It seems it’s almost a given that every time one of the major large-format RIP’s comes out with a New! and Improved! version, it takes a little while for them to get the bugs out.

Well, day before yesterday I flew out to a good client’s to do a few things, among them upgrade their RIP from Onyx 7 to Onyx X10. Install went easily enough and everything seemed okay, so that was that and I left for the airport.

In about as much time as it took the client to get back to his shop from dropping me off, he called and wanted to know why he was getting no display image on any of his Jeti printers. He’s got three of them: a 1224; a 3150; and a 3350. And on all of them, he got either a black box in place of a screen preview, or a box filled with question marks.

In all cases, the jobs printed okay, but the way these guys run their workflow, this is a pretty big problem; if they have ten or fifteen jobs in the queue at a machine, it’s pretty hard to tell which is which if they can’t see them.

So I called Onyx the next morning and found out that it’s a “known bug and they’re working on it.”

Evidently it’s not just Jetis either. It’s all machines that have a spooler and a display–most grand format machines.

So heads up. If that’s you and you’re about to upgrade to X10, you might want to hold up. My client has actually gone back to using 7 until this is resolved.

I’ve got a case number on it, so watch this space. When it’s resolved, I’ll let you know.

I got my new iPhone 4 last week, and since there was a bunch of speculation about the iPhone 4 operating system supporting ICC profiles, I decided I’d check it out.

And in the checking, I found out a few things I’d never realized before. So if you’re all geeky about color management and displays and browsers, follow along. It’s kind of interesting.

First off, here’s the link to the test:

http://correctcolor.org/iPhone

What you get when you get there is four versions of the same image: One in tagged ProPhoto, and one untagged; and one in tagged sRGB and one untagged. The background is grey #767676, which is what the grey border on the image measures out to in sRGB.

(And yes, I know no one ever sends ProPhoto to the web; I just wanted to get an obviously visible shift on all screens in what I was using as a larger gamut, so even though I usually use this image in Adobe 1998, I converted it to ProPhoto for this test.)

Now, conventional wisdom has it that Safari is color managed, and so is Firefox, while Internet Explorer is not.

Well, turns out that’s not entirely true.

Or it is, but that’s not the whole story.

If you open this file in Safari on a Mac, this is what you’ll get:

Trust me on this: The two on the left appear here exactly as they do in Photoshop when converted to each of these profiles. In other words, they’re absolutely correctly color managed. Meaning that the application–in this case Safari–has recognized the embedded profiles and then converted the images to the monitor profile for display.

The ones on the right were created in the exact same color spaces as the ones beside them on the left. The difference of course is that the ones on the right don’t have anything embedded in them that tells any application that is looking what those color spaces might be. So in the case of both of these, Safari is simply assuming they were created using the monitor profile, and in so doing, assigns it to them. Not likely, but that’s what it does.

Note that in this one on the lower right the background does blend seamlessly, because #767676 is rendered in both cases directly to the monitor profile.

Okay, what happens in Firefox?

Well, in Firefox, you get this:

At first glance, you might think this is pretty good. You’ve got three images that match, and all of the three even get a seamless border.

So how’d they do that?

Well, if you’ll look closely at the three that match, not only do they match each other, but they also match the untagged sRGB image in Safari. So what Firefox is doing is recognizing the profiles in tagged images, applying it, then converting the images to sRGB, and then assigning the monitor profile to everything.

So, none of these images appear in Firefox as they appear in Photoshop. What that means is that depending on how far away the viewing monitor profile is from the monitor images were viewed on when they were created, and from sRGB, those images are going to display correspondingly poorly, or incorrectly in “color managed” Firefox.

And while that’s managing color–in a sense–it is not proper color management. (Any time you assign a color space to an image other than the color space the image is currently in, you’ve defeated the purpose of color management.)

Note that in both cases here, Safari and Firefox, the untagged ProPhoto image has just been assigned the monitor profile.

So now IE:

Now I’ve followed some links lately that allowed as how Microsoft has it all over Mac in how it handles browser color in that IE just assumes everything is sRGB. And for all I know that may even be true. But if it does, it then goes ahead and assigns the monitor profile to everything before it displays it, making the whole exercise moot if it happens.

What you’ve got here is all the elements in this image having the monitor profile assigned to them with no regard to their original color space and no color management used at all.

