A Little Detective Work

And An Insight Into Conrad's Mind

Tread carefully.

     OKAY, I was searching randomly for anything that might make a good Intro, and came across an article about Artificial Intelligence, which I will only use in full the once, because although it bumps up the word count, it takes a lot longer to type than AI.

     O look!  An evil purple dancing dinosaur!

     O no, I was lying, it's a poodle.

     You see, I remembered a story from the early years of "2000AD" where a human being, accompanied by an alien robot, encounters a group of security robots when they're up to mischief on a building site.  Could I remember the title?  Could I what!  It's been decades since I read it and I wasn't that enthused about it to begin with.  

     However, having a mind like a skip can be an asset at times.  I recalled that the artwork was by 'Redondo', a Spanish artist.  His style was only so-so, but he was quick, thus being one of the go-to guys if "2000AD" was falling behind schedule.  Art!

     That's the artwork of Kevin O'Neill, who was emphatically NOT quick, and on a couple of occasions his strip for "Nemesis" had to be done by Redondo.

     Okay, thus armed with the artist's name, a bit more digging revealed the story I was puzzling about.  Art!

"Return To Armageddon"

     I've had a trawl to see if I can find the scene where our heroic pair encounter the security robots and cannot, and no I'm not going through my Comic Mountain to dig out a single image.  Art!

     That's them in the background.  

     The significance is that Amtrack (the hideously deformed dude above) and Seeker (the shop-worn alien robot) ask the security robots what is the single greatest problem in throwing off their yoke of human mastery.  "Being unable to lie," replies the head security robot.

     Problem solved - Seeker swaps out a bit of his hardware and the security robot immediately declaims "I am Security Droid Num - NO!  I am Julius Caesar!"  Thanks for dooming Hom. Sap. Seeker.  Although, to be fair, he does see humans as merely expendable aliens.
     Which brings us to the meat of the matter.  You see, AI as it is currently composed is quite capable of lying, accidentally and without intent.  Art!

This one, when it arrives, will lie deliberately and with intent.  Malicious intent.

     The example I'm going to give here is about the South Canadian law firm of Levidow, Levidow and Oberman, who were representing a client suing an airline for personal injury.  Doubtless he wanted millions and the airlines didn't, which is usually where these things start.

     Enter ChatGPT.  Art!

     Attorney Steven Schwartz was directed to use ChatGPT to create a brief to be presented in court, which he did.  This was his first time using the AI and he must have been primed by watching too many "Terminator" films, since he specifically asked it if any references or cases provided were fake.  Art!

     

     Absolutely not, replied ChatGPT; the cases referred to exist on legal databases such as 'Westlaw' and 'LexisNexis'.

     WRONG!

     The whole brief looked thorough and professional, but it also cited numerous court cases THAT DID NOT EXIST.  The presiding judge, who diligently checked the brief, was not very impressed.  

"six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations."

     The judge is the Big Dog.  You do not want to irk, irritate or annoy him, and Mr Schwartz is due to attend a hearing about possible sanctions.

     As I said, this was done without ChatGPT being horrid.  Just imagine what Skynet or those security robots will get up to .....

Wissant

For your information, this is a commune in France, situated on the coast and part of the Pas de Calais department, and if Art will put down that bowl of coal -

The world's skinniest tourists

     Wissant had a long history as a fishing village and as the embarkation and debarkation point for various English and French armies en route to invade each other.  It's harbour gradually silted up and Calais supplanted it in commercial importance.  There are several artificial lakes in the hinterland that were created by quarrying for sand and gravel, during which the bones of a complete mammoth were dug up.

     There you go, a whistle-stop tour of Wissant.

     Now, why on earth did it pop up in my mind yesteryon?  Answers in the Comments please.

Still On The Boil

All being well, I plan to finish off "The Long Goodbye" tonight, and Dog Buns! what a twist in the tail has emerged and no mistake.

     ANYWAY I thought I'd continue with my thankless task of interpreting the South Canadian slang of seventy years ago, so that you don't have to.

PITTSBURGH PHIL:  I can't remember the context this was said in, so yah booh sucks to you.  Art!

