Most Boring Day of Most Boring Person, Ever

Well, back once again.

Nothing interesting has happened, of course, other than the approach of a hurricane, which means that it's going to be raining and gloomy for the next week or so, according to Weather.Gov.

So, trying to not be overly communicative, yet still informative, I have been working even more on the Aspen Hill, Maryland Wiki.

In recent days, I've put a more "standard" and "friendly" -- and far less narrative -- front page on the Wiki. It now looks a lot more like the front page of Wikipedia.

Further -- and this should give you an idea of how boring I am, and how boring is my chosen field of server administration and development -- I have decided that it's really important for me to do two things.

The first is to complete accurate categorization of all of the records of storefronts, shopping centers, professional buildings and their occupants, etc.

A first-whack at this was something I completed about 5 years ago. It was comprehensive, accurate, up-to-date, and very non-pretty. So I used it to drive the initial population of the Wiki, but let's just say, if you want to really paint yourself into a corner, there is no better way to do it with a fully functional shell script that fulfils a badly-rationalized plan.

Sure, I tweaked a lot of home-made PHP5 scripts to dump the databases in a way that quickly generated lists of stores on a per-shopping-mall basis. The thing was, I hadn't yet realized the power of Categories in the Mediawiki software.

This means that I have page after page of Lists, but it's far better to let the Categorizing functions generate those lists, than to maintain them yourself. It's far easier to let the software do the maintenance.

So, that first task, it's taking advantage of a day too rainy to be outside, and sitting inside doing very dull repetitive boring stuff. Of course, if you look at Category:Storefronts, Northgate Plaza Shopping Center you get a list of article titles, which happen to be the names of storefronts. Click one of those links, you get a page with the name, address, telephone number, etc. Then again, you can also click Category:Northgate Plaza Shopping Center, you get a list of addresses. This isn't all that informative, unless of course you want to generate a mailing list. But you can also click on the listing of street numbers at that mall, and it takes you to an article on the place, which also lists the current occupant, and you click that link and you're back at the article on the store in the storefront at that address.

All very comprehensive, all very boring, all a fair amount of work to do, creating the categories, the structure, the relations of the relational database done in hypertext, etc. But once you're done, you have a really good tool for finding out where to shop in Aspen Hill.

Now for the second thing, essential to the first.

Every few months, I have to actually go out of the house and into the public realm -- which generally I prefer to avoid, for reasons the Astute Reader will quickly recall -- and compare my databases with reality.

Stores close, offices move, medical practices relocate or consolidate or change their advertised staff and professionals, you get the picture. I have to go do some Reality Checking and verify what's open, what's closed, etc.

Which means that I have to walk around malls that ordinarily I prefer to avoid.

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On the very hot and muggy morning of August 25, I got up and went and walked around Rock Creek Village Shopping Center. It's the most "upscale" of the Aspen Hill's six distinct Shopping Centers, or at any rate, it is the most non-ghetto. I walk around with my clipboard, comparing the printout of the page seen at the link, above, and write down any changes. Not many, really, other than the Quizno's being closed. (This isn't yet reflected on that listing, I haven't got around to that, yet.)

Then up to Layhill Center Shopping Center, Plaza del Mercado Shopping Center, Aspen Manor Shopping Center, Aspen Hill Shopping Center, and finally Northgate Plaza Shopping Center.

Clipboard in hand, I wander the malls, checking off the stores that are there, crossing out the names that are no longer at the addresses, noting new storefronts where they are, and then home I go, to update things.

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Did I mention that I am the most boring person ever? Even the things I do to pass the time for myself are boring.

But it's not really as boring as all of that.

When you have a clipboard, and business cards to pass out, you can go almost anywhere and while you're there, you might as well keep an eye on people and definitely keep a sharp ear turned to the conversations that go on around you.

In a place like Aspen Manor Shopping Center, that might be an idea good enough to make the difference between staying healthy or landing in the hospital.

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To state that Aspen Manor Shopping Center is a ghetto-as-fuck hotbed of vile racists from abroad is to understate the case. To make it clear, I'm not talking about the Koreans in Lotte Plaza, though they might in fact have more than a few foreign racists among them. I don't know, I avoid them. I avoided them for years, and still do, mostly because of their unrelenting violence and the fact that members of their community stalked me in and out of local stores for years. That didn't end until someone on store security staff at Home Depot grabbed one who was sneaking up behind me and set her straight: "He's not a bloodsucker. He's German. Yeah, I know, easy mistake to make."