Note that the two on the bottom now both match the one on the bottom right in Safari, as well as the three that match each other in Firefox. And now both of the ones on top are unmanaged, equally awful, and match precisely the unmanaged ones on the top in Safari and Firefox.

So the bottom line on all these browsers is this: Somehow or another eventually you have to get an image to the monitor color space if you want it to display. Except for Safari on a Mac with an image with an embedded profile, all browsers get there by assigning the monitor profile to your images; Firefox after recognizing embedded profiles, IE before.

So what about the iPhone 4?

Well, rather than try and get a screen capture posted I’ll just say it displays identically to IE. Try it for yourself.

In other words, no color management at all.

Maybe someday, but not for now. I’m not sure how or where this phone supports ICC profiles, but in its version of Safari it’s acting exactly as IE does on a Windows computer, and it’s not using any profiles embedded in online images in any way.

Wow. It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged anything.

Sorry to anyone who missed me, but I’ve been globe-trotting, seeing the world, having fun, making a dime or two, sick as a dog, stuff like that.

Anyway, one of the things I tell clients and prospective clients and one of the reasons I stress to people that if they’re truly serious about correctly reproducing color digitally they need to hire a professional to set up their systems is that while good information is out there on the Internet, so is bad information.

Some of it really, really bad.

And of course as with anything else on the Internet, if you’re not an expert, how do you know what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s horrible?

Well, you don’t.

Now occasionally I wander through Twitter looking to see what people are speaking about regarding the whole issue of color management, and this morning in my wandering I came across this:

http://www.vintagemural.com/blog/wordpress/2009/05/09/tips-for-artists-the-best-way-to-print-your-art/

Now here’s a person who speaks with absolute authority…absolutely incorrectly.

But if you just stumbled across this, you might just think you’d found yourself some gold.

So let’s just start with a couple things:

“What is DPI? DPI is “dots per inch”. The more pixels, or dots, per inch, the richer, the more sharp and clear your image will be.”

Here’s a tip for you: If you’re ever speaking with anyone who’s attempting to impart their wisdom about digital imaging to you, and they don’t know the difference between pixels and dots, just smile at them, pat them on the head, tell them you hear your momma calling, and walk away.

In its digital imaging definition, a pixel is the smallest unit of complete color information in a digital image.

A dot is the smallest unit of individual colorant in a printed image.

The terms are not interchangeable.

When referring to a digital image, the correct terminology is pixels per inch, or ppi; when referring to a printed image, the correct terminology is dots per inch, or dpi.

Okay, so getting past that, the author goes into a long and convoluted explanation of why dpi (correctly ppi) is less important than actual contained image data. Which is true enough, but this explanation is tortured, to say the least.

What it boils down to–that most reading probably know–is that any digital image is going to be made with a finite number of pixels.

The author leaves out that there are two dimensions, but forgetting that, we’ll just say you take a picture with a ten megapixel camera. All that means is that at its max resolution your camera will give you an image with 10 million pixels.

So let’s say that would be 2500 pixels tall by 4000 pixels wide. 2500 x 4000 = 10,000,000.

And that’s what you’ve got to work with.

When you go to alter the image for print, you divide your total number of pixels on your longest side by the actual size of that side and you’ll get the pixels per inch you have to work with. In other words, if you took and image with this camera and printed it at 12.5 x 20 inches, you’d have 200 pixels per inch; at 20 x 40 inches, 100 ppi.

And how many you need depends on situation, but 300 PPI is always overkill. In the finest art situations, 200 is all you’ll ever need. You can go down as low as 60 in a lot of instances before you’ll actually begin to see reject-able pixelation in all but fine type.

Okay, so there’s that, but then the author goes on to explain to one and all that Adobe Gamma is just great for profiling monitors and the best thing to do is use Adobe Gamma to match a printed image.

Well, in a word…No.

Every element in every digital imaging chain is unique to some extent. In order to get proper control of all your color, every device has to be characterized and each characterization accounted for and put into place.

This process (adjust a monitor by eye and Adobe gamma to a sheet printed on an unprofiled printer) might work for the author in this particular instance, but it’s at best closed-loop, and the color the author is creating bears no relationship to anything in the world beyond the author’s printer and monitor.

And finally the author tells you not to forget to embed a color profile, and tells you do to that by going to edit > assign profile. Do that, and you can use the “standard profile” SrGB [sic] or you can use Adobe 1998 “which is a bit more color rich.”