     Harry 'Pittsburgh Phil' Strauss by name, worked as a contract killer for Murder Inc.  Hey don't knock it, a mans got to have a hobby.  Ol' Phil was supposed to have killed over 100 people, possible several times that number.  That's putting serious dedication into your occupation.  He never carried a weapon, instead using whatever came to hand, or his hand if there was nothing else.  What a sweetie.

CHOLO: I've heard this in the lyrics of a song by The Dickies, and I don't think it's particularly complimentary.  It is defined as "A young man of American Mexican background who is involved with street gangs", which is a particularly deadly insult when directed at Candy, Roger Wade's servant, who is never dressed in anything less than extravagantly tailored.  Art!

Not Candy

WEBLEY DOUBLE-ACTION HAMMERLESS: This, as you may be able to tell, is a gun.  A revolver, which the presiding doctor states had a very heavy cocking action but a very light trigger pull.  Art!

     Note the absence of a visible, protruding hammer.  Art!

     This makes it easier to carry around in a pocket as there's less pointy metal bits to get hung up on threads or seams or buttonholes and the like.

Oho What's This?

This is quite the coincidence.  You may recall that Conrad put up a picture of the XB-70 Valkyrie strategic bomber prototype,  because it looks cool as all get out.  It's one of those planes that look fast standing still.

     Well, who has a new Youtube vlog up about none other than the Valkyrie?  Art!

     HazegrayArt, that's whom.  Yes, it may be less than three and a half minutes long, but guess how much processing power is required for an animation that long and that detailed?  

     Ol' Hazy's blurb in the accompanying screed states the following:

Alternate concepts for the XB-70 ranged from cargo and personnel transport, supersonic tanker and reusable launch vehicle

Source: A Look Back… NAA B-70 Valkyrie Variants – A Future That Never Was…

     Art!

     We get a full 360º pan around the jet, above and below, and of course - obviously! - we get "Ride Of The Valkyries" on the soundtrack.

     Then - Art!

     The ventral doors open and another vehicle emerges.  Art!

     This is the X-20 Dyna-soar, an experimental concept craft that, as far as I know, never made it off the drawing-board and which has previously been portrayed as being lifted to orbit atop a Redstone rocket.  Art!

     So, launched from the Valkyrie, already going like stink, it accelerates into Low Eath Orbit.

Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again?

This Legendary Bit Of Snark

Was, I believe, immortalised by "The I.T. Crowd" more years ago than I like to think.  Conrad has always maintained that TITC was more a documentary than a sit-com, a view I maintain still.  It does give me an excuse to put up a picture of same.  Art!

     As for that advice - welllll yes I do encounter it in real-life, working as I do remotely for a global organisation, where there are an almost infinite number of potential points of failure along the way.  Our Team Lead, whom I will anonymise with the appellation "A", has told us frankly that, were we to contact the IT specialists for whatever reason, their first response is -

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

     One gets the feeling that they're not really trying very hard.  Six months ago, when I had a serious technical problem, they solved it.  But didn't tell me.  No, they told "A" who in turn told me.  Nor did they inform that they'd also changed my password, I had to pester "A" before he got told the new password.  Art!

     "Have you emptied the cache and cookies?"

     This is the second part of their catechism, but it would have made today's title very unwieldy.

     ANYWAY all that is to preface today's real Intro, which concerns legacy software, design stupidity and the Covid clampdown, all whipped into a nice little melange.  Art!

     This is a stock photo, so imagine that it's really Minnechaug Regional High School in Massachusets, South Canada.  The photo is there to illustrate the school's use of what they called 'Green lighting' which was an ethos not a colour.  The lighting, you see, automatically adjusted in brightness according to need, meaning it would trigger on if it got too dark, or go off when it was sunny.

     Splendid and simple, yes?  For ten years, yes.  Then -

     Well, no.  For, you see, 'twas in August when school staff and pupils noticed that the lights were on full, all day long.  This was due to a malware attack on the software, which defaulted to a Standby Mode - in other words, being on at full brightness all day long.

     "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

     No, because as I said, design stupidity.  THERE WAS NO 'OFF' SWITCH.

     Art!

     More design stupidity.  The lighting software was integrated as a bundle with all the other school software and thus couldn't be isolated and worked on.  Not only that, the original vendor had gone out of business years before, sounding a bit like 'grab the money and run'.  Not only that, the software itself had been sold on several times, and it required considerable detective work to track down the new owners.  The company that ended up juggling the red-hot coal, Reflex Lighting, had their work cut out finding anyone who was familiar with the now twelve-year old software.  They finally did, worked out a repair plan and then

COVID!

