The Salem Orientalist Society

The other day, while I was on my way to Baltimore in a rainstorm that turned into a sleetstorm, a guy in a house seven or eight doors down from mine shot another guy, didn't hurt him too bad, apparently, but one of the bullets that missed went through the window of the house next door and killed the lady who just happened to be standing in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time. I was walking by the other night, noticing the boarded up window and thinking about how little man is in this world when a silver car with windows too heavily tinted to see into pulled alongside me and drove along for a little bit at the pace I was walking. When they didn't roll down the window and ask how to get to the Lanham-Severn road, I consoled myself that since there were a couple cars coming up behind them, nobody was likely to do anything untoward. And when the other cars caught up, they did have to get out of the way, which they accomplished by speeding up and pulling off to the side where the road widened a couple blocks ahead of me. Then, they made a U-Turn and headed back past me on the other side of the street, and as I was crossing my fingers and saying, "please don't turn back around at the next block, please don't turn back around at the next block, please don't turn back around at the next block," they went down to the next block and made another U-Turn, and drove up to me again, all alone in the dark. So by this time, I'm thinking that this is a little too weird to not do anything about, so I turned and walked up to the nearest house, but instead of driving off like I'd hoped they would, they parked out front. So I opened the screen door, another car came up behind them and tapped on its horn, and they took off. So did I, and that was that. New York City had 539 murders out of 8,115,690 people in 2005, whereas Prince Georges County had 150 out of 722,018, or 1 in every 4813 people vs. 1 in 15,056 for New York - Washington still has us beat with one in 2823 people murdered. Gary, Indiana is still the worst, I think, with one murder for every 1725 people, though it's not really that big of a town.