Um…no.

As soon as you open an image in Photoshop, it’s already in a color space. It’s in whatever color space you had set as Photoshop’s default when you opened it, or it’s in its original space if you had Photoshop set to preserve embedded profiles and not tell you.

Either way, if you wish to embed a profile–and there are instances when you don’t–that’s the space you wish to embed. You go assigning another profile to it and you’ve just altered the way each and every pixel in that image displays and prints.

There’s actually more, but I think you get the point. And I’m really not trying to pick on the author of this piece; I’m sure they mean well.

But if you’re really, really serious about reproducing color digitally, and you’re really serious about doing it correctly, you’re going to waste more time than the money you think you’ll save by looking for your answers in message boards and blogs.

Okay, I said I wasn’t going to devote anymore words to color management on the Internets, but I’ve been working in Flash of late on a project I’ve been considering doing for the past four years and it looks like it may finally actually happen; and then as well I saw this little pearl of wisdom retweeted twice this morning:

http://www.picturesocial.com/video/color-management-while-saving

And, well, anyway, here I am.

But bear with me here. This isn’t entirely about the Internet.

Fact is if there’s one hangup that all people seem to have with color management right out of the box, it’s the whole issue of how their monitor relates to what they see on it. One of the commonest misconceptions people have when I walk into a new client’s place is that I’m going to calibrate a certain monitor to match a certain printer.

But it doesn’t work that way.

What happens is that every device in your chain that reproduces color has some sort of profile that tells the color management engine of any color aware application how it reproduces the color information it’s sent.

That profile may be good or it may be not; it may be accurate or it may not (and no, they’re not necessarily the same.) But it has to be there.

So you may have profiled your monitor using the best tools and software out there, or you may never have profiled it and it’s running to some sort of default, based on your particular OS; but whatever the profile is, it’s the profile your color management engine is assuming your monitor displays color in correctly.

Think of it as a window.

Now, you’ve got your image, which is composed of pixels, which are just little boxes with numbers in them, and the numbers have to relate to some color space. There are all sorts of industry-standard RGB working spaces out there, but if your destination is the web, the one you want to use is sRGB. The key is that when you use any color profile–sRGB or anything else–you then embed that profile in your image so that when you send it out into the world, every other application that is color aware will recognize that profile and display your image just as you intended it be displayed.

However, a problem arises: Some applications aren’t color aware and therefore won’t recognize the profile. And what do a lot of these applications do? They run home to momma.

They assume the monitor profile of whatever system they’re on is the profile of the image.

Flash is like that when you’re creating inside Flash. You can create images in Photoshop, embed their profiles, bring them onto the stage in Flash and they look pissed out all to hell. The reason again being that Flash doesn’t recognize their embedded profiles and assumes they were created in the monitor color space, so it assigns that space to the image. Since my monitor space is a MacBook Pro and I’ve obviously profiled it, and since it’s a typical small laptop gamut–smaller than the sRGB that’s embedded in the file–the effect is to wash the image out.

However, starting with Actionscript 3, you can embed this little script at the beginning of the movie: stage.colorCorrection = ColorCorrection.ON, and what happens is that in the SWF file, all images are assumed to be sRGB–whether they are or not.

A little cumbersome but it does work. You just convert everything to sRGB before you bring it into Flash and you get a consistent result. And while your images look terrible on the stage in Flash itself, when you export to the movie, they look just as they did in Photoshop.

However, back to the issue. In case this hasn’t dawned on you yet, here’s what happens: Let’s just say I was working with my image in Photoshop and importing it into Flash, and I got all frustrated about the image changing when it hit the stage and finally hit on the fact that if I assigned my monitor profile to my image in Photshop, then it suddenly looked the same in Photoshop, in Flash. EVERYWHERE!!

Eureka!…I’m so happy. I’m going to tell the world!

Well, hold on.

Of course it looks the same everywhere on my machine. The monitor profile is the window to which the OS converts everything when it’s displayed. So of course if I set everything to use it, it’s going to look the same whether the displaying application understands it or not.

However, it’s my monitor profile. It’s not yours. And it’s not anyone else’s either.

So I’ve just guaranteed that my image will only look as I expect it to on my screen. Not on anyone else’s anywhere.

