One of the scariest things I've seen since 9/11 actually happened on the ground. At the airport in Cleveland. Waiting between flights, I wandered around the airport, killing time. I wandered into a downstairs part of the terminal. At the end of the hall, there was a huge meeting, of about 30 TSA workers. They were getting a lecture. The guy leading the lecture had a big box: he pulled out two cans of spray paint, a box cutter, a lead pipe, three knives, and some other stuff I couldn’t see. "This was stuff that had gotten through the TSA checkpoint in the last hour." In the last HOUR. The TSA workers listened, bored. A guy in the back was asleep.

Robert Ben Garant was born in Cookeville, Tennessee. He spent the early nineties in New York with the comedy group The State. He then wrote, produced, and occasionally appeared in Viva Variety on Comedy Central. After that came Reno 911!, which he wrote, directed, and acted in, sorta. (He played Travis Junior.) Since relocating to Los Angeles, he’s written films for Disney, Spyglass, Imagine, Warner Brothers, Columbia, MGM, Paramount, New Line, Dimension, Dreamworks, and Universal Pictures, as well as Night at the Museum I and II for Twentieth Century Fox.