Did terrorist try to bomb Tampa International Airport today?

Look suspicious?

I found a"suspicious package" tucked away in the arrival concourse today at Tampa International Airport. I took the steps from the taxi staging area to the bottom floor where the arrival area is located. This is where the bathrooms are at. Next to the service elevator was a brown box with two suitcases inside. They looked nondescript but looked way to neatly packed for someone who had decided to discard old luggage. What is strange is that in 21 years of working this airport, I have never seen any thing like this.

When I came out of the men's room, the box was still there. The concourse was deserted. There was nobody on this level. Strange. Who would leave such a thing behind. I do not want to get all paranoid but what the fuck was this. The overhead intercom kept saying "if you see anything suspicious, report it to authorities." That is what I was now going to do. Forget about my taxi upstairs, this involved saving lives.

Placed out of the way

Now, here is a real problem. There WERE NO SECURITY PERSONAL IN THE AIRPORT. WTF! You would think that in light of recent events, an airport would be crawling with personal. This place was not. Why!? I started running around in the concourse and there was nobody! I went outside where the Uber drivers were loading what used to be our customers (until the cowardly piece of shit taxi commission folded to political correctness) and could find no security personal.

No security to be found

I almost started yelling out "BOMB" "GET OUT OF HERE.' I really did not give a shit because I thought this side of the airport was ready to blow. I ran back into the terminal.

This time I found the courtesy desk and told the lady to call the police. She did and it still took 15 minutes for them to show up. Finally, someone else showed up with a metal box on wheels and they hauled it away. Was it a bomb? We will never know because I am sure they will not disclose that to the public.

One thing is certain. You are not safe at the Tampa airport. Yes, they do have a decoy police car as you enter on the road leading into the airport with its lights on. That is because writing speeding tickets is the priority of the TIA cops. Not national security.

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What happened to Tommy Duncan and Sticks of Fire blog?

The image below is a 2005 TBT article I still have about the Tampa blogger scene. The big boy was Tommy Duncan. He stopped blogging around 2008, and was never seen again. Here is what Creative Loafing said about that era: "The 40-something blogger founded the most-often-cited independent Tampa Bay news blog, Sticks of Fire, in Feb. 2004, and the site, without much financial assistance from advertising, is still going strong today with a stable of more than a dozen regular contributors. In 2005, Duncan was featured in a tbt* story about the young lions of the local Internet. Today, about half of them have fallen by the wayside or (in the case of famous sexy blogger Rachel Moran) moved to New Jersey. Duncan keeps on posting. The local digital scene has grown, but he's not sure it has improved in quality."

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I was sick in the ER

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PTC ticketing Uber and Lyft drivers

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A homeless story

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