Pointy-Eared Assholes in Hats and Other Crap

(Update, typo fix. Slight addition. Stet at October 5 2300 hours.)

Greetings to the Astute Reader, I hope you've got your windows up and your HEPA on. It won't do you any good against actual gas warfare, but it ought to stop any particulates much bigger than a virus, and might even slow down that scary scary Swine Flu which seems to be a whole lot weaker than the weakest of the "seasonal flu" strains.

Of course, there's a lesson to be taken from the 1918 Pandemic, and that's this: the first time you get it, you don't even notice, but your immune system gets primed for an overwhelming response the next time that strain is encountered. The first time you get it, almost nothing noticable happens... and the second time you get it, your immune system responds so well that it drains all of your metabolic reserves, floods your lungs with mucus, and activates your lymphatic system to the point of exploding lymph nodes and total secondary circulation system clog. The only ways to avoid this mostly amount to having a defective immune system, or never getting that first (or second) exposure.

Again, according to Sitemeter, this still remains a highly-unread blog.

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The Astute Reader -- as well as the scoffers looking for easy sources of amusement -- might be wondering by now, "Thomas, WTF is wrong with you? Stuff happens to you that either never happens to anyone else, or which doesn't bother other people". Well, the short answer is, "it's not enough just to be a Freak, I also had to be a Freak Magnet".

As for why things bother me that don't bother anyone else, I can only offer a precis of a discussion I had with someone well-placed in the law-enforcement community. It seems that they have a not-uncommon allergy that is well-understood in the corporate workplace, and in the pubilc school corporations.

Back when this person was a child, they would encounter this allergen on a nearly daily basis and it made them quite miserable when it wasn't actually making them quite sick, which also happened all too often. In those days, the idea of being allergic to this common product was laughable, unheard of, not even Freaks were thought capable of being afflicted by this. People scoffed.

Eventually, however, the medical community researched it all and discovered that this person was not alone. Indeed, far from being all alone in the world, it turns out that the most common hospital admissions originating in school (or other institutional) buildings were due to this particular allergen, or other food allergies to very common staples of industrial/institutional cafeterias.

And now, it's pretty much illegal to use these ingredients in industrial/institutional cafeterias and food-preparation areas. And even better, for failure to follow the rules, you can be sued, sued, sued.

And if you knew what this allergen was, and could be proven to have intentionally exposed such a person to that allergen, good luck even making it alive to your court date. People susceptible to kryptonite -- to use the comic-book concept -- tend to take it right personal when people field it against them. So do others in the same fix.

Unfortunately for me, my own personal kryptonite is not yet on the law books. Yet I should mention that even the comic-character Clark Kent, not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed (so to speak), eventually managed to figure out how to counter kryptonite. And DC Comics being a core subscriber to the "Comics Code Authority", he never killed anyone when he combined super-speed and large amounts of lead to counter kryptonite... but I'm no Superman.

Yet I seem to live in a world full of Lex Luthor, again to crib from the comic-book rogue's gallery.

Fortuntely, they are usually fairly easy to spot:

Usually they are pointy-eared assholes in hats.

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First, I should mention that I have nothing against hats. And to quote a certain local law-enforcement official who said this loudly enough so that I couldn't possibly miss it, "if my hair did that, I'd wear a hat all of the time, too".

Well, now that I'm almost bald, my hair doesn't do that.

And also, since about 2007 or so, I discovered that there were people out there who are far more actively opposed to Pointy Eared Assholes in Hats than I am, and are willing to go to extremes about it. Oddly enough, all I had to do to escape the really intolerable annoyance they brought to me was to stop wearing a hat.

I should also pause to mention that I do have rather large ears, and they are also a bit pointy... but they're not the same kind of pointy as the Pointy Eared Assholes in Hats, who shall hereinunder be referred to as "PEAH". Further, as I am a Man, as seen from behind, my ears are parallel, not outward-pointing. I also have ear-lobes.

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I should also stop to point out that not all pointy eared persons are assholes, nor are all persons in hats assholes. I even know people who have pointy ears who wear hats who are not assholes... but that's not the way to bet. There's something special that often happens when you put a hat on a pointy eared person: all too frequently, they become backstabbing fuckwads with no intentions in life other than making other people suffer, ideally in a way that leaves the victim wondering what the fuck happened to them.

Due to this stunning revelation which came to me late in life, though at one time I was a long-hair, in the present day, I am pretty damn leery of anyone whose hair covers their ears. Why?

