Category Archives: Non-sports

A week ago, the Toronto Star wrote a story asking if we should be Israelifying our airports to make them safer.

The nut graf(s):

“Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don’t take s— from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.”

That, in a nutshell is “Israelification” – a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

“The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport,” said Sela.

There’s that. And then there’s this story from Time.com that ran in 2006. Describing the El Al (Israel’s national airline carrier) agents, Lisa Beyer writes, “They ask a lot of questions, don’t hesitate to take their time doing it, aren’t embarrassed about profiling fliers and are quick to take matters to a higher level of scrutiny.”

The idea of profiling in this country is met with discomfort – a pulling of the shirt collar that begins to constrict your neck. In Israel, though, the idea is to do exactly that. Not just profile the Arab-looking man or the guy with the long beard and the keffiyeh, but everybody. Maybe profile isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s practicing a different level of awareness. Security looks at who’s parking at the airport, who’s getting out of their car and walking through the automatic doors, who’s approaching the ticket counter. They look for suspicious characters.

Then, security asks questions – not just to the suspicious, but to everybody. Where are you coming from? Where are you going? Why? The answers don’t necessarily matter. It’s how you answer. Are you nervous? Shifty? Calm? Making eye contact? Sweating?

This is why El Al hasn’t been attacked by terrorists in 30 years, and it’s why there’s never been a hijacking out of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. The extra awareness – and asking of simple, basic questions – works.

An example: when my wife, some friends and I went on a group trip to Israel the summer after college graduation, we flew El Al from JFK Airport to Tel Aviv. Before we boarded the flight, the four of us were interrogated by El Al agents. They asked where we were going, why we were headed to Israel, if we knew anybody who lived there. They tried to ascertain whether we were Jewish. They wanted to see if our answers matched up. They wanted to see if they had a reason to be suspicious.

The questioning, from what I remember, lasted about 10 minutes, and you know what? We weren’t offended, and we weren’t inconvenienced.

We felt safe.

In the Toronto Star story, Rafi Sela, the president of a global transportation security consultation company, told of an old Israeli saying: It’s easier to look for a lost key under the light instead of searching in the darkness where you actually might have dropped it. In the US, we look under the light, because it’s easier. We don’t profile because people take offense. We don’t ask the questions we should. And we barely pay attention to the answers.

The people who want us dead stay in the dark.

If a different level of awareness keeps us as safe as El Al and Ben Gurion, then I’m all for it. We should Israelify our airports. We should profile. We should ask the basic questions and see how they respond. We should not let political correctness keep us unsafe. If Israel and its people don’t have a problem with it, neither should we.

We can’t be afraid to make the changes. In the end, it’s about being safe and not having to watch people die.

It’s about shining a flashlight into the darkness and seeing what’s out there.

Explain this to me if you can. Because I’m simply not getting it.

Julie (the wife) is a master purveyor of restaurants.com* and tonight, with nothing on tap for dinner, we decided to cash in one of our $25 gift certificates.

*In case you don’t know, here’s what restaurants.com provides to you. You spend $10 to get a $25 restaurant gift certificate. And that’s pretty much it. No strings attached. You give them $10 and they give you a $25 gift certificate. Sometimes, you can pay $6 for $25. And sometimes – really, really special times – you can pay $2 for $25. Julie is like a bloodhound for those $2 deals.

So, we drive over to Cumin, an eclectic** Indian restaurant in East Hyde Park, and take in a nice dinner. The waitress is about to drop off the bill, we give her the $25 certificate, and she disappears. We assume she’s dropping the price on the bill by $25 and will soon return. We were wrong.

**Their description, not mine.

The owner walks over, drops the bill and the certificate on the table, and says he can’t honor it. We say, Huh.

“I stopped doing business with them four months ago. We don’t honor these on weekends.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t say that on the certificate***.”

***Almost all of the certificates have some kind of exception. Alcohol isn’t included. Or you must spend at least $35. Or Saturdays are excluded. Cumin didn’t say anything about excluding weekends.

“Yes, I know. That’s why I stopped doing business with that company.”

“Right, we bought this certificate, and now, you’re not going to honor it?”

“I don’t do business with them any more. Listen, you come back during the week – Monday through Thursday – and you can be my guest. But tonight, I cannot. You call them and get them to send you another certificate.”

