This is another of my multitude of hats. It has a story behind it. I wore this hat at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Originally, it was unadorned (except for the hat band). When I got to Atlanta I discovered that people were buying, selling, and swapping Olympic pins by the billions; every sponsor, every national team, every bozo who bought a product license, and some who didn't were selling, and everyone was buying. I snorted and what a silly custom it was and laughed at people walking around with pins stuck on sashes, shirts, shorts, bags, whatever. Well, I decided I ought to buy one or two pins as souvenirs. By the time I started back home after the Olympics closed, I had spent something like $200-300 *just* on pins (not counting all sorts of other stuff. :( Anyway, as I accumulated pins, I just pinned them to my hat. After a couple of days I seemed to be having headaches that I couldn't explain. It took a friend to observe that my pins seemed to be depressing the hat. Sure enough, I looked and realized that I had fifty or more pins bearing down on my scalp, and my skull looked like a bad country road -- riddled with little depressions. Duh!!

Anyway, this is the hat. I have sent a letter to the CIA suggesting this as a new way to extract information out of detainees -- or at least giving them headaches.

Another version of this:




Another SP Photo - no torture hat.