[. . .]

No, what real men truly fear is, of course, unfathomably insane levels of gut-wrenching, eyeball-gouging, unicorn-in-a-rainbow girly-girl cuteness, particularly in the form of a tiny insidious white-faced feline cartoon character rumored to have been scientifically designed by encephalitic rat-demons in nefarious underground torture labs to turn Japanese schoolgirls into giggly murderous sociopaths and drive the rest of the world utterly insane with its menacing mouthless meta-cuteness, its sour-urine scent of pure evil, its global status as the Terror That Will Not Die.

We speak, quite naturally, of Hello Kitty, perhaps the most unspeakably evil icon of horrific cuteness since that time My Little Pony and Smurfette had a dirty threesome with a Cabbage Patch Kid at Circus Circus back in '98, resulting in a mutant bastard offspring so repulsively adorable the U.S. government must now keep it locked away in an ironclad Area 51 bunker lest humans see it and instantly explode into bloody piles of candy canes and glitter and 2 billion pink Swarovski crystals.

Ah, Hello Kitty. You look into those tiny, black, wide-set eye dots, those razor-blade whiskers, that blank, oval, impassive face topped with a nuclear pink bow and you see the roughly countless ridiculous spin-off products, and you want to reach deep into your own throat and rip out your esophagus as you rub yourself all over with a spasmodic nail gun just to counter the thing's uber-saccharine ooze. It's just that kind of cute. This is why Thai cop management has apparently instituted a particularly brilliant, deeply inhumane new punishment for "bad" cops on the force. Seems that for any sort of infraction - illegal parking, littering, killing an innocent bystander in a prostitution-ring drug bust - Thai officers now must endure the ultimate punishment: the wearing of a bright pink Hello Kitty armband around the station house.

[More, of course]