Veteran air couriers have no doubt been painfully aware of this for some time, but it seems the once-attractive budget travel option has all but disappeared. A story on MSNBC.com —and co-authored by World Hum contributor Alexander Basek —reports that air courier services are struggling to stay afloat, largely as a result of post-9/11 security restrictions and the growing availability of budget air fares. “Today, documents route seamlessly via the Internet, while physical cargo (and travelers with one-way tickets) are scrutinized more closely than ever,” the authors write. “Both these facts of modern-day life make for tough times at courier companies.”

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Today security expert Bruce Schneier posts the last piece of a five-part interview with Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for the Transportation Security Administration Kip Hawley. The TSA chief has taken some public flogging during his tenure, and perhaps in an effort to rehabilitate the TSA’s poor image among travelers, he traded e-mails with Schneier. For his part, Schneier asked some tough questions. His first includes this: “Can you please convince me there’s not an Office for Annoying Air Travelers?” Let us know if you think Hawley’s answers should cause us to drop or raise the World Hum Travel-Terror Fatigue Level.

Related on World Hum:
* Man Detained by TSA for Writing ‘Kip Hawley is an Idiot’ on His Clear Plastic Carry-On Bag
* Security Expert: New Passports Vulnerable to Cloning, Sabotage
* Passports and Privacy: Here Come the RFID Chips

The threat of more terrorist attacks involving planes in the United States couldn’t be more real. Public trust in the Transportation Security Administration is obviously critical. Which is why new conflicting reports about those so-called possible “dry runs” noted in a recent a TSA bulletin are so troubling. 

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We touched on this early last year, but who knew it would become a big bucks business? Turns out all those outlawed items TSA agents take from air passengers at security checkpoints have become a solid source of revenue for states. From a story by Paulo Prada in the Wall Street Journal: “Pennsylvania, which collects goods at 13 airports including New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, says it collects a total of 2.5 tons of TSA goods a month and that the items, sold on eBay, since 2004 have raised $360,000 for state coffers, as of June.”

Foreign tourism to the U.S. is down 10 percent since 2000, costing the U.S. billions of dollars in revenue. Why? “The overwhelming consensus of the WTTC [World Travel & Tourism Conference in Lisbon] was that we have made it extraordinarily difficult for most foreign tourists to obtain visas for travel into the United States,” writes Arthur Frommer in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. “In some countries, it requires several weeks simply to make an appointment to apply for such a visa at a U.S. consulate. Let me repeat that: Not only is the application process a time-consuming procedure, but it requires a several-week wait for an appointment to apply for the visa!” Now, he adds, further delays are being proposed. The nation’s inability to improve the system, he concludes, is a “catastrophic oversight.”

The cost to the U.S.? More than $15 billion in lost taxes and nearly 200,000 jobs, according to a study released today.

A couple weeks ago, Tom Irwin became the poster boy for comics frustrated by the Transportation Security Administration. Now Joe Sharkey takes another look at humor in airports through the eyes of comic Dan Nainan. “Mr. Nainan may have incessant travel down to an art,” Sharkey writes. “But he still worries a bit about those admonitions about making jokes. I mean, there’s no comedy club at Guantánamo.”

Oh TSA, why do you seem to torment so many travelers, even funny people? U.S. Army veteran Tom Irwin, who performs the one-man stage show 25 Days in Iraq, had little trouble getting cleared to visit the White House last summer. But somehow, he wound up on the TSA’s security radar. As a result, the Los Angeles Times reports today, Irwin has had a tough time checking in for flights, encountering one mysterious and frustrating delay after another.

Five years ago, on the morning of the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington D.C. and the air near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, World Hum was barely four months old. I was living in San Francisco, and Jim was making his way through Southeast Asia. “This isn’t the way you’re supposed to feel when you travel abroad,” Jim wrote in Terror in America: A Letter From Thailand, which we posted the following day. “You’re supposed to be immersed in the exotic, pleasantly buzzed, delightfully lost, happily, if temporarily, in exile. You’re supposed to shuck off your old self, lose track of the news back home and try on an utterly foreign way of life.”

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That’s right. Based on the recent foiled terrorist plot in England and the ensuing sighs from travelers around the globe, we’re taking the extraordinary step of raising the World Hum Travel-Terror Fatigue Level from Really Annoyed (level 3) to Totally Sick of This (level 4). For those keeping score, that’s just below the highest level on the World Hum Travel-Terror Fatigue Index, Enough Already. Don’t be alarmed. The index simply reflects widespread terror-fatigue levels among business and leisure travelers. While we’re obviously relieved the horrific plot was averted, we can’t believe our ginger-lime shampoo is now under scrutiny. (Remarked one frustrated but well-groomed female traveler on CNN: “I don’t think you can blow up a plane with blush.") Let’s hope we can one day drop back to level one—Margaritaville. We can dream, right?

Francophile that I am, I was glad to hear a short snippet on the NBC Nightly News yesterday evening mentioning a menu change on Capitol Hill. “Freedom fries” and “freedom toast”—so dubbed on congressional cafeteria menus when tensions rose between Washington and Paris during the looming invasion of Iraq in 2003—have quietly reverted to their original monikers, French fries and French toast. A USA Today blog noted that, back in 2003, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, angry about France’s anti-war position, “wielded his legislative authority over the House cafeterias and mandated a change of menu, which had been suggested by Republican colleague Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina.” The blog goes on to say that there are no official comments from the hill on the decision to re-Frenchify the names.

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According to Reuters, Jolie will play Mariane Pearl, the widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was murdered in Pakistan in 2002. The movie is to be based on Mariane Pearl’s memoir, A Mighty Heart. “I am delighted that Angelina Jolie will be playing my role in the adaptation of my book,” Pearl reportedly told Daily Variety. “I deeply admire her work and what she is committed to.” Daniel Pearl’s murder was also the subject of the book Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy.