Countdown Day 5: Home Security

Folks here take home security seriously, but they mostly kick it old school. For example, barbed wire seems to be the major deterrent of choice. We see it strung up around houses, across windows, laced through shrubbery -- basically wherever someone wants to put a barrier, a no-passing zone.

Barbed wire is fine. Ugly, but effective. My hands-down favorite for it's low-cost and arsty look is the broken-glass-in-cement approach. Take a look at this wall. It looks like a normal wall. Even a happy wall (note the cute mural):

But take a closer look. That cheerful facade sports a line of broken glass embedded in cement that will cut you to pieces snikety-snack if you try to enter this house without being invited:

I have a dream that someday I will live in the middle of nowhere in a house that's off the grid and surrounded by a barbed wire fence and claymore land mines. Given the nanny-state "you-can't-do-that-someone-might-put-an-eye-out" regulations in the U.S., I might just have to retire in China.