Better Behave

There's a brillant new idea for making air travel safer: Behaviour Detection Officers. The TSA trained airport screeners to look, if you seem nervous, anxious, angry or in any other mood classified as potentially dangerous. Observed are facial expressions, body and eye movements, changes in vocal pitch and other indicators of stress or disorientation. The system is called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique, or SPOT. They're already on duty (see photo from Dulles Airport). The Israelis developed the program, although it sounds more like it was inspired by the 'What the fuck are YOU looking at'-school of communications from the streets of New York City. It all makes sense in the grander scheme. If America really wants to be the bully, it was about time it behaves that way on micro-levels as well.

Here in the US there have already been cases, where passengers were threatened with detention, just because their behaviour didn't please the officers. So remember: Don't pick your nose at check-in. Sit up straight at the gate. Don't get fresh with ground personnel. No smoking in the bathrooms. No chatting in the aisles. No soda pop in backpacks. Reminds you of third grade? Well, back then you got away with a scolding. Now it might land you on some no-fly list.

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Try "The Micro Expression Training Tool" developed by Paul Ekman, who helped the T.S.A. set up the new screening program, based partly on recognizing facial expressions.

New York State Of Mind

How many more old lefties trying to regain some relevance by milking the 911 tragedy does New York have to endure? First Bruce Springsteen. Then Neil Young. Now Oliver Stone wants to reinvent himself as a kind of Hollywood Norman Rockwell by bringing us a family values version of the attacks (did the backlash after his celebrity worshipping docs of Castro and Arafat have anything to do with that?). He does succeed in giving a taste of being trapped under megatons of rubble, by burying his audience under two very long hours of patriot shlock. But if a guy who rarely leaves the rosy hills of Hollywood wants to immortalize New York's biggest trauma, he at least might wanna know what he's doing.

Right at the beginning Stone outs himself as an out-of-towner. First there's the classic view from East Broadway with the NYC court and the Woolworth Building behind the Manhattan Bridge, which in the early morning of Septemer 11 would've still had the Twin Towers looming behind (missing in this shot). Then there's the Staten Island Ferry going South past the Statue of Liberty, cut to a guy glaring at the approaching skyline (which would mean going North).

The most obvious bungle is the turnaround moment of the first act, when officer Jimeno catches American Airlines flight # 11's shadow on the Westin Times Square Hotel's colorful facade. Which wasn't up yet that day (see photo, which shows the hotel's state of construction in December 2001). And oh yeah - the way that plane's flying North? It would've hit the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Bulding in Harlem and not the Twin Towers. C'mon Oliver Stone. Don't treat New York Ugly American style, like some Middle-Eastern backwater where it doesn't matter what's left and what's right. Alright, shoddy artistic license ain't half as bad as shoddily fucking up the War on Terror. Although it might explain the empty New York theaters last weekend.

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Watch the trailer featuring two and half of the aforementioned moments.