Vox Publica

As I start my brand new blog, white and empty, with an infinite number of blank pages to fill up, I can almost smell the glue-like fragrance of a new notebook. It holds so many promises, so many possibilities: wisdom to be acquired and be shared, laughs to be had, serious subjects to be discussed. I just wish it had margins where I could doodle.

It’s this white emptiness, this possibility of doing away with the old and starting afresh with the new, that led me to put away my old blog and start this one instead. It will be similar to the old (now private) one, but with some changes. Musings about my private life, family and conflicts, will be mostly confined to my private blog, and here I hope to write more and better about general issues. I’ll still post my views on books, movies and the like, as well as links to interesting or humorous articles. And there will be song lyrics and musings and quotes. But what makes a new blog, as a new book, so attractive is its promise of the unknown - so perhaps this blog will turn into something else altogether. I hope you will come and see.

Today I received the following spam. It's a re-take on the old Nigerian fax (and later e-mail scam). In that scam, you get a letter from someone who pretends to be a high government or bank official asking you for help (generally access to your bank account) to perpetuate a multiple-million dollar fraud. For your help, you get a percentage of that money, generally a few million. Once you are hooked, they start asking you for money in order to pay fees and bribes and so forth to release the money.

Many people have been scammed and lost thousands and tens of thousand of dollars. Now the scammers have decided to scam them once again - by pretending that they can receive a large payment from the UN for their losses in the previous scam. Of course, there is no such program and no such payment and we can expect they'll have to pay more fees and so forth to give the scammers some money.

I have little sympathy for the victims of the scam - they are stupid, greedy and unethical - but I do find this highly amusing.

BTW, you can usually spot a scam of this type (and others) by looking at the faulty English.

I wish everyone (i.e. the couple of people) who read my blog a very happy Halloween!

I bought Mika a very expensive Wonder Woman costume because for a month all she could talk about was being Wonder Woman. Now she changed her mind and is going to be Belle (a costume she already had). I'd be mad if I didn't expect it.

Camila is going to be a dog, a costume I borrowed from Rosemarie. I'm also taking with me a princess costume (the one she wore last year), in case *she* changes her mind. But it's cold, so I think a dog is better.

I love Halloween myself. We had a party with close friends and it was really fun. But after a month of having the decorations up, I'm ready to take them down. Alas, I don't have many Thanksgiving decorations, but I'll make do.

My god! What a boring blog post!