Just imagine having Barbra Streisand on your VIP list. According to This is London, she is very particular about what she wants from a hotel:

Peach-coloured toilet roll to match her complexion, and rose petals in the toilet bowl. One hundred-and-twenty designer bathroom towels also in peach. Ten highly specified designer floor lamps.

And that’s before we get to the insistence that the security team wear ‘neat dark sweaters’ and use metal detectors.

(Via Hotel Chatter.)

More airline safety news: If you’re in a plane crash, you’ll most likely survive if you’re in the tail section of the plane, according to Popular Mechanics. I’d still rather sit up front, say, in the first class section, even if the odds of surviving are 20 percent worse from front to back. After all, the article points out:

And once your seatbelt is firmly fastened, relax: There’s been just one fatal jet crash in the U.S. in the last five-plus years.

It sounds like the authorities finally figured out what we have known all along: that confiscating lighters on flights is nothing more than “security theater,” as TSA chief Kip Hawley now admits in an article in today’s New York Times (here’s a link to the MSNBC takeoff on that article, for those who don’t subscribe to the Times).

By lifting the ban, Mr. Hawley said, security officers could spend more time looking for bombs or bomb parts. “The No. 1 threat for us is someone trying to bring bomb components through the security check point,” he said. “We don’t want anything that distracts concentration from searching for that.”

The goo rules are still in effect, though, and it sounds like we still have to take off our shoes. So security theater still rules, unfortunately. It was heartening to read that

In the coming months, the agency will install new equipment intended to improve its ability to intercept explosives. The new equipment will include advanced X-ray machines that rapidly examine carry-on bags from many angles, making it easier to identify bomb components, and hand-held devices that can determine whether a liquid might be explosive.

Now that might actually make us a little safer.