Seems to me that terrorists are not as smart as they think they are. Always looking for ways to smuggle death-dealing devices into the U.S. they are missing the most foolproof method of all. Bear with me now, OK? I mean this is a bit of a delicate situation. At this point you have to promise not to tell anyone about this deadly secret -- and if you are a terrorist, do the decent thing and close your eyes for a couple of minutes.

The answer is "doctors' waiting room magazines." That's right. The ones you read before going to lunch without washing your hands. In fact, this is definitely a time when you should wash your hands even before going to the rest room.

I mean, only desperately sick people have handled doctors' waiting room magazines and coughed on them -- and horror of horrors -- even sat on them. Not one healthy person has touched them since 1956 when they were only 5 or 6 years old.

When using these magazines as deadly weapons, no delicate processing is necessary. No explosives or detonators are involved -- although you could safely wrap explosives in them since sniffer dogs are far too intelligent to go anywhere near the things. You don't think so? Well, I'll bet you've never seen a dog in the veterinary waiting room, reading a magazine and licking his thumb to turn pages. Yes, I know a dog's thumb is halfway up his arm, but have you seen that tongue?

So now you are wondering how they could transform these things into weapons of mass destruction. Well, what about if they recruit 50,000 Osama Bin Laden look-alikes, each carrying 5,000 doctors' waiting room magazines to scatter among the unsuspecting populace.

None of these Osama look-alikes will be stopped or reported by anyone because the whistle blower would be accused of persecuting the Osama impersonators simply because they look just like terrorists. Any terrorist knows that we are only allowed to point the finger at people who look nothing at all like terrorists unless we want to be accused of racial stereotyping.

So, if you see a young mother from Dubuque sitting in the waiting room trying to placate her restless kid, and she is on a short fuse and the kid appears ready to explode, call the cops. There is no way you can be accused of racial stereotyping -- unless the kid seems to be jabbering in a foreign tongue, then keep your filthy prejudices to yourself.

So what we should do is preempt the terrorists by requisitioning all doctors' waiting room magazines and dropping them on strategic targets, where no innocent people can be hurt -- like Iran and Afghanistan and Syria and. ... Well, we are not monsters for heaven's sake.

These magazines are so deadly that they will annihilate such wimpy things as anthrax bugs and cholera viruses -- even magazines that have only been read by tubercular thumb-licking page-turners will do it.

It's just possible that by throwing a few magazines into the reservoir, we could even clean up the local tap water, although that's not as easy to neutralize as anthrax and cholera.

Perhaps you've noticed that when you go to your doctor with a putrefying fingernail fungus, you find yourself cured very quickly -- probably even in the time it takes you to make those delicious hand-rolled pretzels for immunity-deficient seniors.

This magical healing has nothing to do with medicine or making pretzels but is due entirely to those magazines from which you picked up your killer cure for nail fungus. It's a case of bug eat bug. Of course, you have now deposited your own contribution to the deadly cycle and. ... OK, then it gets complicated and I'm getting one of my headaches. Anyway, it seems to me that in future, waiting room patients should be allotted rubber gloves.

But, a word of warning; when patients are through reading their magazines, those gloves will be crawling with bugs, and might even walk themselves off to see a movie. This could be almost as deadly to moviegoers as being unaware that the wheezing guy behind them has coughed his chewing gum into their popcorn.

So what we do is give the gloves as a peace offering to countries where operating room doctors care for sick terrorists. I mean there's no need to be vindictive, right?

OK, hold it, hold it; I take it all back. I've just been told by a medical person that dry paper is not a good keeper or breeder of germs. So, no matter what the dog does to your magazine, once it dries out you can safely wrap someone else's sandwiches in it.

Just keep Fido away from the kids. If they are like my own kids were, they are covered in some really scary head-cold germs.

So take them to the doctor's waiting room where they can finger the magazines, but make sure they are dressed like terrorists so they won't be stereotyped.

(Dec. 16, 2007)