And knowing is half the battle.

You totally didn't know! That's why you couldn't act like it.

EXACTLY!

Some kids drove by the dog park on Monday, and stopped to yell "Get a life, losers!" to the people there, including me. It seems like an odd thing to get incensed about.

Anyone who insults someone about any aspect of their looks is a horrible person. Period. There is NEVER a need to insult a stranger like that.

I rarely comment on anyone's moral character unless asked, and even then, I am pretty circumspect!

But Sophia, you also would not bare your all to get onto MTV either, would you? I am sorry to say that dignity is and always has been a rare commodity.

class issue

It's weird, how something almost completely unmoored from raw economics -- the majority of Americans can afford adequate nutrition, all other things being equal -- has turned up with meaning opposite from what it meant when it was moored to economics. When the working class went hungry, fat was a wonderful thing to be. Now that the working class don't go hungry, there's something wrong with that too.

Anyone who insults someone about any aspect of their looks is a horrible person. Period. There is NEVER a need to insult a stranger like that.

Seriously.

I have been known to yell out of my car, but the yells have always consisted of things like "The light's red, idiot" and occasional yells and gestures when trying to tell another driver that he has a flat tire or his coffee cup is on top of the car. There should be univerally agreed on signals for things like that. The only time I mutter things at people in person is to tell them that they're too stupid to live. Then I'm not insulting them for how they look, but for the fact that they have parked their shopping cart crosswise across the aisle and no amount of "excuse mes" will make them move.

You totally didn't know! That's why you couldn't act like it.

BWAH!

This morning on the radio, they were discussing class reunions, and one person e-mailed in her experience at her 20th high school reunion (the first one she'd attended), when she ran into a guy she had been friendly with (but not really friends) back in school. She went up to him and said hi, and right at the beginning of the conversation he said, "Well, you were fat in school then and you're still fat now." She left the party and refuses to go to another reunion ever.

Who the hell says stuff like that to someone?

I don't understand random attacks of malice. I can kind of understand when a person thinks he's been wronged in some way and hits cranky overload, but being verbally assaulted just because I'm standing there? WTF, dude.

This. I've gotten a few verbal drive-by assaults in Salem. Most of the time they don't even slow down enough to make what they are yelling decipherable apart from a few choice swear words (and "faggot" once) and it's almost always guys in a pickup truck or an SUV (and yeah - usually 20-somethings). I've had it happen late at night but more weirdly first thing in the morning. Just getting home from a hard of shooting rats at the dump or something? Those times almost make me laugh out loud at the oddness.

people who want to hurt others and get away with it.

I mean seriously if someone said that to me that I knew AT ALL, they would get "who the fuck says rude shit like that?" and I'd walk away. If I didn't know them, on most days I wouldn't care. If I was caught on a bad day I would engage in screaming insults at them.