     Lockdown gets imposed.  

     18 months after the fault occurred, it was finally resolved with a new lighting system THAT INCLUDED AN OFF SWITCH.

     Here endeth the lesson for today.  Or at least until one of us has a PC problem.

Chandleresque

No!  Nothing to do with "Friends" I'll have you know.  RAYMOND Chandler, thank you very much and here's a punch in the mouth to remind you that we're talking all hard-boiled, punk.

     So, I've made further progress with "The Long Goodbye" and, true to my dinosaur nature, have been assiduously - not a word you expected to see today - making notes.  Thus - 

FRENCH FITS: Again, a phrase I'd not heard before.  I could have guessed by context, since Philip Marlowe was trying to track down an alcoholic possibly being treated for same.  It means 'Delerium tremens', or the shakes that a chronic wino gets when not on the sauce.  Art!

     I tried to Google and I think the hamsters decided I wanted a 'French outfit'.

NICK THE GREEK: This one took a bit of digging as all I was getting were results about Greek restaurants.  This is the nickname of one Nikolaos Dandolos, who was a professional gambler, and a Philosophy graduate.  He made and lost immense sums of money, because - gambling.  Phil's sour comment - does he have any other? - was that he'd have as much luck finding the missing wino and beating Nick the Greek at a crap game.  Art!

RIMLESS CHEATERS: Plural, so possibly spectacles or shoes.  Conrad is famously and fabulously ignorant of anything to do with fashion, so they could well be shoes.  Doctor Loring was wearing them, if that helps.  Art!

     Glasses.  I see.  Well, except not really.  One can see why ''Rimless" but where does the 'Cheater' part come in?  I'm typing this on my lunch-break so don't really have time to dig very deep on this.  It seems to be an old nickname for spectacles, and that's all he wrote.

"The War Illustrated Edition 190"

We're coming to the end of the pictures I selected from this issue, dated September 1944, which may be good news, or bad.  Only you can tell!  Art?

     Another of their faux 'coloured' endpieces, which I think are done by an assistant with a paintbrush and a pot of sienna paint.  

     What's the take-away from this picture?  Only that this column of armour has absolutely no fear of air attack or artillery barrage, or they wouldn't be bunched up nose-to-tail.  Recall the last picture on yesteryon's blog, where bunched Teuton transport had been caught nose-to-tail, and severely punished for it.  

     This is the rather dangerous liberation of Paris, where there were odd groups of Teuton stragglers about, trying to get out of Dodge before they got lynched, and Teuton collaborators sniping from rooftops in a state of high dudgeon that their meal-tickets were showing a clean pair of heels.  In upper starboard you can see the panic that ensued once the bullets started flying.  There is no mention of what happened to the snipers in TWI; one does not suppose that they retired to the country on a pension with a dog.

Making It All Wrightson

More of Bernie's artwork, and I still feel clever in tracking down the story first illustrated on the 'Print' website, since they didn't bother with attributions.  Art!

     Well, the title and cover tells you all you need to know about "Swamp Thing".  It's a Thing that lives in a swamp.  Doubtless it would prefer to live in a house with all mod cons, except I doubt Swampy has a stable income and a sound financial background.  Conrad is unsure what the gap-toothed geezer with the gun is up to, either protecting the scarlet lady or threatening her.  Probably the latter.  Which may have made enough of a disturbance to bring Swampy along, to complain about noise pollution.

Just A Citric Twist In The Tale

Conrad was wondering yesterday afternoon how the Trump Media & Technology Group's shares were doing, except that I think the South Canadian stock-markets only open mid-afternoon here in This Sceptred Isle, so there were no Monday updates available.

     Fortunately for all those interested in mockery and humiliation, they have now been updated.  Art!

     Looking a bit sick there, pal.  Perhaps you need Nick the Greek to gee up your fortunes.  Let's have a longer time-scale look at this, just to rub extra lemon-juice into the paper cut.  Art!

     It's not looking good.  Tee hee!
     Yes, I'm a terrible person.

Finally -

I think that's enough scrivel for one day.  Farewell!