Evidently, a sizable percentage of the people living around here believe in "dracula" or "bloodsuckers".

I still haven't figured out whether or not "dracula" is a proper noun, as in the name of a long-dead Wallachian prince whose epithet in Romanian was "Dracula", or "Dragon". Of course this is also the name of a character in classic fiction. If these people actually believe that fictional characters are lurking in Aspen Hill and buying power tools at Home Depot in broad daylight, I can only reiterate my demands that the County find or make more money to fund mental healthcare outreach programs; there's a clear and pressing need. Or perhaps "dracula" is a generic noun, like "Korean" or "Latino", or "Anglo", or "Jew".

Which leads me to wonder about the etymology of the people whispering about "bloodsuckers". All of my life I have heard people alluding to the recurrent Blood Libel against Jews, but usually that was a direct accusation of racial/religious hatred, as in someone insulting someone else by calling them "a bloodsucking jew". It's all the more bizarre as any observant Jew is required by Deuteronomy to never in their lives consume any blood or product containing blood.

I'm pretty much convinced that this whole "bloodsucker" thing is just widespread racial/religious hatred. The icing on that cake, of course, is the remark to the Korean ninja stalker lady by the Home Depot security guy (or undercover cop, whatever): "easy mistake to make". After all, the vast majority of Aspen Hill's Jewish community are survivors (or descendants of survivors) of the Nazi Holocaust, which means that outside of following a different religion, they were as German as the Germans themselves.

Thus, I presume that cultural and linguistic isolation in the Korean (and to some extent, African and Spanish-speaking) communities all combined with one too many late-night horror movie, causing these baffled immigrants to believe that Jews were sneaking around sucking people's blood and that clearly something had to be done about it. And not knowing the difference between German-Americans who were not Jewish and the German-Americans who are Jewish, they evidently decided that any German-Americans were fair game, under a theory of better safe than sorry, just drive them all away, no questions asked.

That anyone who subscribes to -- or even tolerates -- such practices, and then demands non-discrimination and even race-based preferences for access to employment or college admissions or special liasons in the law-enforcement community, is practicing extremely blatant hypocrisy, I leave to the sense of irony of the Astute Reader.

Yet for me, it's just another of the many hazards in crime-ridden Aspen Hill, especially up around Aspen Manor Shopping Center.

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Crime got so bad in this area that we were declared a "Crime Hot Spot", and the axis of Georgia Avenue between the Wheaton Central Business District was declared the "Wheaton to Aspen Hill Mid County Crime Corridor". Funding, in unfortunately insufficient amounts, came into the neighborhood through the
Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention ("GOCCP").

We got the Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative up and running, and that developed a focus limited almost exclusively to Spanish-speaking public school students, trying to provide "stay in school", afterschool, summer school programs, etc. The effects have been rather limited, and it certainly didn't do anything about the wackjobs stalking "bloodsuckers". Indeed, they seemed to me to be so well-organized that at times I have entertained the notion that they couldn't be this organized without (hopefully unofficial) police department involvement, or the involvement of other agencies which might range from local government to foreign intelligence services.

I suspect there's also more than a bit of involvement by organizations such as CASA of Maryland, whose acting director -- one Gustavo Torres -- declared that his group would organize to stalk and harass anyone in opposition to CASA's declared mission of bringing the Chavista socialist Indigenous Supremacy movement to Maryland. Well, spies and intelligence operations are nothing new to Aspen Hill, after all, the KGB's foreign operations directorate definitely liked Aspen Hill Shopping Center and Northgate Plaza Shopping Center as places to hand off information and pay informants.

Most of their operations were directed against the former Defense Contractor, Vitro Labs (now BAE Systems), but hell, spies are spies. They'll exploit anything they can, just to have some added information and potential for even more control and manipilation. If they can tell ignorant foreigners silly stories to get them involved in a compromise in a way that furthers the parent agency's mandate, they'll do it.

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Did I mention that my life is pretty boring?

I like my life boring, okay? I don't need excitement like spies and unregistered agents of foreign powers operating in Aspen Hill inciting foreigners to stalk me through the stores, or for that matter to stalk anyone through the stores.

