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As I mentioned yesterday, Thanksgiving week at Denver International Airport may include some humiliation, pat downs, and even quiet, civic-minded protests. But on Monday, at least a few travelers at DIA “resigned” to controversial full-body scans and/or enhanced security pat downs in the name of safer skies. “There was nothing intrusive at all,” Kathaleen Quinlan of San Diego told The Associated Press as she passed through DIA. Still, National Opt-Out Day is tomorrow, and the protest against the new measures, which are seen by some as demeaning, could cause major delays.
Leave it to a Coloradan to jump into the fray with something so crazy it just might work. Jeff Buske of Larkspur is selling tungsten-lined underwear with strategically placed fibers that repel X-rays away from crotches. “You shouldn’t have to be digitally strip-searched or doused with radiation to visit your grandmother,” Buske, a 52-year-old electrical engineer, tells the Los Angeles Times from New Jersey, where he’s trying to find a manufacturer to help handle skyrocketing demand for his obscuring undies.
While Buske’s Rocky Flats Gear company seems like a great idea (Westword has pics and video), New York magazine has a field day with “what if” scenarios, including one in which the “tacky” underwear, decorated with a fig leaf, ruin a date that’s otherwise going well. Another potential problem: What if “you go through the body-scanning process, and instead of seeing the vaguely transparent outline of your junk, a TSA employee sees a strange, unrecognizable opaque shape in your underpants? You think they’re not going to pull you aside to peek inside your undies after that?”