Jaunted

TSA / Airport Security / Airline Security / Toys / Travel Toys / → All Tags

Let's Play TSA Agent!

One of the earliest and most basic criticisms of TSA security theater is that, after a while, the agency's nudey scanners and gropey patdowns would become normal. Instead of being a temporary fix until we could invent something better, intrusive and humiliating security procedures would become part of our lives. They would blend into the background as just something that people do.

Fast forward to last month, when criticisms of this thing started circulating. What you're looking at is a basic metal detector built in the shape of a handheld "security scanner," and sold as part of an entire line of security toys. It's being sold to kids because, hey, that's just how life is these days.

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Videos / Airports / Toys / Comedy Travel / → All Tags

Two Words: LEGO Airport

Drop everything you're doing right now and take exactly 3 minutes and 13 seconds to play with some toys—LEGOS, to be exact. We just dug up an oldie but a goodie in the wonderful world of YouTube, and that's the above stop-motion video that turns the innocuous plastic blocks into an airport, complete with British Airways planes (that fly to El Paso!) and and in-flight emergency.

The dudes who made this video—the TomJoeTwins— have many others, where everything from zombie takeovers to doomsday to "explosive poo" have been rendered using LEGOS. it's not quite Friday yet, but this will do for now.

Bonus points if you caught that the welcome onboard announcement actually identifies the LEGO flight as a Cathay Pacific direct to Narita.

Spa Travel / Shanghai Travel / Toys / Barbie / China Travel / → All Tags

A Shanghai World Expo Alternative: The Barbie Spa

A Barbie-tini in the Barbie Cafe

Had a long day of walking around Shanghai, visiting the giant World Expo? Add another one-of-a-kind place to your visit then, perhaps with a treatment at the world's only Barbie Spa.

Last year, a Barbie Flagship store complete with Barbie Cafe, Barbie Boutique and Barbie Chocolate Bar opened in Huaihai Road in the Fashion District, but it's only recently that we've discovered that the two-storied, 35,000-square-foot place also contains a Barbie Spa. Order a Barbie-tini and a Barbie body scrub, and let's just hope that neither contains contains bits o' Barbie.

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Theme Parks / Hello Kitty / Tokyo Travel / Tama District / Toys / Sanrio / → All Tags

Immerse Yourself In Weirdness at Tama's Hello Kitty Museum

Navigating Tokyo itself - a dizzying maze of twenty-three wards, each technically a city unto itself - is difficult enough. Now throw in the twenty-six additional cities that comprise Western Tokyo, the combination of rail and metro lines that service them, and the Japanese penchant for hiding all kinds of singular attractions in the most unlikely places. It's just unfair to expect tourists to know where to go or what to see.

The western Tama District contains one of the most quintessentially Japanese - which is to say, one of the most off-beat - attractions in all of Tokyo. At the back of the Tama Center, a sprawling shopping plaza plus hotel plus park, sits Sanrio Puroland. Otherwise known as the Hello Kitty Museum, this is a gigantic indoor theme park turned over to the characters from what might loosely be called the Hello Kitty universe.

It's like a Willy Wonka Factory of weirdness, filled with gigantic dolls and puppets all addressing you in high-pitched Japanese.

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