Well, yes, that sort of thing does tend to happen around me, too, Friend Fat. But the proportion of nutters to normal humans is actually quite low.

The ones I find truly hard to take are the nice middle-aged women who don't travel much so they plunk themselves down next to me in airports and then start telling me about attending their brother's third wedding even though they really liked his first wife but he divorced her anyway and then married a trophy wife who cheated on him so he had to divorce her too. Or the nice men in restaurants who need to tell me about their chemo treatments, or the chatty fellows on the train who hear my Canadian accent (so flatly obvious in Europe) and insist on sharing the details of their travels in America.

These folks usually ignore Edmund. I guess he looks too sternly masculine, or perhaps masculinely stern.

Bruce, I feel for you; really, I do. You probably have a cute blond alter ego or astral projection that keeps its pockets full of carrots for the horses no one else can get near and sardines for the cats and skunks who normally have the common sense to avoid people. No amount of curmugeonly public mumbling will offset that kind of irresistibility, so you should probably just get used to it.