Came across this beauty of a news story today. Police: Impersonator pulls over woman, tells her she's beautiful.  Take a second to read it.  It's short.  Don't worry, i'll wait.

See.  I waited.  Now let's see if we had similar experiences reading this tale.

Here was mine:

First thought; great headline.  It's so great, in fact, that i figured they had to have pushed the truth around a little bit to get it to fit the headline.  I mean, that doesn't happen.

But then *bang*.  it happened.  Some guy has a tricked out black car that he put cop lights on.  Now, this in and of itself is not entirely impressive to me.  In high school we had a friend who outfitted his, well, his untricked-out piece of silver metal with a siren and PA system.  Sometimes he pulled people over with just that.  He never did get out of the car though.  The long hair and flannel would have given him away instantly.  Also, the lack of being old enough to be a cop.

So to me, the really impressive thing this guy did was have the coconuts to try and really pull someone over.  On an interstate.  And while i realize completely that this is an insanely stupid thing to do, at this point in the story i still was, overall, on the side of this guy and his cop prank.

"License and Registration".  Those words are where his toes met my line.   It's arbitrary.   But when you take the person's information, you begin stretching the ambiguity between the absurdly hilarious and the pointlessly creepy.    Still, i thought, he needed to do that to keep up the ruse.  If he hadn't asked for her info, it would have been even more suspect.  (and i can tell that it's my personal line because i feel like even this is a rationalization -- the guy could have certainly just said something to the effect of "i just had to pull you over to let you know you are absolutely beautiful" -- and then walked away.  Minimal contact, maximum laugh).

The smile fell completely off my face, however, when i hit this line: "The woman described the man as about 5-feet-10, with a medium build. He was wearing dark jeans, a black shirt, a black hooded sweatshirt and had some type of badge on a chain around his neck and a handgun on his hip, police said."

Annnnnnnd we're way over the line.  spectacularly so.  We are dancing in a neighboring town over a hill and across a bridge, we are so far from that border.   If you are not a police officer (and even if you are, frankly), you have absolutely no right to stop me in my travels and put your firearm a foot away from my face.   Even to tell me im beautiful.   ESPECIALLY to tell me im beautiful.   You should have stuck with the fake badge my man.  I would have been able to forget all about you and your stupid dress-up day.  But you have to roll strapped up to a woman's car.   Go to jail, go directly to jail.

Not forever.  This isn't death penalty bad or anything.  But you need to go away to think about how the value of your life isn't greater in meaning, value, or importance than anyone else's.  The gun makes the whole, potentially edgily humorous prank, into a invasion of privacy, safety, and decency.

I take some solace that, if and when they find you, the fact that you did this on an interstate will increase the penalty exponentially.  Dick-bag.