I love Hinesville. Always have. It’s one of those places that sort of gets under your skin after awhile.

Mostly, I love its people, a diverse group if ever there was one.

And with that in mind, I’ll start with a sentence from a police report in which a woman told a Hinesville police officer someone came to her house and started hollering at her.

"(The woman told the officer the woman who pulled up to her house) said she would kill her and beat her (bleep)."

That’s Hinesville for you. First you get killed, then you get beat up.

Hopefully the woman was kidding, and, as most of us who’ve been around here a while know, those sort of misunderstandings tend to happen in the world’s greatest little city ever built. As a matter of fact, cops here should charge a fee just for referring disputes.

As has long been noted, we’ve got everything Atlanta does, only it’s in a smaller area and fewer people live here to accomplish it.

We’ve also got an infantry division next door if things get too haywire, maybe.

I offer that in jest, but when I was a dumb young artillery soldier stationed at Fort Bragg — Fayette-nam, anyone? — in the mid 1980s, word was some general back in the day got so fed up with the way certain locals were treating his troops he sent the 82nd downtown to let everybody in North Carolina know who had the biggest guns.

I don’t know if that story is true. I do know I were a general, I’d be dangerous.

For starters, I’d give myself my own tank. I’d drive it around town — merrily tailgating, driving slow in the fast lane, fast in the slow lane and not using blinkers at all, just like the locals.

I’d probably do that all the way to Richmond Hill and back at least once a day, my general’s stars shining in the sun while I acknowledged the salutes and pulled my tank out in front of oncoming traffic. And when I stopped to fill it up at Enmark’s, I’d blast loud music from the speakers that I, as a general, would order some poor PFC to install so I could annoy everybody else at the gas station with my great taste in music.

John Prine, the Ramones or John Coltrane. Or Public Enemy. I’m old enough and young enough to still appreciate Public Enemy.

Another one from HPD: A woman reported her husband used her credit to buy a pickup and she was unhappy about that. The woman said she found out while she was up in South Carolina and got a phone call from a Savannah Honda dealership "stating they were running her credit in order to sell her the car she wanted."

She told them she wasn’t buying a car, didn’t want her credit run and that was that.

Except it wasn’t. "She then received several denial notices in the mail from various financial companies stating her credit was run in reference to purchasing a (pickup)."

Then her husband came home in a pickup "that he didn’t previously own," the wife told police. She said she confronted him and he denied it, but his email and phone number were on the finance application. She was told the issue was a personal matter since they were married. Her husband is probably a future president of the United States.

Onward: A man reported somebody stole "his rear third brake light" from his Escalade. Just stole it right off, that rear third brake light.

Now, if I had a tank because I was a general, I’d have the brake lights wired so they’d shock somebody senseless if they tried to steal one. Generals can do that, I suspect.

Finally this from HPD: An officer was patrolling recently near Hardees when the manager waved him down to report someone "claiming to be a detective ...." called him to state that "Hardees owed the government $1,472.09. (The bogus detective) explained that a warrant would be pursued against every employee in that store if he did not receive the money and he would be up there by 0800 hours if it was not paid before then. He also stated he was a federal marshal who would go through Judge Keith Owens to pursue the warrants and the money would need to be paid to a Green Dot card. (The bogus detective) told the (Hardees manager) not to inform anyone else of the situation or the warrants would be pursued."

The manager had the bogus detective on the phone when he flagged down the cop. The manager handed the phone to the cop, who said hello. The bogus detective hung up and then maybe called a Waffle House.

To end this, apropos of nothing, this from Soren Kierkegaard, philospher:

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

Have a good weekend and be safe out there. We survived another week.