant that he was here legally, and had done absolutely nothing wrong except be Middle-Eastern.
Anyway, the rest of it was basically the Andrea Yates story (isolated wife suffering from post-natal depression who has several small children; controlling husband who makes her home school the kids and who dismisses her difficulties by telling her she just needs to try harder). But I liked how they mixed Annie into that. I guess we shouldn't be surprised when we learn that it was ANNIE HERSELF who carried that McDonald's sack into the lavatory!
And speaking of Scaredy Cat Annie, last month the Houston Press featured their own version of her, one Angie Smith (not her real name, because "Angie" doesn't want people laughing at her to her face), who works for the paper in "retail sales."
Here are the highlights of her story:
First, Angie noticed a Middle Eastern-looking man flipping through a magazine, but he wasn't reading it, he was looking around the plane! Another Middle-Eastern man, this one in a pink Izod shirt (aha!) spoke to the first man, but sat somewhere else. Then four men boarded, got near Angie's row, and told the first man that he was sitting in their seat. That all seems normal enough, right? Mais NON!
But in this case, the passenger simply jumped up and moved to a seat in the next row back -- without looking at his ticket. Smith thought this was odd. She started wondering if he even had a seat.
You know, because airlines always let people on board who don't have seats.
Anyway, then some OTHER people boarded the plane and told the guy he was in their seat, so he stood in the aisle for a while.
Smith was really starting to worry now. "We're on row 33. He's just standing there. I was starting to get a little panicked."
You know, if a guy sitting in the wrong seat makes you panic, you really shouldn't be flying.
Anyway, the man finally sits by the guy in the pink Izod shirt, which was apparently his assigned seat, because nobody else tells him to move.
Smith decided to talk with the flight attendants. She carefully kept her back to the row where the two men were sitting and explained about the seat-jumping and how the two men ended up sitting together. "Maybe they're just gay," one attendant said.
Because gay men do this thing all the time. They're well known for trying to avoid sitting next to other men.
Seriously, I've seen this exact thing happen at least four times that I can remember (and probably more that I can't, since it's so unremarkable). A person doesn't like his assigned seat, and sits in a better one, hoping that nobody shows up to claim it. They do, so he moves to another empty row -- he is displaced again. Finally, when the plane is full, he has to go sit by the guy his company assigned him to travel with, the obnoxious guy in the pink shirt.
But back to "Angie" and her thrilling tale of danger. The other flight attendent tells her that all passengers' names are run against an FBI list, and no terrorists could get on board. And that reassures her?
"We're all dead," Smith thought as she made her way back to her seat.
And when they all died, Angie was vindicated. The End.
Okay, actually nobody died, but the men did hog the restroom (one went inside and did unknown nefarious things, while the other one waited right outside the door). The End.
Okay, it's not the end. We have to suffer through a sensationalist retelling of Annie J's story, and then learn how Angie whined to everybody in the goverment about her near brush with death when she got back, but nobody gave a rat's ass, including the long-suffering David Adams of the Federal Air Marshal Service.
Annie Jacobsen laughs when told of David Adams's advice on reporting possible terrorist activity. "Dave Adams is the guy who told me I had untrained civilian eyes." And, in fact, when talking with the Press, Adams used that same phrase to explain that these "untrained eyes" may not understand the difference between actions that are a little out of the norm and those that are dangerous.
Yeah. and when those "untrained eyes" are coupled with a "hysteric brain," and you throw in some "swarthy guys," those eyes can't even figure out the difference between reality and their own private disaster movie.
Adams insists that they "have no information…that there is widespread probing of any of our commercial aircraft. However, we would be in the wrong business…to think that there's a possibility that it's not taking place."
Possibility versus probability: Congress didn't want to dance around this one, and launched an inquiry into "security gaps" aboard aircraft following Jacobsen's story. And untrained eyes or not, Jacobsen's account, backed up by other passengers and by the facts of the case, persuaded Congress that perhaps the Federal Air Marshals weren't quite as on top of things as they'd like to think.
Two men get on a plane and go to the bathroom together.
Let's all pray they're gay.
Again, because gay men are always using the lavatory while they fly, and yet they hardly ever blow up the plane.
Anyway, I think that Annie has officially made it to urban legend status, and I hope she at least gets a campy horror flick out of it.
6:09:16 AM 
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