There Is A Saying

"That Escalated Quickly"

In real life this is not common, as most events have a long preamble before reaching a climax and conclusion.  'Not common' doesn't mean 'never happens' and I hope to illustrate this with stills from a clip on Twitter. 

     Picture the scene.  There you are in your little family car, tooling along the motorway somewhere in Ruffia.  Suddenly -

     The driver who lost a wheel doesn't seem to have noticed it, since at no point do we see a car ahead pulling over.  What the heck, you can manage on only three wheels, right?  Art!

     The next driver slows to a stop, which is not a smart move, because you can guarantee that at least one driver behind you isn't paying attention.  You can see where this is going.  Art!

     Crunch time.  Car Number Four hits Car Number Three which ploughs into the back of Car Number Two which punts Car Number One further up the road.  Two drivers get out and immediately sprint away from the scene.  Strange. What can they be fleeing from?  Art!

     How on earth this happened I have no idea.  Note that Car Number One is safely beyond this mash-up.  Also, off to one side is - Art!

     That stray wheel which started the whole thing off.

     Now onto the meat of the matter, which is another tale from Reddit, which I suspect hails from Australia or New Zealand, because they spell 'Labour' properly yet talk of cents when dealing with coinage and money.  This is another case of things escalating, though nowhere near as quickly as the car crash above.

     Firstly, let us encounter the traditional Bottomhole Boss, Jim.  He ran two franchised donut cafes, and true to form he forced his employees to clock off before counting the money in their tills at close of business.  Art!

     This worked for him until it didn't, because new employee John informed Jim that this was wage theft and he wasn't going to clock off, then continue working.

     Jim, having the words 'Bottomhole Boss' running all the way through him like a stick of rock, promptly fired John.  Can't have the minions getting ideas about fair treatment.

     This proved to be a sticking point for John, because when his last payment went into the bank, it was short by $0.75.

     Cue a call to Labour Standards, which appears to be the Antipodean equivalent of the South Canadian State Labour Board.  One of the things they take an extraordinarily dim view of is wage theft.  Art!

Quiver, Jim, quiver

     Jim refused to pay John his $0.75, so off to court they went.  Jim's trial preparation consisted of forging fake payroll documents to 'prove' he'd paid people correctly.

     This cunning tactic backfired as the employees all turned up with their payslips, proving wage theft.  Ooops.
     In the end, Jim had to pay John the $0.75, at which point John shrugged and gave it to the employee next to him.

     O yes, Jim also had to compensate all the employees he'd stiffed over wages, to the tune of several hundred dollars.  Art!

     A bit of a bite back over $0.75, I think you'll agree.

     It gets worse.  

     Jim had to pay a fine for stiffing his employees, and he had to pay the other party's legal fees.

     It gets worse.  

     Jim was charged with fraud, false documentation and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

     It gets worse.

     CafeDonuts, who Jim franchised his two restaurants from, discovered he had been doing Very Naughty Things, took both restaurants off him and also took him to court.  Jim lost.  He also lost his house, which he had to sell to pay the settlement to CafeDonuts, and his wife, who presumably got fed up to the back teeth with her Bottomhole Boss husband.

     All for about £0.60.

     It took two years for Jim to get back on his feet and running a restaurant again.  He now pays his staff correctly.  Art!

Do nut stiff your employees

The Eggy Yeggy

If you've been taking notes then you'll recall that a 'Yegg' is a safe-cracker in hard-boiled parlance, hence that crack about eggs.  Conrad prefers them soft-boiled when eaten whole, though you have to have the HB version in salads and so forth.

     Let us now continue with the elucidation about communication and what I've picked up from reading "The Long Goodbye".

ARTHUR MURRAY: From context, I think this chap was a dancer, hoofer or choreographer, because Phil was grousing at the boxers on television, who pranced all around the ring without actually, you know, boxing.  Art!

     I was right.  Born Moses Teichman in that part of Ukraine which was Austro-Hungarian, he emigrated to South Canada, changed his name and went into ballroom dancing in a big way.  There is still a chain of dance halls named after him.

BULLDOG PIPE: Rather than smoke cigarettes, like the more common kind of shamus, Phil smokes a pipe, being a bit of a tobacco snob, doncha know.  Conrad knows less about pipes than he does about ballroom dancing.  Art!