When you’re working for the web, convert to sRGB, embed the profile if the image is free-floating, and don’t if it has to match a background; and if in pictureviewer or Google Chrome or whatever it doesn’t look quite the same, well just smile and understand that you know why.

Oh, and, just as a final note…

If you watched the little video above, what you may have noticed is that the guy got you to monitor color by way of View>Proof Setup.

It’s kind of a bizarre little quirk of Photoshop that in the proofing configurations that one section of RGB choices proofs an assign of the chosen profile rather than all the rest of them which proof a conversion. However what all the setting in Proof Setup have in common is that they don’t alter the file. They just show you onscreen what would happen if you did what you were contemplating. They don’t actually do it.

So even if you did exactly what this guy is telling you, once you saved your file, you’d accomplish…exactly…nothing.

It’s a jungle out there kiddies.

You can get run down a lot of blind alleys trying to learn color management on the Internets. My advice would be if you’re serious about it, to hire someone to teach you. Someone with experience and maybe an absolute, ironclad guarantee that what they’re teaching you actually works.

Y’know, I make my living at this, but a part of me honestly asks: Why bother?

However the Twittersphere–or whatever it’s called–is just all abuzz over this image in the announcement of iPhone OS4:

See it, down in the lower left-hand corner, behind the gdgt logo? Sure enough, “ICC profiles.”

So what do you suppose that means?

One guy wonders how you’re going to “calibrate” the screen. (Actually, profiling a screen is characterization, not calibration. Calibration is what you do before you characterize.)

Well, my guess is you won’t. Not only are there no commercially available colorimeters or spectrophotometers that will plug into an iPhone or software packages for its OS, but iPhones are iPhones; they’re single-piece devices so all the hardware of all individual models is identical. No doubt they’ll just incorporate a screen profile into the OS, and then iPhone Safari will recognize profiles in pretty much the same way big Safari does now.

Then I suppose they might make the screen profile available to developers–which would probably just wind up confusing them more than they already are.

Be fun to watch, though.

I was doing my usual word-search for “color management” on Twitter this morning, and I came across this:

Photoshop comps look washed out when exporting for web? Read this: Color management in Photoshop for the web http://bit.ly/96Cbh2

The link takes you here:

http://www.rumblingskies.com/blog/?p=46

Now, fact is there’s much worse “helpful information” about color management out there on the Internets, but this is still kind of typical of one of the problems of anyone out there trying to get a handle on the issue of color management as it relates to all the devices and functions that a digital image is likely to pass through.

Basically, what this guy is telling people will get them for the most part a good result, but he tells them in such a way that it’s almost by accident.

Note here:

Martijn, a colleague of mine at Ottonico, simply disables color management on his documents.This can be done by opening the ‘Assign Profile’ panel (edit -> assign profile). The result is that the “working RGB” setting is not used and this other profile is applied.

[He shows the 'assign profile box in Photoshop switched to "Don't Color Manage This Document."]

This already improved colors consistency drastically, since you’re already editing your PSD without the ‘prepress colour profile’.

Um, no…you’re not.

Go on, try it yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s a common misconception among many people that there’s ever any way to “turn colormanagement off.” The pixels in your digital images are boxes with numbers in them. The numbers have to relate to some color space. If they don’t, they won’t reproduce anything.

What happens if you click “Don’t Color Manage This Document”?

If your document is in the same color space as your working space, nothing. The pixels in your image are still defined by your working space, whatever it’s set to. If your document is in a different space than your working space, Photoshop will assume it’s in that space and your display will alter accordingly. Then when you go to save the image, the box to embed the profile will be unchecked. Check it, and you’ve worked the file just exactly as if you’d never opened the “Assign profile” dialogue, or as if you’d simply assigned whatever your working space profile is.

So then the guy goes on to suggest working for the web in sRGB, which is correct, but he leaves the reader with this:

As always, it’s best to work with a focus on the future. I feel that it’s a good thing to embed this profile, since these profiles will be used more and more in the browsers to come (Safari and Firefox 3 already support it). An embedded color workspace won’t bother browsers or Flash players in displaying the image, but it does give the browser the possibility to use the image to its biggest potential. Future Flash players and webbrowsers will support color spaces more and more. Wouldn’t it be a shame to omit a color space then?

Well, yes and no. Any image is already in whatever color space it’s in. You can’t omit it. If the numbers in the pixels in an image relate to sRGB, they relate to sRGB, whether the profile is embedded or not.

