I had jury duty today and during the lunch break, I walked down to the major mall downtown and came across a pretty anemic Occupy San Diego demonstration on the front steps. There were about twenty-five protestors and forty police officers, complete with a lineup of a dozen or more motorcycles parked in front of the mall entrance.

As I walked up, I threw a thumbs up to one of the guys holding a sign and got a smile -- they looked like a decent group of people, men and women, mixed ages, mostly on the hippy side -- I saw one guitar, several in Rasta braids, lots of Army Surplus couture, etc. As I threw the thumbs up to the guy, I turned toward the mall entrance and came face to face with the police officers there, one of which was looking at me like I was about to start something. I smiled and said, "Wow, we have more police officers here than protestors."

He nodded and said, "As it should be." I kept walking and to his partner, I spun my finger around in the air, indicating the area, and said, "Safest corner in the whole of downtown, right here."

Honestly, the police seemed really on edge and much more tense than the protestors. I was more nervous from them than from the protestors.

Later, in another area of the mall, I heard shouting and looked down from a second floor balcony to see a woman dressed in a maxi dress with a bandana on her head and a guy -- he was the one doing the shouting -- who had taken off his shirt and had someone write a big 99% on his back in Sharpie, and his shorts were hanging down around his lower hips and his very loud underwear were hanging out - like white with some kind of big, orange decoration - and he's holding a sign over his head and he's standing up on a raised flower bed wall and he's shouting at people walking by to go shopping in the mall.

I couldn't hear what he was saying, but by the time I got down to the ground floor -- it was time to get back to court -- the mall security had him back on the sidewalk and had made him put a shirt on and he'd stopped shouting at people and I found myself thinking, yeah, there's the guy that O'Reilly and Beck are holding up as the poster child of the OWS movement.

I can only imagine what Pam and her neighbors are having to put up with in the name of Democracy,

Roxy