I occasionally meet someone new here in Aspen Hilk or surrounding areas, and ask them if they might want to go downtown to go barhopping. Almost invariably, I get some demurral along the lines of "yikes, do downtown? No way. Too goddamned weird".

And its funny, sometimes I ask my friends downtown if maybe they want to come on out to Aspen Hill. Usually they say one of two things: "sorry man, I don't do Ghetto", or "fuck that, it's too weird out there".

Considering where some of the folks live who say "I don't do Ghetto", evidently the place's reputation downtown is pretty sad. It has the reputation of the place where people moved to when they got priced out of the city. And considering some of the people who claim that Aspen Hill is too weird for them, I've had to ask them why they thought it was weird. Most responded to the effect that at least down in the District, they had a 50-50 chance of anyone they met being able to speak English.

This last group often expressed a lot of misgivings about living in a Nation's Capital that was effectively surrounded by a foreign country. And these weren't the elitist assholes who used to natter on about "beyond the Beltway, the inbred provincials are agitating for theocracy" and that sort of thing. The group that was expressing concern about the increasing foreignness of contiguous counties were almost all Black, and well-educated. A lot of them had degrees with majors, or strong minors, in History.

One of these was one of the folks who practically fell out of their chair when I said I lived in Aspen Hill. He'd just waded through the Mitrokhin Archive, on the heels of an article in the Washington Post which declared that Aspen Hill was a hotbed of espionage back in the Cold War days. We had some interesting and amusing discussions about how we kids in the neighborhood had always thought that the two guys parked in their cars out in the middle of the parking lot were detectives, and here we find out that they were indeed police, but not our own: they were another country's Secret Police, seriously discussing with each other the state of progress in their efforts to completely destroy and subjugate the United States.

It only seems droll or amusing. It's actually deadly serious, it was at that time, and it's deadly serious now. Only now it's not the Russians we need to worry about... much.

But tradecraft is tradecraft, and the agents who were in place at the end of the Cold War almost certainly remain, and the station chiefs had fairly large stables of informants and "local talent". Spies never discard a useful asset unless it seems that the asset may turn or be turned. And these assets have to be exercised, and most importantly of all, the station chiefs need to find or make a way to get other people to distract or engage the people who are endlessly searching for the station chiefs.

Station chiefs do not live in fabulous upscale apartments festooned with the latest in special gadgets; that would attract attention and station chiefs do not like attention. So, they live in the most crappy place they can find which is not a violent war-zone of a ghetto. In Montgomery County, that's pretty much Aspen Hill.

I already knew all of this, but it was interesting to hear confirmation from a well-educated man with a degree in history that they'd earned on the GI Bill. Comparable conversations have occurred from time to time and from place to place, but thanks to the InterNet, conversations aren't really necessary. You can find all sorts of useful information online.

And if you want to find useful information online that deals with Aspen Hill, Maryland, mostly you will get it because I am out there with a clipboard, taking notes.

And clearly, I am not the only person who knows this.

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The Astute Reader will recall that I say I don't have much ability to read faces. Well, that's somewhat true, but when you have a disability, usually you learn to work to overcome it, or at least to work around it or to work with it.

Some things, I can recognize for what they are. A scowl of racial hatred, well, not hard to recognize on some folks. Some folks, the very dangerous ones, manage to conceal it even from the people who can easily read expressions.

Other things are also not too hard to recognize. I might not quite recognize a look of fear, but shivering and huddling are things I understand. When I see this sort of thing from someone who I just asked for a new business's phone number, I can reasonably suspect that they aren't afraid of me personally -- never seen them before in my life -- they're afraid of what I represent, or what has been represented to them.

Are they afraid of me for being white? I kind of doubt it. Are they afraid because I'm not their usual yuppie or preppie customer? It's possible, but I'm just leaning in the doorway asking if I can have their business telephone number. Are they afraid because they recently were traumatized by a male? Sadly, this also is possible.

But when I get this sort of reaction from almost everyone I encounter in that context and on that day, in those few hours, I start wondering if maybe some station-chief didn't decide that it's time to crank up a little misdirection for their pursuers. Get the "locals" all riled up, and the hunters won't be able to sort out the madness of public agitation from the clues left by escalating operations by the enemies of the USA.

This is the classic "kick the anthill" approach to evading detection. Spy hunters are almost onto you? Start a riot.

So, as mentioned earlier this month, Something's Coming, and I expect it will be Something Big.

So much for my life being as boring as I might like.

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