     This is a bulldog pipe.  Because it has a square shank and a tapered rim, before you ask.

FLOSSY AGENCY: This concerns the Carne Organisation, a private security company run by the ex-Colonel of Military Police Mister Carne.  It has a big fancy headquarters that costs a lot to run and maintain, and is about as far as it's possible to get from the room-and-reception area of Marlowe's business address.  The name 'Flossy' implies showiness and ostentation, even if all the cell-like rooms in the building are decorated in drabbest grey.

"The War Illustrated Edition 190"

Let's see what Conrad can pontificate about this time.  Art!

     This period was known to the British as "The Great Swan" and was a remarkably swift and prolonged pursuit of the fleeing Teutons, who were desperately trying to put distance between themselves and the Allies.  This meant destroying bridges, an absence that was overcome by boats.  This was a bit of a stopgap measure and later the sappers would be along to lay proper pontoon bridges, as seen in the first three photos.

     The picture at bottom shows the aftermath of an air attack by the Allies on Teuton transport that had collected in a jam whilst getting ready to cross the bridge in the background.  Ooops.

More Macguffin Machinations

I don't know what this is, but doesn't it look exciting!  Art?

     It looks very electronic and digital and professional, whatever it is.

     I'm going to cheat and look at what it is by clicking on the link.  Then I'm not going to tell you, because I'm horrid that way.

     You'll have to take it on trust that I will ever update you.  Tee hee!

Finally  -

I've been stuck in the stuffy old Sekrit Layr all day long, which has felt like three days back-to-back.  I dare not open the door to get any airflow lest Edna decide to run around barking the bark of a four-footed alarm system, which she does several times per day.  It's actually quite pleasant outside, with a cooling breeze, so my plan of action is to hike it down to Lesser Sodom after work finishes in just over an hour's time.  Also fingers crossed that we don't get too many ambulances, what with the window being ajar.

Still On The Boil

To Recap

I have, for the past few weeks, been reading a compilation of three novels by Raymond Chandler, namely "The Big Sleep", "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The Long Goodbye", which are classics in the detective genre, and also absolutely definitive examples of 'Hard-boiled' fiction.  This is stuff where the protagonist not only does not take any nonsense, they are adept at dishing it out with fists, feet, knives, blackjacks or guns.  Especially guns.  They are cynical, worldly and over-fond of alcohol.  Philip Marlowe, Chandler's shamus of choice, indulges in alcohol to an extent that nowadays he'd be seen as an alcoholic.  The tobacco bit is a little more nuanced, as he smokes a pipe by preference.  Art!

An example of a long musical goodbye

     Which is where all these titles about 'Boiling' come in.  I'm not going to whang on about distillation today, and still less about boils, because I can't think of much else that would put an audience off.  If you're still here, congratulations.

     One thing - okay, maybe two - that I'd like to address here is a phrase Phil describes: " - melted ice in a bowl".  Think about it.  If it's melted ice, then it's water.  How can you tell it was ever ice?  If it's not all melted then it's still ice.  Then there's the character 'Roger Wade', an alcoholic - I mean the genuine boozehound who cannot live without imbibing a pint of whisky for breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, late lunch, dinner, supper and any other excuse - author, whom is supposedly a spiteful skit of Raymond Chandler.  Which is a bit puzzling, as Raymond Chandler is the author of TLG.  Authors, hmmm?  What can I say.  Art!

PIPE!  And cat.  But, primarily, pipe.

     So!  Let us continue with my annotations from TLG, which you may look upon as a public service, Conrad doing the hard work so you don't have to.

MOZO: A term used of a member of staff at a rather shabby and down-at-heel Mexican hotel.  Once again, not a word Conrad had ever heard of before.  With a little digging on Google, it turns out to be a servant or housekeeper, which matters because Terry Lennox uses them to pass on a letter to Phil.  Art!

MADISON: A portrait of which was sent by Terry to Phil.  Marlowe, you see, had been diligent in not asking awkward questions about why Terry needed a lift to the airport at Tijuana, because if he didn't know then he wasn't either a material witness or an accomplice.  Art!

     Yes, a 'Madison' is a $5,000 bill, of which Phil reckons there were only about 900 in circulation at the time.  Trying to spend one of these would probably be very difficult, because which kind of business keeps a float of four thousand and five hundred dollars, at the least? and any bank would immediately be verrrrry suspicious about who you are and how you had one of these.  In fact they are so rare there is probably an established paper trail for each and every one.

