…and a partridge in a pear tree.
I can think of one case, just one, where this kind of criteria would have been valid.
Ted Kascyinski, before they cleaned him up for arraignment, was the perfect caricature of a madman. The icon existed long before he was even born; he just happened to match it as exactly as if he were cast by CAA. And the bank staff would have been justified in their suspicion, because AFAIK, he did indeed “not normally go into banks”. He may not have hated money as much as he hated technology, but he avoided anything that made him traceable, as a bank account surely would have. As such, if he’d been in a bank he would almost certainly have been there to plant one of his bombs.
But insanity rarely fits its stereotype so neatly. Neither does evil. I said in a thread last fall that if I had emerged from a coma after 9/11, and was shown that photo of bin Laden, the one where he’s almost smiling and doesn’t look ill yet, I could be induced to believe that he was a patient, peace-loving religious leader who had opposed al Quaeda. And that if I’d been shown a photo of Tim McVeigh not in a prison jumpsuit (also knowing nothing about him or OKC), and told that he was one of the firefighters who ran into the second tower after the first one collapsed, I would have believed that, too.
And the hell of it is, those two couldn’t look less alike, or have less in common. There is no pattern.
Then there’s Ayat al-Akhras, the Palestinian girl who blew herself up in front of an Israeli market. Her picture on the cover of Newsweek doesn’t look like an insane killer - rather, she looks like she could be going to a school dance or something.
Perhaps it’s a misquoting of ‘…people who don’t go into banks normally.’
Perhaps it’s a misquoting of ‘…people who don’t go into banks normally.’
d&r
So, to recap,we have…
Clowns, Engelbert Humperdinck, cabinet members, Quadruple amputees, shut-ins, Michael Jackson, corpses, Movie stars, miserly hermits, bookies, Civil War vets, spazzes, Jeffrey Skilling, dogs, the undead, famous musicians, the Queen and assorted members of her family, little talking babies that have a personal wealth estimated at $1 billion, Survivalists, Bill Gates, people who live in primitive tribes in the Amazon rainforest, vampires (except blood banks), clowns, mermaids, unicorns (visible or otherwise), cartoon characters, human torches, evil dictators, talking animals, wizards, ghouls, zombies, monks, superheroes (except in their ‘normal Joe’ identities), servicemen on active duty overseas, JeffB, Yog-Sothoth, people named ‘Flexoral’, the late Vincent Price, ducks, Cecil Adams, midgets over six feet tall, fictional literary characters, Jesus Christ, foreign heads of state, elves and faeries, pirates, Mesopotamians, monks who’ve taken vows of poverty (see above), mole men, muppets, Sumerian nobles, men dressed as sheep, Wile E. Coyote, aliens from Area 51, graduates of Miskatonic University, silverback mountain gorillas, Lord Crumb, The Beatles, Ivan Renko, Sidd Finch, the Donner Party, Whigs, roundheads, cavaliers, crusaders, gilded age presidents, Mark Twain, enchanted furniture, deep blue, Black people without passports, Mole people (to include mole women), teenage mutant ninja turtles, evil-animated ventriloquist dummies, John Malkevich, Captain Hook, the comatose, satyrs, centaurs, J.D. Salinger, Werewolves (except for Glasswalkers), Sons of Ether, Virtual Adepts, sidhe, wraiths, mummies, Elminster, the Crow, Gandalf, Sauron, celery. members of the Bloomsbury Group, Cato of Utica, the concept of cohesion, Galápagos penguins, Hassidic nuns, Simon Bolivar, bromine, Winnie the Pooh, Klingons, Hamlet, Barney, the Energizer Bunny, people who have bomb shelters and twenty year stockpiles of food, slugs, Ms. Pac-Man, the dead member of Monty Python, alarm clocks, leach fields, Carlson who tried the joy-buzzer handshake on the giant but gentle primates, Carlton the Doorman RIP, the Pope, sesquicentenarians, the Invisible Hand, Vogon Poets, Orange People, toddlers on pogo sticks, the Tooth Fairy, blind aircraft pilots, Ewoks, OG, Mahatma Ghandi, Leonidas P. Smiley, Mexican wrestlers, the Tripods, Garfield and Odie, Rod Serling, residents of the underworld, nuclear pyhsicists in diapers, the Village People, crash test dummies, Roman shock troops, Nietzsche’s “supermen”, Earl Grey, killer robots from Sirius 9 and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.
Good work team - we now have the comprehensive profile we need. One e-mail to the Feds and bank officials can sleep safe at their counters.
MWAP (who could Friday afternoon skive for Ireland)
Oh, great. It’s not just banks now but shopping malls too! Didn’t we just go through this six months ago and nothing happened?
I hope you’re serious. I’ve had my eye out for these individuals all week when banking and haven’t seen a one.
I shall bring the list to the mall with me as well.
oh no!! we forgot the Teletubbies !!!
:EEK: