The Road to Hell

This is what a school should look like - a place of life and learning - not guns and death.

I've been resisting posting about Sandy Hook.

It's so sad, so predictable, and so American. Violence is as American as apple pie.

But a comment on a blog has forced me into it. Someone is seriously and earnestly advocating arming teachers as a solution to the problem of school massacres.

Admittedly, this suggestion was made by someone living across the Pacific. I'd hope no Australian would have such a tenuous grip on reality to promote it.

Can you imagine it? A school full of armed teachers? Armed with what? Glocks, perhaps, or Brownings?

I can see it now. Range practice after school - annual skill and safety checks - the establishment of secure school armouries. The janitor groundsman could double as the school armourer. There'd be an issue of ammo every morning on parade. All weapons would have to be cleared and handed in at day's end.

The arms industry would make (excuse the pun) a killing. The contracts would be lucrative and attractive.

Murphy's Law would hold, of course. Imagine what could go wrong. Teacher carelessly mislays his/her weapon - it gets picked up by one of the school's more crazy students. Don't laugh - there's a constant percentage of psychopaths in every school. You'd only need one.

Or perhaps there's a break-in at the armoury. Twenty or so Brownings (or Glocks) are let loose in the criminal community.

Or perhaps a teacher finally succumbs to the many pressures of the job and barricades himself/herself in a classroom holding twenty-five kids hostage.

If it can happen, it will happen.

The fact that this lunacy could even be considered is a pretty clear indication of the problem stateside. Gun violence is so embedded in their culture that it's seen as a solution rather than a problem.

It takes a particular kind of delusional view of the world to come up with this train of thought.

 What's next?

I give it a week or two until they come up with a new solution.

I can hear it now. Lower the age of conceal carry to five.

That way the grade oners can look after themselves.

Bizarre? Don't bet on it.

We are talking about the NRA, after all.

And the tragedy itself?

I find it profoundly unsettling to think about what the children and staff at that school have been through. It has triggered memories I’d rather forget. On three occasions in my over 40 years in schools, firearms as a threat were in the picture.

Twice the threats were verbal, but on one occasion there was a real physical threat. A father came to the school with a rifle in his car. I managed it by sitting down when the perpetrator came into my office. It seemed a better idea than standing up. I was unable to get him to take a seat, but eventually he ran out of grief and left.

I say “ran out of grief”, because it was grief that was driving his rage.

He came back next day and apologised. I didn’t contact the police. Perhaps I should have. The weapon was legal.

It did give me an insight into the feeling of sheer helplessness you experience when you’re placed in the position of being responsible for the safety of a group of children, but lack any means to do anything about it.

But arming teachers is not the solution. It would be a short cut to hell.

Scamming the Scammers

Cobbled up licence

I had a recent encounter with a scammer, so am passing on my experience to you, dear reader.

It may be instructive.

There was never any risk that I’d part with any of my hard-earned, but he/she/it stuffed me around a little.

It was a fairly basic scam, and one that’s been around for a while, but it must work occasionally.

I advertised a car for sale. One of the responses to my ad was via a text message which asked me for my email address. I sent it, and received a series of emails from a “Toby Johnson”.

This “Toby Johnson” asked some reasonable questions about the vehicle, which I answered, apparently to his satisfaction, as he offered to buy it.

There was just one small problem. Poor “Toby” was out of mobile range (funny that, since he’d initially texted me) on a boat offshore from Darwin. On account of which the only way he could contact me was via email. Being stuck away from civilisation was preventing him from accessing a transit depot or any other conventional means of collecting the vehicle.

I was apparently supposed to be sympathetic. Poor “Toby” had a tough gig.

But “Toby” was resourceful.

He found a “courier” whom for a fee (a neat $2850) would do all the hard stuff.

This courier person would arrange for the vehicle to be shipped to Darwin, cleaned and detailed, and made available to old mate when he was finally free to escape his enforced maritime isolation, whereupon he would drive his newly acquired vehicle back to Victoria. (Williamstown to be precise).

“Toby” sent me a picture of his driver’s licence to establish his bona fides. If I hadn’t been suspicious before, one look at this “driver’s licence” confirmed my belief that this was a scammer.

The person depicted looked more than a little dodgy, and had aged remarkably well for his 47 years as indicated on the licence.

Anyhow, I started to prevaricate, offering to drive the car to Darwin, provided he sent me some dosh for fuel, accommodation, and a return air fare, although by this time, I was almost sure that all was not as it seemed.