The only thing worse than pointy eared assholes in hats are the pointy haired assholes that know that people will avoid them if they see the pointy ears. They're disguising themselves as normal people. That's the same as admitting that people ought to avoid you, and that you're hiding what they are so as to delude and lure victims.

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My workstation is an old (by modern standards) 2.4GHz Pentium machine, built in about 2003 or so. At the time, it was state-of-the-art enough for me, and I loaded it up with all sorts of stuff, such as a nice NVidia graphics card, a Soundblaster Platinum Live! 5.1 soundcard with the front patch panel and dedicated MIDI In/Out/Through and lots of other goodies. Also added, a nice 2-input TV/video card with multiple inputs/outputs, Really Good DVD player, all of that.

And in the modern day, due mostly to the immense blasts of SPAM hitting the mail-server that runs on the workstation, and the 20Gbit/sec bandwidth here, the workstation runs almost dead-slow from multiple instances of SpamAssassin.

So, I decided to go down to MicroCenter on Rockville Pike.

I bought the components for my last few computers here, as well as media and labels for production runs of my patented product. You'd think that they'd all know me by now.

Well, everything is all okay until I get to the checkout.

The guy ringing me up is courteous enough, knows what he's doing, speaks clear English probably with less accent than I have
(I'm lifelong from East Rockville/Aspen Hill, okay?), but due to the cattle-chute layout of the place, I wind up facing one clerk while another clerk is at my back.

The guy behind me is large, long-haired, blond, and hits me behind the left ear with what I call "the Spike".

"The Spike" seems to be roughly a 3-inch length of unclad glass optical fiber. It's impossible to remove (it'll just shatter), hurts like a bitch, and when it pins several muscles together as in the neck right behind and below the ear, causes significant and long-lasting loss of function.

Plus, it'll have me at the doctor's office with a life-threatening infection within the week. I'll be convalescing for 14 days, just because I decided to go in and buy 2 gigs of DDR1-400 Mhz RAM.

As usual, everyone sees this, and equally as usual, nobody even blinks twice other than when I reached up to the wound.

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Maryland has some of the worst laws in the country, when it comes to prosecuting violence.

First, the laws never adapt to changes in weapons and technique, or at least they're very slow to adapt; the last significant changes in this was the prohibition of nunchaku and shuriken, and that was back in the mid-1970s.

Secondly, Maryland's criminal law tends to allow for rather bizarre applications of law to cover circumstances clearly left undefined. For example, violations which in other States would constitute "threat and menace" -- to wit, telling someone that you'll kill them and waving a handgun -- will be prosecuted in Maryland as either "simple assault", "verbal assault", or "reckless endangerment". Reckless endangerment is itself a strange law, since there is no comparable criminal law against willful endangerment, but rather the actions of willful endangerment will be prosecuted, to-wit, assault with a deadly weapon, etc.

Third, for most crimes of violence, the police are not allowed to investigate. I have heard officer after officer complain bitterly about this. In most States, if someone tells them that someone bent a golf-club over their head in an argument on the greens, the cops would at least go ask questions and make an arrest if in their reasonable opinion there was actually a call for that. In Maryland, they're not even allowed to go ask questions in most cases. It's simply ridiculous.

Of course, some would suggest that this means that if someone got sneaky on your ass and hurt you in a way the cops can't prosecute, then you should just do the same.

And if you're a sociopath, that makes perfect sense.

If you're not a sociopath, and will not break the law when it is the clear moral duty of a police officer to uphold your part when you make the accusation, then the sociopath is given clear advantage.

No wonder that Maryland is home to so many of them!

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After the big blond guy backstabbed me in the neck, evidently for shopping at the store, one of the other clerks -- medium size, medium brown complexion -- actually came over and got between me and the big blond guy. He even deflected a few more shots at my back, and in the conversation I heard the phrase "non-safe customer".

What, there are customers that fall into the class of "safe to abuse"? WTF is this?

I realize that police are outnumbered, the law hamstrings their capacity to do anything regardless of how many of them there might be, that the law also rewards backstabbing cowards but will quickly jail an honest man making a morally-sound and ethical direct confrontation.

But that it's gotten so bad here in Maryland that foreigners have to tell the Poor White Trash which non-PWT they are inadvised to harass?

Well, like I said, I am not just a Freak, but a Freak Magnet.

But I'm just one of the smaller Freak Magnets in a much larger Freak Magnet: Maryland's utterly defective criminal code.

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More to come, no doubt.

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