Friday, May 01, 2009

Are You Hot or Not?

I’ve been emailing a wonderful woman in Australia named Janice who organizes and conducts tours of movie locations in Sydney. Because Australia aside, I love Australian movies so much, I scheduled this tour for our first day in the country. In our emails, we’ve been trying to figure out exactly where and when we should meet.

In the course of figuring out how long it will take Pipi and me to get downtown from the airport, Janice has informed me that because of swine flu, there will be one brand-new immigration hurdle to jump through at the airport: a thermal imaging machine. These machines scan a traveler’s body and report his or her temperature down to a fraction of a degree. These machines can’t say for sure if a person has the H1N1 virus, but they can at least flag visitors arriving with a fever.

This seems like a pretty good idea. What would make it a great idea would be if they performed this screening before we got on the plane. They way they do it now, they can stop one infected person from bringing down a whole continent, which is good. But speaking selfishly, I’d really like it if they found a way to keep that one infected person from sitting next to me for 15 hours.

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