BEMUSED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED

As I have often thought life gets odder and odder and my good intentions disappear on a daily basis.  I wake up determined to read the more serious parts of the newspaper and listen to news programmes but my brain quickly closes up (the little brain I have left that is!)  One of the problems with old age is that we seem to have heard it all before, it is just déjà vu all over again!!   Taxes must go up/come down.  Inflation is too high/ too low.   Benefits are too expensive/we’re not paying enough in benefits.    Unemployment is too high/too low.  Private landlords are the devil/we haven’t got enough of them.  Interest rates are going up/coming down.   Is it any wonder that my mind wanders towards the weirdness of people and the baser things in life.   There is nothing I can do about any of these things though I suppose that if stories made my blood boil it might save on the heating.

I make no apology for reproducing this email in full.  Possibly there are people who would be scared by receiving it but as none of it makes one iota of sense and although it is fairly literate – even if I am quite confused as to what they mean about ‘installing an exploit on one of my devices and in my pedantic op[inion they should have written re-sent and not resent – it has not worried me one jot.   However here it is for your information/amusement/edification – take your pick

!

Here it is!

Hello,

We wrote you an email some time ago, but you seem to have ignored it, so we resent it to you.

We are the ShinyHunters hacking group.

A few months ago, we gained access to your devices and started monitoring your online activities.

What happened:

We gained access to the CarGurus database where you have an account and easily accessed your email.

You weren’t very careful about the links you opened.

A week later, we installed an exploit on your devices, including your phone, giving us access to your microphone,

camera, keyboard, and all your data.

We have your documents, photos, browsing history, conversations, and contact list.

Among other things, we discovered that you visit adult websites and watch explicit videos.

We managed to record you and created videos of you pleasuring yourself.

With a few clicks, we can share these videos with your friends,

colleagues, and family or even make them public.

Proposal:

Send us $2000 in Litecoin (search online how to buy) to the following wallet:

ltc1qjx4hzpqemclesyfvmm08gxutfe5hauezj3tr6j

We’ll delete everything immediately.

You have 48 hours from the moment you open this email.

Once the payment is received, we’ll remove the malware from your devices.

We’ll also remove all your personal information from darkweb for you to be safe from now on.

What you should NOT do:

Do not reply (email was sent from a hacked account).

Do not contact the police or anyone else-we’ll release the videos along with other stuff all over the internet.

Do not try to reset your devices-everything is stored on remote servers.

What you don´t need to worry about:

We will see your payment immediately-the wallet is generated specifically for you.

We will not share your videos or other things after payment-there is no reason to continue causing problems.

You’re not the only one in this situation.

Be smart and cooperate; otherwise, you’re going to regret it.

I have received this in the past, but I have now been sent it again.  Needless to say, I have ignored it but presumably they must have some success or they wouldn’t keep sending the stupid thing out.   I suppose it is possible that there are people out there who have been ‘pleasuring themselves’ as they so charmingly put it, whilst watching an inappropriately named ‘adult movie’, but surely not many of them will actually be aiming their laptop at the business end, as it were, so that the unfortunate viewer would get a full frontal.   I must confess to ignorance about such curious practices so I could well be wrong and that this is a common (and I use the word advisedly) habit but in that case I must have led a much more sheltered life than I realised.

Another thing that caught my eye recently is that our government, presumably unable to find enough worthwhile things to spend our money on, has produced a leaflet to give to illegal immigrants explaining to them that rape is not acceptable behaviour in this country!   I know many of the boat people are fleeing from countries that have an appalling record on human rights but are there any countries in the world where rape is legal?   Of course, there are some grey areas surrounding child marriage and rape within marriage but even so….

Moving on to more pleasant, if slightly odd, things, I have also recently read about Nature-deficit disorder (NDD) which is natural world a non-clinical, conceptual term describing the human costs of being alienated from the .   In other words what we country folk refer to as ‘townies’ who pitch up here and complain about the cockerel crowing in the morning and the smell of muck being spread on the fields.   I can’t help feeling that Stephen Morgan a Labour MP and our Minister for DEFRA must be suffering from this disorder as he fainted when visiting an abattoir.   Presumably it came as a great shock to him that meat actually comes from animals and doesn’t just appear in those neat packages that you find in the supermarket.

To end on a lighter note I was actually trying to listen to a more serious programme about the economy the other day but was totally distracted as one of the experts appeared to be Ru Paul who I believe is an American drag queen.   However I was, sadly, mistaken as it was in fact a woman called Rupal Patel who is an economist with the Bank of England.