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Vacation Stoppers

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By Rick Reynolds

As we approach the summer vacation travel period, here are a few vacation- ending missteps to avoid. My wife and I just returned from Italy despite the following hiccups:

1. Never use middle names on airline tickets. When purchasing our tickets online, I stupidly put my wife’s middle name where it said, “middle name.” Silly me. As it turned out, her passport had her maiden name as her middle name, so the two essential documents didn’t match. The airline wouldn’t change the name on the ticket and told us to beg the mercy of the TSA officials. I implored the airline to issue a new ticket. Refusing, they said to bring 3 corroborating, irrefutable elements: her birth certificate, her marriage license, and her mother.

2. Never buy the trendy passport holders that hang from your neck. Though I’ve never had trouble losing my passport on international trips, someone told me that I must purchase the soft cotton undergarment passport holders that assure one will never become separated from one’s passport. Under protest, my wife wore her passport carrier on our way to the limo company that would take us to the airport. But soon my wife’s passport carrier became uncomfortable around her neck, as she later explained, so she had taken it off and placed it in her lap. When she got out of our car, it fell on the ground. There it remained until we did our final checklist in the limo, on the way to the airport. “Honey,” I said as calmly and reassuringly as I could summon. “You have defeated my failsafe passport protection strategy. You have removed your passport carrier. You are no longer with passport. Would you like to see me wet my pants before I get to Pisa?”

3. Never bring deadly weapons on the plane. While this would seem academic, a Swiss Army knife/ keychain was detected in my wife’s carry on. Gosh, and here we had been so careful! All our liquids were in little 3 oz. bottles in clear bags, ready for inspection, and, low and behold, there’s this little, innocent, deadly weapon nestled in her underwear. When asked by the stern TSA officer if she was carrying any weapons onto the plane, my wife asserted, “Absolutely not!” Then, as the officer proceeded to pull out each of the 4 gleaming sharp blades, one-by-one, my “fight or flight” instinct took over:

The “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life,” defense instantly popped into my head, as I envisioned losing my vacation. When I collected myself, I remembered that her ticket and passport didn’t match, confirming that my first instinct might actually work.

However, thinking this stretched credulity, I next thought of saying, “Honey, you never told me you had terrorist tendencies.” But finally, I summoned all my maturity and said, “Darling, would you tell this nice man why you’re bringing a knife of mass destruction onto the aircraft?”

At this point, our 25th anniversary was off to a rocky start. There were only three absolute vacation-ending events, and we managed to do all three. To make matters worse, I noticed the TSA officers were now looking at me differently. After all, why would this nice looking woman spirit a knife in her luggage? She didn’t look the part. Next I know, I’m spread-eagled. While I was explaining to them how careful I had been despite my wife’s carelessness, another officer was touching parts of me I hadn’t visited since grade school. So intimate was their search, I asked them for a cigarette afterward.

My wife tells me she’s forgiven me. And she highly recommends Tuscany.

35-year resident of Chappaqua, humorist Rick Reynolds resides in southern New Hampshire with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

My Life as a Digilante

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By Rick Reynolds

I’m quite sure my computer wants to kill me.

My work laptop has one of those security devices that reads your finger print before loading your files. Every single workday for the past three years, I’ve carefully swiped my forefinger across the little window and the damn fingerprint reader summarily dismisses that I am who I purport to be. It’ll play with me a while, saying I swiped too fast, too slow, too soft, or too skewed—before it outright accuses me of identity theft. After 10 tries, it will flash “Security Breech!” Once it decides you’re a security risk, no amount of finger pointing will succeed for 45 seconds, presumably to give it time to calm down. It does everything but point out that I’ve dribbled coffee down my shirt (it knows my wife does that).

So, after arriving at work at about 8 a.m., I must endure the indignity of swiping my index finger at every imaginable angle, at pressures ranging from 1 to 26O psi, and after all fails, presenting it with my middle finger in order to heat up the “dialogue.” Indeed, I am forced to pass my “digitus secundus” over the glass so many times, I’ve rubbed the fingerprint right off my fingertip. Thus, stripping me of my identity, it continues having its way with me.

I’ve even resorted to licking my finger in the hopes of making better contact, but a question mark/exclamation point prompt comes up questioning (I’m guessing), if I’m some kind of pervert. I’ve even tried to fool it by Xeroxing my other pointer finger, then flopping it and passing it over the glass—to no avail.

