I Can Explain This Officer

I'm told that government will be monitoring more of the Internet so that no company will be able to guarantee any privacy. When I heard this I started thinking that everyone should start plotting mayhem so that if the Feebs were going to be reading my private communications, they should read something more interesting than my humdrum life.

However, just because MY life is humdrum, that doesn't mean my writing is humdrum.

Some writing includes depictions of criminality. Oh. That reminds me.

Some years back I was hanging out with a friend who's another writer. I told him a story about a friend who had used a mannikin to scare lovers at the local make-out spot. They'd drive to the make-out spot, pull out the "body" and toss it down the almost precipice--it was a very steep hill.

While I was relating this story, the thought occurred, this could be an interesting premise for a thriller. Some youngsters could toss a mannikin off a cliff to freak out the bystanders. And when their compatriots waiting below retrieve the mannikin they discover a real body. Panicked, they put the body in the trunk of their car.

At this point my friend and I spun a number of things that could be done from this premise. Things like how we'd dispose of the body. Or the DNA evidence left in the trunk of the car and how they'd dispose of the car.

That's the trajectory of all the best Hitchcock films. Someone does one small bad thing, and then numerous bigger and bigger bad things escalate and this makes the heroes lives hellish.

After a few minutes of this discussion, several patrons of the Cottage Bar got up and sought tables more distant from our conversation.

This gave me a big laugh.

Circling back to the Feebs, I'm confident that while they are breaking down the doors of aspiring crime writers, the real terrorists will be exchanging bomb recipes using steganographically encoded messages hidden in cat videos.