Pun Salad

Happy New Year! (As always, Pun Salad bravely defies the secularists who insist on using non-Gregorian calendars. Down with the war on New Year's!)

• Pretty neat to see how those digits rolled over from '12/31/2009 23:59:59' to '01/01/2010 00:00:00'. Just like they do every year.

  But, as John Tierney notes, there's an even rarer event coming up tomorrow, and you'll want to be prepared: Tomorrow's date is palindromic: if you write it in mmddyyyy format ('01022010'), it reads the same backwards and forwards.

  If you want to celebrate, I suggest you spend the entire day speaking only in palindromes. You can say 'yay' when something nice happens, 'poop' when things go poorly, 'wow' when you're amazed. Greet mom, dad, and sis. Insult folks by calling them a boob or a kook. Drive a racecar, helm a kayak, read sagas. When you're asked for your dining preferences: "Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog."

• Okay, so the Transportation Security Administration might not be doing a good job of keeping explosives off planes, but they're ruthlessly efficient at taking down bloggers:

  At 7:00 p.m. on December 29, armed TSA agents banged on the door of photojournalist and KLM Airlines blogger Steven Frischling’s Connecticut home. “They threatened me with a criminal search warrant and suggested they’d call up my clients and say I was a security risk if I didn’t turn over my computer to them. They said ‘we could make this difficult for you,’” Frischling told me in a telephone interview the following afternoon. By then, TSA had removed Frischling’s computer from his home, made a copy of his hard drive, and returned the computer to him.

  Frischling's transgression was posting a TSA security directive detailing new stupid restrictions on airline passengers. ("Passenger access to carry-on baggage is prohibited beginning 1 hour prior to arrival at destination.") Frischling observed that the memo was circulated to thousands of airline personnel all over the world.

  Yesterday, Frischling was told, in effect: "Uh, never mind." Instapundit has more on that anticlimax, with a suggestion that the bullying lawyers involved be hit with ethics charges.

• In other your-money-down-a-rathole news, GMAC got another $3.8 billion from Your Federal Government.

• The lovely and talented Victoria Jackson plays Molly Far, a 1773 American colonist plagued by her visions of a terrifying future: