Scarlett Fever

I wanted to post a new entry much sooner than this – really, I did.  When we rolled into the New Year I was revolved….or was I resolved?...........I was determined to make this a “year of writing”.  Alas, these first two weeks of the year have been brimming with an unexplained phenomena:  I have stunningly discovered that someone somewhere plays basketball against someone somewhere every single night, and my television shows these incredible happenstances every single night.  Amazing.  Oh sure, I could write a bit at halftime or find a spare half-hour before tip-off to construct a sentence or two, but a separate phenomena has made me wary of even thinking about journeying into the Interweb.  Folks, I have had myself a close encounter of the technological kind.

It was a dark and stormy night…..actually it was too darn dark to tell if it was stormy, so we’ll just go with a dark night (you have no idea how much I want to make a Batman reference here).  Time: very late.  Location:  parents’ living room.  Not having Internet access at my own home makes me doubly addicted to roaming the web when I stay at my folks’.  This being the final night of my Christmas vacation stay I was cramming in some final visits to my favorite sights.  As the clock rolled past midnight into the second day of 2016 I settled into ESPN’s website to get a final recap of this day’s sports action and a preview of what was on tap for the next.

After checking scores ranging from college football to international ping pong I clicked on a link to read about the 25 most rewatchable movies of all time because, you know, that’s obviously a topic that belongs on an all-sports website.  (Interesting side note:  I’ve watched all 25 of those movies at least four times each; none of them should have qualified for a rewatchable list.)  As I finished reading about movie #25 I noticed a link to “hilarious unplanned photos”, so I clicked another step deeper into the webyrinth.  These photos certainly seemed unplanned but the term “hilarious” was stretching the truth a bit.  My waning attention was quickly aroused by Scarlett Johansson looking at me from the sidebar of the screen.  Without reading the accompanying text I clicked on her picture because, you know, it was Scarlett Johansson.  Read the text, people…..read the text!!!

This link turned out to be “75 of the hottest screen moments from 75 hot actresses”.  I immediately clicked out of this site….after giving careful consideration to the accuracy of all 75 moments on the list (well done!)….and was greeted with a pop-up window telling me I was under attack from an enemy force known as Malware.  My only option for survival was to dial a phone number and beg for mercy, but it was friggin’ 2 a.m.; there was no way I was gonna start making phone calls at 2 a.m.  Then a voice from beyond…a female voice…NOT Scarlett’s voice…urged me to call the number.  She meant business, telling me that if I didn’t call the number I would be hacked to death the next time I tried shopping online.  With cold sweat on my forehead and tears rolling down my cheeks I did a combination forcequit/logout/shutdown, went to bed, and hid under the covers.

After confessing my sins to my tech goddess at school I was relieved to find out nothing evil had happened, or would happen, to my computer or myself.  Apparently I had fallen victim to a phishing scam, which was terribly ironic after all of the hours I had spent that week sitting in a fish house on various lakes.

I return to the world of the web with some lessons learned from that frightening chain of decisions:

**There is nowhere safe on the Internet after midnight.

**When visiting a sports site, stick to the sports articles.

**Scarlett is not my color.