I even made a counter proposal – trucking the car north for about half of what this “courier” was charging.

“Toby” was having none of it – accusing me at one point of “stuffing” him around. I resisted the temptation to point out that after two years in the army, I’d been stuffed around by experts, and based on this experience I knew my efforts weren’t in that league.

I sent him some fictitious bank details, so he could lodge the payment for the car in my “bank account”.

Next thing, an authentic looking email arrived from purporting to be from PayPal indicating that the funds for the car had been transferred into my “bank account”.  It had the PayPal logo and mimicked the PayPal format.

Then came the kicker. The funds couldn’t be released until I lodged $2850 with an address in the UK via Western Union.

As “Toby” very kindly pointed out, any Australian Post Office will do the transaction. He even offered to add an additional $100 to speed the business on. All I had to do was send the $2850 to the UK address, and all would be well.

The funds would be “released” into my bank account, the “courier” would magically appear, and the car would be whisked north.

By this time, I was beginning to enjoy the little game, so I sent him an email telling him that I’d be very happy to comply once the funds appeared in my “bank account”.

This was unlikely, given that it was fictitious, but hey, two could play at this game.

Toby’s grasp of the English language was, to say the least, a little eccentric. Some examples –

I want to know your reason for selling the Vehicle and also let me know if there's any finance plan on it, I'm willing to pay $14,800 and i will be glad if you sell it to me. I will be delighted if you remove the AD online and consider me as your favourite buyer by ignoring all other offers.
I promise to take care of the Vehicle even more than you have done in the past, let me know if my offer is good enough to be the next owner.
Toby.

And

I won't be able to come over with cash or mail a cheque because presently, i'm working away in Darwin on a research project but i have equally arranged the courier agent that will come for the pick up, transfer of ownership but this will be after i have made payment to you.
Kindly send me your bank details as i'm ready to transfer the money into your bank account.
Kind Regards,
Toby.

And

I will appreciate if you understand my situation here as i'm away out of town and that i'm serious in buying this car. I have attached a copy of my licence for you to see how serious i'm on this, please send me your details as i'm ready to buy off the vehicle from you.
Kind Regards,
Toby.

And when he was stroppy –

I'm here on my boat and i need the car to be on ground once i'm back to town as i will be needing it to move around and transport myself back to Victoria. If you cannot self to me this way then good luck as i hate to be stuffed around and it's pretty looking like such.

He obviously was asleep in school when the lesson about the upper case personal pronoun was taught.

Anyhow, I kept stalling and offering excuses, all the time building a file of material which has been handed to the local plod. They seemed quite interested, although I was told that there are literally hundreds of these scams, and tracing them is difficult.

Why me?

Probably because in the ad I used a sales pitch that I was too old to get in and out of the vehicle. This is complete bunkum, but it may have created the impression of an easily scammed old dodderer.

The bottom line is – never part with any of your hard-earned on the strength of any email, no matter how authentic it looks.

This character’s effort was amateurish, but it must work occasionally, or it wouldn’t be worth his time.

By the way, if you want to have fun with a scammer, this site is helpful.

Update - They're still at it.

Since this was posted, I've received the following texts -
From - leonme44@gmail.com - Hello seller Do you still have the listed AD(car) on drive.com.au for sale? get back to me.
From - pat.crs1102@gmail.com - Hello ,is your car advert still available for sale and what your firm selling price ? contact me
From - poliver46@gmail.com - I will like to know if your car is still available and to know the firm price, please get back to me
I replied to each saying I would only negotiate personally or by direct phone contact. There was no response of course.
Each of these is obviously a scam. Why would you text a seller when you have his phone number and could call? In addition, their use of English is clunky and characteristic of someone who is not fluent, meaning they're probably offshore.
I don't know who is thicker - these spivs who are dumb enough to think someone would actually fall for this, and those who actually do.
The sad story is, some must be taken in, otherwise the scammers wouldn't continue to try their ripoffs.

 

Those Mad Russkies

Regulations about low flying appear to be fairly lax in the Russian Federation.

Hard to tell, but it looks like an SU 24.

I reckon you would have been able to smell the avtur.

He was certainly Russian somewhere.......

Thanks Brendan.

The American Right & Disability

Nothing reveals so clearly the moral bankruptcy of the American Right as the Republican Party’s stance on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

In this single action, paranoia trumps compassion, common sense yields to cynicism, and hope gives way to fear.

