Gadling

Spring Break in Cabo San Lucas has been enticing college students for years with its beaches, surf and, of course, the infamous bars like El Squid Roe. Now, Spring Break 2009 is on the verge of being canceled due to the ill effects previous Spring Breaks have had on the Baja water table.

Mexican officials are reporting that the water table has been negatively affected due to increased water consumption during this holiday week. Apparently, the worst culprit is toilet flushing. Mexican scientists and environmentalists are concerned that a massive water shortage, due to huge amounts of flushing, will be imminent if the number of Spring Break attendees increases next year and they are lobbying the local government to cancel the event altogether.

Don’t fret yet, Cabo-lovers! Due to the uproar from the local tourism association about the subsequent loss of income, the Cabo San Lucas municipal government is working on a plan to please both the environmentalists and the tourism workers.

The potential plan is to involve a toilet-flushing schedule. Specified hotels will be given the go ahead to flush at certain times of the day while others will have to wait to flush until their appointed time. The details of what hotels and when is still under great debate as hotels vie for top flush times. Miguel Suarez, a spokesperson for the municipal government, was quoted earlier this week saying, “We definitely don’t want to cancel Spring Break 2009 and plans are currently underway to schedule the water usage, particularly from toilet flushes, during this event. We have top project managers and local environmentalists working with a number of hotels in the area to work out the Fair Flush Schedule.”

It’s hard to say whether this so-called “Fair Flush Schedule” will agree with the hotels or how next year’s Cabo San Lucas party crowd will react to being told when they can and cannot use the facilities. Local hotels are already stocking up on emergency buckets to be left in all hotel rooms and there have been rumors of hotels forming alliances with port-a-potty distributors in the area.

So the question is will Spring Break 2009 get tanked?

Transportation Security Administration authorities are looking for a 1-year-old believed to have been, in the words of one official, “a mule” in a complex scheme to smuggle combustible liquids on board a Lufthansa flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to Frankfurt yesterday.

Officials would not immediately confirm whether al Qaeda was behind the plot, but one source inside the investigation, who spoke to Gadling on condition of anonymity, seemed to give some credence to that theory. “They have crossed over to a whole new phase with this one,” he said.

“People wonder why we scrutinize little children,” the source added. “We get criticized for that. Well, now you know. No one gets a free pass.”

Authorities are calling the infant “Baby Jack,” though it was not immediately clear why.

Witnesses tell Gadling that a young couple and their baby boy held up the security line at JFK’s Terminal 1 for nearly 20 minutes as TSA workers passed the infant between one another.

“They had him practically in the X-Ray,” one witness said. “He was crying.”

Said another onlooker: “Two screeners came over and took turns lifting the kid and putting their noses to his ass.”

The family was eventually led away, witnesses said.

According to Gadling’s source, the threesome was detained for questioning and were photographed. “The kid’s diaper was way too full, and they wouldn’t change it in front of us,” he said. “We got someone putting the family in the bathroom near Starbucks 10 minutes before, changing him. Now you tell me, how does the kid fill a diaper like that in 10 minutes?”

Airport authorities were coordinating with local police and the Department of Homeland Security when the family escaped. Sources say the interrogation room’s door had not been secured. “They looked like a family,” another source said. “Get them out in this airport, good luck finding them.”

Officials have acknowledged few leads, though the Associated Press is reporting that a woman saw the family “walking briskly” out of an unmarked door. At one point, Baby Jack was seen on his own, crawling toward an as-yet-unidentified older man in sunglasses, who scooped him up and “just vanished,” the source said.

“I can only say that this is an open, active investigation,” a TSA spokesman told Gadling. “We are using all available resources to find that baby.”

Asked to comment on the family’s escape, the spokesman said, “They did not board the plane. That is the news here today. They did get aboard that airplane.”

Another source inside the TSA added: “I’ll tell you this, they weren’t that boy’s parents. We need find him and get answers.”

Asked what the adults looked like, the source said, “They didn’t look like you or me, that’s for sure.”

Thanks to the latest survey of foreign language proficiency conducted by the United Nations, Americans no longer have to feel sheepish about their poor language skills. Although the US ranks 157th in the worldwide foreign language proficiency survey, the results also bring some positive news.

“America was voted far better at faking foreign language accents than any other country,” says I. M. Rone-Ree of the Foreign Language Association and a lobbyist for the No Child Left Behind act. “We are proud that so many Americans can imitate the accents of the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Mexicans and French, among others.”

Some critics have indicated that the American obsession with faking accents can, maybe, seem a little ignorant to the rest of the world. “But zees ees crazee,” says I. M. Rone-Ree, cracking himself up.

Disgraced former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair is taking aim at legendary travel writer Jan Morris in an explosive new book, saying Morris faked a sex change operation years ago to boost her sales.

Morris, the author of more than 40 books including travel classics like The World of Venice, Farewell the Trumpets and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, not to mention a three-volume history of the British Empire, has been lying to her readership for years, Blair said in an exclusive interview with Gadling. She has always been a woman.

“We’re talking about one of the biggest literary hoaxes of all time here,” Blair said.

Blair said he’d been “working this story” for more than two years. “It started like all good stories do, with an overheard rumor. I just ran with it. It hasn’t been easy getting this story.”

Blair is calling a press conference soon to announce the publication of Jan Morris: Inside a Life of Lies (Brave Books). In it, Blair reports that Morris fabricated a 1972 sex change operation in Casablanca, which she later described in her affecting memoir Conundrum, which has been a cornerstone in the cannon of transgender literature for years. Blair spent more than a year in Casablanca retracing Morris’ steps. His conclusion: It is very likely Morris never even went there.

Asked about his sources, Blair said they were “ironclad,” and include doctors and personnel at the hospital where Morris is said to have undergone her sex change.

“Why did she do it? She needed better sales, that’s why,” Blair said.

He said that Morris has always been a woman, despite adopting a nome de plume — James Morris — in her earliest years as a foreign correspondent for The Times of London, a move he says designed to make inroads in a profession dominated by men. “Who would have believed it was a woman reporting from Mt. Everest in 1953?” Blair says. “You remember George Eliot, right? There’s a precedent for women writing as men.”

Blair is perhaps best known as the former New York Times national correspondent who was forced to resign in 2003 amid allegations that he plagiarized and fabricated stories. A subsequent internal Times investigation revealed that 36 of 73 stories Blair wrote for the paper were questionable, with Blair often making up quotes, fabricating datelines and lifting story details from other news sources. The scandal rocked the Gray Lady and brought down Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd.

Blair’s memoir of the ordeal, Bringing Down My Masters’ House, was a commercial disappointment.

One of Morris’ publishers, W.W. Norton & Co., has issued a statement calling Blair’s book “a hatchet job.”

Besides lying about the operation, Blair says his book reports that Morris has been “liberal” about the details of many of the trips that she has turned into travel books. “I have several sources, for example, who all collaborate that Morris has never set foot in Trieste,” Blair said.

Morris declined to comment when reached at her home in Wales.