The issue however right now is that the web is partially color managed and partially not. And for that reason my rule still applies: If the image is free-floating, embed the profile. But if it has to match a background, don’t.

So why am I picking on this guy?

I’m not really. Or at least I don’t mean to.

It’s just that here’s an example of how hard it is to incorporate all aspects of color management across all elements of the digital chain. I’m sure this guy is a very talented developer, and probably one very smart cat. And he’s got a decent fundamental knowledge of certain aspects of color management…but some obvious holes in his knowledge as well.

Often you’ll hear people complaining that Google Chrome isn’t color managed or the like, and I think part of the problem is situations like this. It takes such a long time to learn all the minutiae of color management that once you have, you’re a color management guy and you work in color management. You’re not a developer, and the last thing you’re likely to do is want to write code for a living.

So there’s a tendency for bit and pieces to float around, and since a goodly portion of the world is perfectly happy with crappy color on unprofiled monitors anyway, I’d imagine that some–such as Google–just decided to ignore the whole issue as not worth the effort.

Not, of course, to say I agree. But I’m also not sure I see the issue going away, or the mindset changing.

I’m not the spring chicken I used to be, that’s for certain.

In fact, I’ve seen more than a few upturns and downturns in my day. But I’ve never seen anything quite like the situation that exists now. I don’t know if it’s because banks still aren’t lending money or people are just spooked about what may happen next, but I have never in a lifetime that’s involved a fair amount of business-to-business contact and selling seen such an overwhelming and consistent fear on the part of so many at the prospect of spending any money.

I’ve come to believe that you could walk into a place, slap a hundred dollar bill on the counter and tell the owner you’d sell him that bill for ten bucks, and he’d take a horrified step back, make the sign of the cross, and say, “I’m just not spending any money right now.”

Well, okay, I understand. And the thing is, if I called you and broached the whole subject of color management you might just wonder why you should spend money on it. You weren’t planning to when you got up this morning, after all. And times are tight and…blah, blah, blah…

But even in tight times, is not spending money always the best course of action?

I called on a prospect recently. Called on the owner a time or two, then called on the designer, and the designer was pretty excited about the prospect of color workflow management. He had the usual issues: PMS colors that were hit and miss; greys that either looked okay inside then turned green outside, or were just off from the start; and he had no real idea of working color spaces or how to make sure to get optimum transforms at every step in an image’s path from inception or arrival to print.

So here’s the thing:

You think that’s free?

Your suppliers giving away ink and materials are they?

Your employees working for free?

Honestly, I don’t think color management costs any money at all.

I’m reminded of the old cartoon a salesman who used to call on me had printed on the back of his business cards:

One common complaint you hear in just about any industry during good times is that there are too many people getting into the business and all of them are cutting their prices in an attempt to undercut the established players and steal their business.

And one of the few good points about harder times is that they do tend to weed out the weaker players. And I’d argue that one of the main strengths of anyone who prints big images for a living is their ability to reproduce color correctly and vividly.

The great thing about color workflow management is that it gives you the best of both worlds. Not only do you get cost savings in terms of time and materials not spent chasing color, but you use every bit of your printing capability every time you print.

And I think that’s money well spent, in any economy.

Yeah, kind of sounds like an oxymoron, and in fact it sounds like it because it is.

But what’s funny is, well, I opened a Twitter account awhile back: http://twitter.com/CorrectColor if you’re dying to see or want to be one of the small select group following me. My idea was that I’d just watch for certain words and phrases and then swoop down, dazzle the hapless posters with knowledge, they’d fly me out to wherever to solve their issues and I’d quickly be in so much demand that I’d never, ever, ever again have to make another cold call and listen to someone bow up and tell me they had color management all under control because printing a bunch of swatches for every kind of material on every machine they have is color management.

Whoops. Sorry. Maybe I’m a little grumpy today.

And anyway that’s all beside the point, because what kind of shocked me is that far and away most of the people online who are talking about color management are talking about it as it relates to the Internet.

Man, there are some long and convoluted discussions going on out there too. And of course, some long and convoluted discussions about how to do things exactly wrong.

(And here’s a tip: Any time, anyplace, anywhere you’re reading about color management and anyone tells you to use your monitor color profile as your RGB working space, just walk away right there. They don’t know what they’re talking about.)