To quote from the report - Supporters (of the legislation) dismissed those fears as paranoid, noting that the treaty would change nothing in U.S. law without further approval from Congress.

It has nothing to do with reality – it’s all about seeming and posturing.

When seeming and posturing is more important than the rights of the most vulnerable in the community, you know you have a problem.

Looking at the map, it puts the Yanks in interesting company.

With this decision, their colour is now red (not signed).

Rate of Groth

The Australian has coined a new term to describe stuff happening in the economy.

Well, that's consistent.

It's about as creative as most of what else appears in Murdoch's Pravda.

Update - 
They've fixed it. Spoilsports.

Rejoice

Soon it will be Christmas.

That's not why I posted this.

Ii's my favourite Carol. Hat tip to my music teacher sister who remimded me about it.

An Embarrassment of Itches

Perhaps I’ve been lucky, but I haven’t had much to do with the medical profession.

I’ve only been hospitalised once (to have my tonsils and adenoids removed when I was five) so my encounters with members of the profession have usually been related to issues with other family members.

I also have a brother who is a GP and a niece who works as a paediatric registrar, so there is a different sort of family connection.

Today, however, I had to see a dermatologist as my GP had referred me because of a mysterious rash and a couple of lesions on my back he wasn’t happy about.

Apparently the specialisation of dermatology is prized amongst medicos. When I asked my brother about this he said simply – “Nobody calls you at 2am because they’re worried about bad skin. Fair enough….

Turns out the lesions were quite benign (frozen off with some sore of weird hand-held contraption), but I’ve been inflicted with something called Grover’s Disease in the form of a rash on my back and trunk that itches something fierce.

Getting this diagnosed was a fascinating experience. I was ushered into a treatment room which contained only one item of furniture (besides the doctor’s desk and chair) – a height adjustable plinth. I became intimately familiar with this item of equipment because I was left unaccompanied for about 15 minutes waiting the arrival of the Dermatologist.

I was at the point of rolling the doctor’s chair out from behind the desk to sit in it because the plinth was not exactly comfortable – there was no other chair in the room – when a nurse type person wafted in and asked me all manner of questions.

That was the first wave.

Next came two people, both female, and wearing the same uniform as the first one.

They were the second wave.

One I think was an intern, and she asked me to remove my shirt and lie face down on the plinth. 

For reasons unknown, another slightly shorter wait transpired before the actual Dermatologist arrived. Perhaps I was being vetted to make absolutely sure that I was actually worthy of the attention of this rare and esteemed person – an actual real live specialist.

He breezed, rather than wafted in, although he was also wearing the corporate garb also. Then followed a series of events straight out of the Doctor movies.

He proceeded to give a tentative verbal diagnosis complete with history, pathology and prognosis. It was thorough, but it was directed at the intern, not at me. It sounded like a tutorial, and also like I was simply an interesting exhibit, not a living breathing patient. Being discussed in the third person in your own presence is a weird experience.

This was given in a completely hands-off fashion. He didn’t actually touch any part of my anatomy during the examination. Perhaps he’s had bad experiences with contagion.

He explained that Grover’s disease was not named after the Sesame St character that lived in the rubbish bin, but was indeed called after the doctor who discovered and described it. Given that this Dr Grover never did work out caused it, or what the cure is, I wonder why he was considered worthy of naming rights.

I was told is it benign and self limiting. I think this means it won’t kill you, and eventually clears up all by itself. This is comforting, but less comforting was the information that it can hang around for 12 months or more.

12 months of excruciating itch – not fun.

Anyway, the specialist breezed out again after prescribing two different topical (no – nothing to do with news – not that sort of “topical”) products, and I thought we were done.

Not so.

The intern announced that she was going to remove 4mm of skin from my back for a biopsy. Obviously, the specialist wasn’t totally confident with his diagnosis. This procedure took a little bit of time, as a local anaesthetic was necessary, and also cost $86.20.

I know that because it was on the invoice.

So I ended up with my wallet lighter by a total of $300, a hole in my back, and some not-so-good news.

The sight of the specialist’s Bentley Continental Coupe in the doctor’s car park did nothing to lighten my mood. Reflecting that f I had just contributed half the cost of a new tyre to his favourite set of wheels didn't help..

I wonder if you need a thick skin to become a Dermatologist?

Update - 

Received the results of the biopsy. It's not Grover's disease, but a rash called pityriasis rosea. I doagnosed this myself and told my GP. He didn't believe me and sent me off to the specialist. I reckon I should get my money back.