If I haven’t gotten into my computer by 9:30, I must suffer the humiliation of asking the IT guy to come down, for the hundredth time, to hold my finger to the reader, when, of course, it suddenly works. I’ve begged him to change the sensitivity of the security settings, but he tells me it wouldn’t work: the machine, flat out, doesn’t like me (literally and figuratively).

I have similar problems while driving with my Tom Tom GPS navigator. Madam Tom Tom, as I refer to the device’s voice, is always sending me down dubious routes, and when I opt to ignore her, an edginess to her voice becomes more and more apparent. A slightly annoyed, “Turn around at the next road,” I’ll hear repeatedly until she finally gives up and reroutes me around my “mistake.”

On a few occasions, when I’ve found myself on a cow path—two dirt tire tracks with grass in between—I’ve had words with Madam Tom Tom. I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve said to her—especially when, after making 15 lefts and rights on trails traveled only by goat herders, I emerge out onto a paved road directly across from the restaurant I’d been looking for. Then, once again, I must apologize profusely to Madame Tom Tom for my lack of faith and patronizing, misogynist treatment.

Despite my wife’s many strengths, map reading isn’t one of them, so she credits Madam Tom Tom with saving our marriage. As far as my computer woes, my spouse calls me a digital vigilante, or “digilante,” who seeks trigger-finger vengeance while operating outside the laws of binary logic.

I don’t know why I can’t get along better with my machines. Moreover, I don’t know why they should wish me harm. Sometimes I think it’s because I’ve purchased them discount at Amazon—or maybe it’s the free, 3rd class shipping that’s upsetting them. One thing is for sure: both my machines and I feel undervalued.

Chappaqua alumnus and 35-year resident of Chappaqua, humorist Rick Reynolds resides in southern New Hampshire with his wife, daughter,
and two dogs.

The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Moth

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By Rick Reynolds

No, the title is not a typo. This is NOT about the best selling book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua, which has sent shock waves through a generation of permissive parenting. Having been both a permissive student and a semi-strict parent in Chappaqua, I can tell you that the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (and father) has played out for generations in the hyper-competitive, education-on-steroids world of Chappaqua academia. But this isn’t about that.

This isn’t about chaining one’s child to a piano till she can play Bach in her sleep. No, this isn’t about parents insisting their third graders get all A’s and no B’s, so they can go to Harvard, or Princeton, or Yale or West Point—and not those lesser colleges and universities. Nor is it about joining the debate club, or banning sleepovers, television, and free time–all of which is advisable, but unrealistic in the extreme. No, in a world where children have instant worldwide communication through the Internet, the notion that they can be controlled by anything other than solitary confinement deep in a mineshaft is absurd. As they say here in New Hampshire, “Thems days is over.”

So, relax parents. The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Moth is about the 1930’s and 40’s RAF biplane, and its look-alike, nest-spinning, tree-destroying, bi-colored moth for which the early aircraft was named. The plane was used as a flight trainer in the run up to World War II. During the war, it was deployed as a light bomber for even lighter targets, and with a specially fitted, scythe-like blade, it served as a parachute line cutter, freeing descending enemy paratroopers from their chutes. But most interesting was the Tiger Moth’s use as a tug for pulling dummy targets to shoot ordnance at. The tow plane, known as the “Queen Bee,” was one of the first remotely piloted aircraft, developed after tug pilots with short tow ropes refused to take flak from friendly forces.

The Queen Bee spawned the word “drone,” the robotic craft which makes up our modern fleet of pilot-less aircraft used for surveillance and pinpoint precision bombing. Instead of sending young troops into harm’s way, wars will more-and-more be fought over foreign soil by drones operated by “A” students in New Jersey and Utah. (Their commanders will be “A” students from Chappaqua–at least those few who don’t become doctors, stockbrokers, or their lawyers.) In either case, survival of the fittest may depend on the survival of the Tiger Mother and her hyper-educated cubs–not that this is about that.

The Tiger Moth plane was also used in battle against–you guessed it–the Tiger Moth bug. Outfitted with pesticide tanks, the Tiger Moth dusted crops and the trees housing the leaf-killing silken nests of Tiger Moths. The moth, having the advantage of numbers, luckily survived long enough to see the emergence of the organic movement. Having seen human folly come and go, the Tiger Moth now lives happily on the web, enjoying its bug life as a happy herbivore eating locally produced food.

So where am I going with this? you ask. Hell if I know. I do know that, the more things change, the more they stay the same. With today’s brutal economic environment, humans and bugs alike need all the ammunition they can get. It’s not just about getting A’s, though, but what we get A’s in. In the end, nature wins–with or without us. There’s only one war that must be won, and that’s the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Moth.