So I read through a bunch of this stuff and people’s frustrations and got to thinking about how I could put together some sort of little consulting thing I might could make a few bucks off of…

And I finally decided that it’s just too simple to charge for.

So here it is. All you need to know about color management on the Internet:

First, depending on how much you know about color management, you can work in this color space or that color space or the other color space, but when you’re ready to send an image to the web, you need to convert it to sRGB.

sRGB. Nothing else.

Then you either have to embed the profile or not. And there’s tremendous confusion out there, but the fact is that whether you embed the profile or not, you don’t alter the file. It’s still in the sRGB color space. It’s just that by embedding the profile, you tell any other application that opens the file that can recognize the profile to use it.

And of course the current state of the web is that Safari recognizes the profile, Firefox does (if you tell it to, but not by default), I don’t think IE does, I know Chrome doesn’t and Opera doesn’t either.

So, how do you make a file work in all of them?

Two rules:

If your file does not need to blend seamlessly into a colored background, embed the profile. That will make it look as you want it to in the browsers that recognize the profile–color managed ones. It won’t exactly in the others but by having it in sRGB it’s at least going to be in the ballpark they expect, so it won’t be awful.

And that’s simply all you can do. So there’s no sense worrying any further. There’s a perception out there that if you convert your images to your monitor profile and then do this or that or the other thing, then they’ll match in all browsers.

Well, of course they will. On your monitor. They’ll look exactly the same as well on every other computer everywhere in the world that also is using your monitor. (In other words, none of them.)

So don’t spend any time and effort trying to match your images on color managed and un-color-managed browsers. It’s not possible.

And the second rule: As it stands right now, while some browsers will read a profile in images; unless it’s changed very, very recently, and unless you know how to do it, there’s no universal html tag to apply a profile to the html parts of your site. In the real world what that means is even in color managed browsers, the text and backgrounds are still not color managed.

So, if you want your image to blend seamlessly into your background, you need to still keep it in sRGB, but untag it–do not embed the profile. This will of course leave your image to the mercy of the browser, but it’s the only way at present to assure this will work.

That’s it. There’s nothing more to it and nothing more you can do.

Keep in mind that the web is far, far, far from a color perfect place. Very few monitors are profiled, and most people don’t have much of a clue what good color is or what bad color is. All you can do is use the tools correctly, and know you’ve done all you can do.

See? Nothing to it.

However, if you’ve been agonizing over this for weeks and have a Eureka! moment here and want to toss a buck or two into the tip jar, well, times aren’t so good I’m gonna stop you.

So if the spirit moves you, be my guest.

Want complete beginning to end color workflow management that’s guaranteed?

Want to be in complete control of color from inception to completion?

Want to print PMS colors with confidence?

Want to say goodbye forever to swatch charts for all your machines and media; to test strips; to wasted materials and time; and to making excuses to customers who roll their eyes and walk off on a search for vendors who can hit their red/grey/whatever?

Want to have your name added to the select list of Correct Color clients? Want to always have someone you can call with color questions who will answer the phone and give you a direct answer, with only a Texas accent?

Want all that, and to basically have to pay only us–with virtually no travel expense?

Well, if you’re on the east coast, basically between Jacksonville and New York, and you’d like to solve all your color issues once and for all between April 5th and April 26th, we just might have a deal for you.

Call 512 468 0010 or email typhoon@correctcolor.org for details.

Most times I actually have no beefs with the TSA folks. Seems to me that they take a good deal of abuse from people who just like to complain about anything and everything.

However a few weeks ago I did have an interesting little exchange with a TSA guy at Austin Bergstrom, who, after holding up the line while he looked at the items in a side pouch of my computer bag, then going through them and fondling them individually, informed me that he was going to go x-ray them all again.

I didn’t say anything but I must have rolled my eyes or something, because when he came back he asked me if I knew what materials that were used to make “the bomb” looked like.

What a stupid question.

I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and held out my hands and he allowed as how he had been–as he was searching my stuff–”considering evacuating the checkpoint.”

Well that would have been interesting.

Anyway, a week or so later I was going through security at LAX, and the contents of the same pouch got some extended interest again.

The guys weren’t nearly so grumpy or officious though so I asked one of them what it was they were so interested in. And it turns out the offending item was…

My trusty PMS bridge book.

Not sure just why this thing looks like bomb-making paraphernalia, but from now on I think I’ll put it in the tray with my shoes.