QUIT YER BITCHING ABOUT AIRPORT SECURITY. Quoth Slate's Tim Noah, "I don't mind being the haystack, because Sept. 11 taught me that there are needles out there." I agree. A few months after September 11th, I did some flying between Hartford and Washington. I was always bothered that I wasn't being searched more thoroughly at the gate. I had, I think, the kind of profile they should have been watching out for: young (21), male, with a thick beard, an unusual name, little luggage, one-way tickets, an almost out-of-date passport that doesn't look like me, a driver's license that has a different birthdate on it than the passport (long story), &c. I'm not a terrorist, of course, but you wouldn't know that to look at me (or at least, you wouldn't've at the time). I thought then, and still do, that people like me, rather than randomly selected grandmothers, ought to face elevated scrutiny in airports and the like. Of course it's an inconvenience, but it's a reasonable one, and one that makes the country, and me, safer.