I have this book called "The Final Four of Everything,"where you pick a topic and make brackets like in the NCAA basketball tournament. The categories are fun, Breakfast Cereal (Crunch Berries rule!), Bald Guys (hmm, Ghandi vs. Homer Simpson), teeth (done by a dentist, of course), and more. One of my favorites is Dangerous Animals. It's not determined by what people are afraid of, but by how many people they kill each year. The final 2 competitors are bees and white-tailed deer. And though a bunch of people die each year from hitting deer with their cars, it's a weak second to the number of people who die from bee stings. Snakes, bears, wolverines don't even figure into it.

I bring this up, believe it or not, in response to the big hoohah going on about the security stuff in the airports. Everything you do every day affects the risk you expose yourself to. The safest way to live is to not get out of bed. And stay out of the kitchen and bathroom, the most dangerous places in the house. And anyone who pays attention knows that the most dangerous action they take every day is to get in a car and drive somewhere.

All of life is about risk management. We take calculated risks every day. And it is impossible to anticipate what sorts of risks one will face on any given day. In fact, anticipating future risks is nearly impossible, because life is complicated and there too much noise and distraction for anything to be clear. So we end up trying to avoid the last thing that happened to us, since we don't know what's next.

And that's just what's happening at airport. Every new security measure is put in place to prevent what has already happened. I understand, but does anybody really think that someone else is going to now do exactly what the last person did? And what exactly are we preventing? Preventing methods of terrorism isn't the point. It's acts of terrorism that we're trying to stop.

OK. Time to have lunch. But not on a plate because I broke one yesterday.