Junk Mail

Junk schmunk. Quite why I am not allowed to leap down the phone fibreoptics/letter box and tear these bastards limb from limb is beyond me. I would also quite happily eat the livers of the virus spammers and slutbots that infest Twitter, and as for the arsebiscuits who send me offers of large penises (no thanks, my inbox is already full of cocks), why don't they just die? E-mail spam especially pisses me off, because those invites to hook up for local sex and dodgy porn links could be going to a kid for all they know. My filth-filter settings are tighter than a gnats chuff, but this crap still gets through. It's infuriating.

I have a pathological hatred of unsolicited communications of any kind. I don't care if it's posted, emailed, phoned, texted or tweeted at me. I sign up to the TPS, MPS and always tick the do not share details/no further contact box. I share what I want to share. My privacy settings reflect that. 123 people got a giant rocket up their arses when I found my details on their pages, despite locking and hiding various accounts and being ex-ex-ex directory. If I want to share the size of my placenta, I'll post it, but if you call me to ask about it, I will pheeeeeep my antique police whistle at you (if I remember, which is unlikely, but hey. The thought is there).

A company (we'll call them Shite) claiming to be calling on behalf my provider (we'll call them Arse )called my mobile, and asked for me by name to try an hawk me insurance for my ArseBox; As my contact settings are email only, I was furious at this seeming breech of data protection. Googling indicated that Shite are scammers, and subsequent calls and mails with Arse confirmed this for me when they told me that they had never heard of this scampany, and that they were acting illegally. I did ask Arse how Shite could have got my details as A) only Arse had my name/mobile number B) Shite asked for me by name, not by Mrs-Smith-Fishing, and C) all my investigations pointed towards Arse customers only getting called by Shite. I said you either have a serious security breech, or this Shite scampany are blatantly misrepresenting and illegally obtaining details... Arse told me they take security very seriously, and that Shite were acting outside the law, and I should report them to the TPS. 

Duly noted. I have.

When I went to Shite's website to get an address to pass on to Trading Standards, my antivirus flashed up a red warning to tell me it had blocked a serious trojan threat. Nice. So not ONLY do Shite seem to illegally get our details, lie to us about who they are when they bother us and try to scam money out of us, they also have a nasty virus attack dog. Double nice. Which is why I shall be reporting them to the fraud squaddy people and Trading Standards as well. 

You might think I get too wound up by all this. Possibly. It made me spit blood before, due to wasted trees/intrusive telephone calls at fuck'o'clock/invites for sex in my spam folder. Being stalked and harrassed made me dread the phone ringing, or the text alert pinging, or the letterbox flapping even more. But it boils down to several things...

Our home is our castle. That sign on the letterbox that says 'No Junk Mail' means you. Don't think that your brochure of 99p shop quality housewares at Harrods prices isn't unsolicited junk - it is. Especially when I've asked you to not post it again. Your overpriced cosmetics brochure is junkmail, your junkFOOD menus are junkmail, and you may also NOT ring my bell to try and sell me your religion or ask me for my bank details to save the doggies. (Much less give me crap when I say "no thank you". I support the charities I want to support, not the ones some cock in a tabard chuggers me for) Our homes are our castles and I often wish we were still allowed to chuck boiling oil over the ramparts. Companies and charities that invade me get to go on my eternal shitlist.

I hate phone calls. Signing up to the TPS has cut most of them, but the amount of companies who disregard this is rising, and they are breaking the law in doing so. When the phone rings at stupid'o'clock as well as panicking that Batesy has found me, I also get terrified that something awful has happened to a loved one. I'm TPS and ex-ex-ex directory so I don't get this crap. Who the funting cuck do you think you are to circumvent this?

Elderly and infirm people are being conned and scammed by these telemarketeers, and sometimes hounded and harrassed. Is that right? Is it right that our grandparents are being terrified by the sound of the phone because these slimy soul sucking scam bastards won't leave them alone? Various charities and organisations don't think so. The government shouldn't think so either, and should ban all forms of unsolicited calling, and make NOT sharing details the default. And charities aren't innocent - I know of several vulnerable people who have been pressured by all the mailshots and end up living in poverty because of all their charity DDs.

The electoral roll. I'm sorry, but how is it right that any company, for any reason, can target you via the edited electoral roll THAT THEY BUY? Do you know about the 'edited' electoral roll? Or that you can opt out of appearing on  it? How is that acceptable? Why aren't we kicking arse about this? Because the more you look into it, the more shitty it gets.

If you STILL aren't as furious as I am about all this then just think on this;

If these people are able to get hold of names and numbers, with or without you taking steps to prevent it - then what other personal details of yours are they getting?

Celebrity Death Match

Firstly - I do not give a flying poo about celebrity and the cult thereof. That means I don't give a shit about which shoes go with which overpriced knickers either. I give not a toss who is shagging who, or which z-list reality show cock is banned from which cockwanky nightclub for being a mentalist tosspot. See? I am Sleb&Fashion-free. I spit on the OK! magazine! I piss on Hello! I wonder why people would pay too much money to find out what overpriced house which overpaid...person has added to their menagerie this week. Depressing on so many levels. 

Equally, when a person of note dies, my heart sinks. Do not get me wrong; I feel compassion for their loved ones who will be feeling the intolerable loss, I do. And when they are relatively young, all that potential gone, that is especially horrible. But. When a celebrity dies, out come the horrible, stupid and repetetive non-jokes. And the competetive fawning. And the never-ending airing of their greatest hits or films or matches. And GAAAD it drives me mad.

I usually say nothing on social network sites. I don't like to RIP someone who I didn't give a monkeys about in their day-today life; it seems oddly disrespectful to my oddly-wired brain to suddenly care because they've died. Anyone who knows me knows I am allergic to several notable ones who have passed on, and would know  I was being a hypocrite of the highest order. So I try to say nothing, and certainly won't type a 140 character eulogy just to fit in.

Then the way the media presume the whole bloody world is as obsessed with celebrity as they are, and play endless variations of songs that always made me want to defenestrate the radio and suddenly anger me even more because it's like enforced mourning or a competition to see which radio station or TV channel can be the most 'mourny', when pre-death they often gave less of a shit that even I did. It's sickening on levels I can't even explain.

Children are starving to death, or being murdered by genocidal/deluded pisswads, or dying of godawful diseases every day, generally un-noticed by a celebrity obsessed media. Babies dying of cancer, children being forced into atrocity. And in general there's a media silence. No across-Twitter RIPs for the women and children brutalised in the Congo. No sickly-sweet eulogising for the people trafficked for their sex or their vital organs. No constant replays to raise funds and awareness for cancers that kill as many people today as they did sixty years ago. But a celebrity dies and we are expected to stand still. I do NOT disrespect their death - but I DO disrespect the media hyperbole that spins up. I loathe it, in fact. If as much airtime and newsprint was used to raise awareness of the other deaths, maybe things might change in a small way.

But worst of all, the very worst, are the disgusting 'jokes' that suddenly surface. I don't care if someone was a deluded dictator or an international Diva or a PeoplesPrincess - somebody loves them, and somebody is hurting so much at the loss of their loved one. To see or hear grotesque jokes at their lost ones expense must be like a kick in the heart. Why do people do it? Or even think they're the first one to bloody tell it?

So no, I will not join in the celebrity mourn-fests. And I will switch off the radio as soon as the first bars of that Dolly Parton song come on. But equally so, I will not laugh at jokes, or boggle at theories surrounding their deaths (I'm looking at YOU, DailyFail). But I do acknowledge that great talents have passed, and feel for those left behind.

But I won't wear sackcloth and ashes because a tabloid tells me to.