     Thanks, Terry.

HATTIE CARNEGIE 'CAREER GIRLS SPECIAL': From the context, Conrad suspects this is about fashion, which is a closed book to him.  A bit of digging reveals that Hattie Carnegie was indeed a fashion and clothes designer.  Art!

     Yes yes yes, she designed clothes, that's as much as we need to know here.

MONOGRAM: At one point in the narrative, Ol' Phil - who doesn't age according to the calendar so I'm not sure I should be calling him 'Old' - mentions watching a television programme about crime and detectives.  He finds it risible, stating that the dialogue was so bad " - even Monogram wouldn't have used it."  Art!

     

     Monogram Studios, you see, were one of the 'Poverty Row' studios that made films on a shoestring and thus couldn't afford scripts or scriptwriters of any talent.  They existed alongside other studios such as Republic, Mascot and PRC.  All long gone, to no great regrets.  One supposes that their equivalent nowadays would be the direct-to-DVD market.
     Right, I think that's enough cultural comparisons for one Intro, we shall move swiftly along as I tackle this rather disgusting-looking pizza.  That remaindered halal pastrami has turned black after being baked and then microwaved.

"The War Illustrated Edition 190"

Once again, a caveat.  The photographs that were published in TWI were deliberately not up-to-date, and indeed might be as much as four weeks old.  This was to prevent the enemy from gaining any important tactical information from them.  Whilst the war had been fought in North Africa there was also an element of timing, because negatives had to find their way back home across the Mediterranean and to Perfidious Albion.  Not so with France, where transit to the UK might take only a few hours.  Art!

     This, in response to anyone who thinks the British observe the rules of war as they do with cricket.  Not remotely.  In the upper two photos you can see the 'Lifebuoy' man-portable flamethrower, a horrid little weapon issued to specialist troops for the clearing of fortifications and the like.  The limitations are a relatively short range and only having a certain number of 'shots'.

     Below that, to port you can see one of the Teuton's least favourite weapon-systems of the entire Second Unpleasantness, a Crocodile flame-throwing Churchill tank.  Teuton infantry hated hated hated these things, because they were incredibly hard to stop and the flame-gun had a range of about 120 yards.  This meant all their hand-held anti-tank weapons were outranged.  Ooops.

     To starboard is another weapon the Teuton's grew to hate: a Wasp flamethrower, which was the old Universal Carrier with a double-barrelled flame projector.  The Carrier was up-armoured with extra protection so that it could bear the brunt of an assault.  Art!

More boiling references

     That final photo shows Wasps carrying out an assault, and if you're having trouble making sense out of all the smoke and flame, imagine how the party on the receiving end feels.

     Perfidious Albion is - perfidious.

Well, that item above means no Roy Cross on this blog.

Whilst On That Subject

Conrad noticed an item on the feed that mentioned war films, and I began to wonder how many of them I've seen, how many I actually have in my inordinately large DVD collection, and how many I've not yet seen.  Art!

     I ought to track down my copy of "Brassey's Book Of War Films" which is absolutely magisterial and definitive on the subject, up until the year it was published.  Which was 2000, so it's now 24 years out of date <sighs heavily at the glory of the world passing>.

I Did Warn You

As a contrast to all the text above, allow me to include a picture of the remaindered pizza adorned with remaindered halal pastrami, after being microwaved after being baked in an oven.  Art!

     It tastes about as good as you'd expect, and the only fan of it was Edna, who loitered hopefully in the expectation of a bit of crust.  Art!

     That's the halal pastrami, which I bought and will eat because it was only £0.20 per pack, instead of £2.80.  

Let The Rage Commence!

There have been, apparently, a lot of offended people who were outraged about a recent sporting event's opening, because they deem anything they don't understand at being THE SPAWN OF SATAN, which must include an awful lot of things including quantum mechanics and how a car engine works.  Art!

     This is a whole family turning up to ComicCon 2024 in costume as X-Men.  More power to their elbow, I hope they enjoy it, they're not harming anyone and if you feel critically offended THE EXIT DOOR IS THAT WAY.  

     You do know that there are entire events where men dress up as women and slather on makeup?