We argued for a little while – and by we, I mean Julie – but he wouldn’t budge. The truth is: we’ve been to the restaurant once before. It was fine, but we never returned (obviously, we didn’t love it the first time. For that matter, we definitely didn’t love it the second time). We went back tonight, simply because we had the gift certificate. Otherwise, we might never have eaten there again.

Anyway, we grumbled for a bit, paid the tab, filled in the tip and left.

We left pissed off.

And this is what I don’t understand.

The owner of the restaurant doesn’t know who most of his customers are. He doesn’t know how many Twitter followers they have. He doesn’t know how many Facebook friends they have. He doesn’t know that if he pisses off one of them enough that he/she will make a special effort to get on a blog or another restaurant Web site and rip Cumin to shreds. He doesn’t know if his customer is doing an interview Sunday morning on a 50,000 watt radio station where he/she could mention that he/she saw a rat run through the restaurant (there wasn’t, but who’s to stop that person from saying so anyway?). You know how many people could hear/read all that? Potentially, thousands.

But the owner doesn’t think about that. So, he sends us – his paying customers – away from his restaurant pissed. The meal was good, the decor and atmosphere were nice, the server was efficient and worked hard to please us, and it was a pleasant evening. But the ending left a sour taste in our mouth.

Now, think about this: obviously, this guy didn’t want to comp us $25, even though we fulfilled our end of the bargain. Whether it’s principle or whether the guy is having money problems or whether he failed his customer relations class. Whatever. He doesn’t want to take $25 off the meal? Fine. But why doesn’t he offer a post-dinner drink? Why not offer desert? If he does that, we accept and we walk out a little less perturbed. We’re not completely happy, but we’re thinking, ‘Hey, the guy made an effort, and you have to give him credit for that. He tried, in some small way, to make it right.” Instead, we’re thinking, “This son of a bitch did absolutely nothing. Why in the hell should we ever go back.”

And we’re pissed.

Me, I’ve got about 750 Twitter followers, about 550 Facebook friends, and I’m going to be on a long-ranging sports talk radio show a few hours before the Bengals play a football game that has, let’s say, a little bit of interest. Let’s say, if I wanted to seek my revenge, 10,000 people hypothetically could hear or read my rant about Cumin. Maybe 1,000 people – 10 percent – say, “You know what? I don’t like what I’m hearing. I’m not going to spend my money there either.” Say, those 1,000 people would have brought somebody else and spent $90 for dinner. That’s $90,000 Cumin is potentially losing because of what I write or say. You know how he could have avoided it? Honoring the gift certificate.

Or giving us a $5 dessert.

Instead, I’m sitting here writing this rant, more pissed by the moment. And I ask: 1) does this guy understand the modern world and the megaphone the Internet provides? 2) And will I go back to Cumin*****?

The answers: 1) Apparently not. 2) No.

*****This does not count the return visit we’ll make during a weekday so we can actually use the gift certificate.

He’s just lucky I’m not writing about this.

P.S. Just after my wife read this post, she got an e-mail from opentable.com that asked her to review the meal she just had at Cumin. My bet? It ain’t going to be good.

I had a good time writing this story for Soapbox Media, an online Cincinnati-area magazine. I’ve always been fascinated with stand-up comedy, and there’s a relatively well-known comic in this area who I wanted to write about for the web site. The editor said that was fine, but he also wanted a broader take on the state of stand-up comedy in Cincinnati. I traveled with Josh Sneed, his girlfriend and his dog to one of his college gigs in Louisville and spent the entire evening with them. It was an interesting time – getting his take on the art of stand-up and what it’s like to be a comic on the road while discussing how strong or weak the Cincinnati scene is.

I knew I wanted to lede the story with him being on the road (driving to Louisville or eating for free at the tiny dining hall on campus or something like that). After thinking about a couple ideas – and discarding them because they were all kind of stupid – I decided to go with the comic listening to another stand-up’s comedy CD and going crazy over it. I thought the lede effectively blended Sneed’s sense of humor and his appreciation for the art form in general. At least, that was the point.

My favorite line, though, was this:

Now, he’s reaping the rewards. And as Todd Barry ends his set on the car stereo, Sneed looks in the backseat once again at his girl and his dog (one of whom is snoring rather loudly). He’s about to cross the Brent Spence Bridge into Cincinnati and is close to home after a fulfilling night’s work. He shifts his body frontward and looks through the windshield, content with his career and with his life.

And funny enough, the next time I saw Sneed and his girlfriend (perhaps inappropriately enough, at a funeral), that’s the first thing she mentioned.