Rich here.

As a redhead (what little is left) I have spent a large portion of my life answering questions about red hair. Sometimes it’s about pain tolerance/wound healing (yes, there are genetic differences), but most commonly I get asked if the attitude is genetic or environmental.

You know, the short temper/bad attitude.

Well, here’s a little insight for those of you that lack the double recessive genes.

Yesterday I was out with my 4-year-old daughter. The one with the super red, super curly hair. You ever see Pixar’s Brave? Yeah, they would need bigger computers to model my daughter’s hair, and a movie projector with double the normal color gamut.

In a 2-hour shopping trip, at least 4 people commented on it (quite loudly and directly), and many more stared. I was warned by no less than two probable-grandmothers that I should “watch out for that one… you’ll have your hands full”. There was one “oh my god, what wonderful hair!” and another “how do you like your hair”.

At REI and Costco.

This happens everywhere we go, all the time. My son also has red hair, and we get nearly the same thing, but without the curls it’s not quite as bad. I also have an older daughter without red hair. She gets the “oh, your hair is nice too… please don’t grow up to be a serial killer because random strangers like your sister more”. At least that’s what I hear.

Strangers even come up and start combing their hands through her hair. Strangers. In public. Usually older women. Without asking.

I went through a lot of this myself growing up, but it’s only as an adult, with red-haired kids, that I see how bad it is. I thought I was a bit of an a-hole because, as a boy, I had more than my fair share of fights due to teasing over the hair. Trust me, I’ve heard it all. Yeah, fireball, very funny you —-wad, never heard that one before. I suppose I blocked out how adults react when I tried to buy a camping flashlight with my dad.

Maybe there is a genetic component, but I don’t think scientists could possible come up with a deterministic ethical study to figure it out. And if my oldest, non-red daughter ever shivs you in a Costco, now you’ll know why.

We have been so busy the past few weeks that this week’s Summary is a bit truncated. Travel has really impacted our publishing, sorry.

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  • Mike: Advanced Threat Detection: Not so SIEMple: Aside from the pithy title, Arbor’s blog post does a good job highlighting differences between the kind of analysis SIEM offers and the function of security analytics…
  • Rich: Cloudefigo. This is pretty cool: it’s a cloud security automation project based on some of my previous work. One of the people behind it, Moshe, is one of our better Cloud Security Alliance CCSK instructors.

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