Cookie Story

Here’s something from the archives about Ben Affleck, cookies and the TSA. It’s from the time when the TSA and Homeland Security were taking over airports.

Ah, good times...

The video is the only one I could find on You Tube with both Affleck and the TSA in it. (warning – video is in bad taste, probably illegal, and contains strong language.)  Actually, I’m embarrassed to post it, but I’ve been including a video with each post and Robin, my blogging sensei, includes a video in each of his posts. So here’s a token video.   You might not want to watch it.

Really – don’t watch this video

Did you watch it? Didn’t like it, did you? Well, I… Never mind, here’s the story.

The Cookie Story

Adapted (partially stolen) by Headley Hauser

I was flying from Chicago to San Francisco so we naturally had to change planes in Miami. During the three-hour layover, I hung around security. In order to sneak fake wanted posters of over-rated movie stars into TSA notebooks, I pointed at small children yelling, “Achmed, what a great disguise, did you get through with the nose-hair clippers?” (It’s a little known fact that pilots and sky marshals are completely incapacitated if they have insufficient amounts of nose hair.).

Such thoughts left me a bit peckish (which is not nearly as dirty a word as I first thought it was). I decided to get a snack. The snack bar had gingersnaps in two sizes, the two-cookie pack for three dollars and the eight-pound box for three fifty. Not that I’ve ever been that fond of gingersnaps but I figured I’d fork over the extra four bits. I also bought a gourmet instant coffee with a package of dehydrated foam for six dollars.

I stuffed the cookies into my knapsack, grabbed my coffee, splashed a few drops on my shirt to appease karma and grabbed the last empty chair at my gate.

I’ve always considered people who blow on their coffee uncouth. I take a fist full of gingersnaps, dunk them in my coffee and wait for them to break up into moderately warm ginger mush. Once you suck off a few layers of cookie rot from a cup of hot coffee, it’s usually cool enough to drink without any annoying blowing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Queen has her tea that way.

I was just getting ready for the second round of snap dunking when I noticed someone else’s hand in the cookie box. The hand belonged to Ben Affleck.

Now there are probably several hundred cookies in a hundred and twenty eight once box and I wasn’t likely to miss one, but dang it, Ben Affleck makes far more money than he deserves and it didn’t seem fair that he should help himself to my ginger snaps! I tried to ignore the outrage but after I’d cleared the second layer of sludge crumbs from my cup, didn’t he go for a second cookie!

This was too much! I stomped off to find security.

I was just forming in my mind a way to make cookie theft by a celebrity sound serious enough to warrant the attention of these highly paid civil servants who were, before 911, minimum wage deadbeats (like me), when I remembered the wanted posters.

I whispered to the woman with a mustache. “Isn’t he wanted?”

She checked the book. Sure enough, there she found Mummar Ben Affleck Ravioli of the Che Boyardi branch of the Humus terrorist organization. “To be considered armed and dangerous – known to regularly murder the English language.”

As I boarded the plane, I found my box of cookies still in my knapsack. Ben Affleck hadn’t been stealing my cookies at all, I had been stealing his (C’mon, you’ve all read at least one of the versions of the cookie story so don’t look surprised).

I thought about his screams as they hauled him off for a complete cavity search. I remembered hearing; “Didn’t you see Pearl Harbor? I’m a big star!” The mustached security woman replied, “not so big from where I stand mister but these gloves are cold.”

I considered his upcoming trip to Guantanomo Bay where he’ll be forced to read the Koran in Arabic. If he reads it as poorly as he did his lines in Chasing Amy, he’s in for a hard time with his fellow detainees.

All this trouble just because I made a mistake about whose box of cookies sat between us.

The plane would be taking off soon but I still had enough time to set the matter straight. Justice was in my hands.

I sat down and offered a gingersnap to the lady next to me.