Everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City. At least that’s what I had always been told. In fact KC has gone about as far as they can go by offering free wireless in the airport. I was there this week speaking at the Military Libraries Workshop.

As I sat in the airport Thursday evening watching the snow come down and my estimated departure time get farther away, I managed to find a stray power plug and sat down to catch up on email and maybe submit a blog post. The former took no time at all (with only a week left of work at NCSU, my correspondence has dwindled…the end-times get lonely). When I tried to do the latter, I was confronted with a serious message from KC’s free wireless provider:

My blog. Not “inappropriate,” not “restricted,” not even “suspicious”… pornography! In fact, blogs.ala.org is categorized as such since I could not get to others either. Had the area around the terminal’s only power source not been so crowded, I might have tried a few real porn sites to see if I could get through, but who could guess what kind of scrutiny I might have been under at that point. After several tries, I became somewhat embarrassed and even felt it necessary to explain the repeatedly appearing screen to the gentleman with whom I shared an armrest lest my failed attempts at work become as suspicious as real porn.

The only alternative was to sit there and laugh about it. Was this Karmic revenge for ALA’s stance on filtering? Was it some sort of mid-western editorial about the quality of my blog? How ironic that I had to wait until I got home to blog about it.