![\"practice10\"](\"https:\/\/c1.staticflickr.com\/3\/2559\/32862058446_ed7daa5f58_m.jpg\")
For the second time in two months, my debit card’s been compromised. Donna picked it up right away: four small charges from Angeles City in the Philippines. I always examine\u00a0card readers\u00a0on gas pumps and ATMs and am pretty sure I haven’t fallen victim to a skimmer. Well, who knows? This time I had to make a crime report to the police and give the bank a case number.<\/p>\n
I thought briefly about going old school, living off\u00a0cash\u00a0the way we all did not that many years ago, but boy does that\u00a0seem like it would be a major inconvenience today. So inconvenient, in fact, I didn’t think about it for more than a minute. I wonder how long it’ll be before the new card’s hacked. Seems like a problem a lot of us are dealing with these days, if comments on Facebook are any indication.<\/p>\n
When I checked Google News early this morning, the half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was dead\u00a0after “falling ill” at the airport in Kuala Lumpur. I figured right away he’d been poisoned. Sure enough, an hour later an updated news report\u00a0said an unidentified woman at the airport sprayed his face with something\u00a0just before he croaked.<\/p>\n
The dead guy is Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un’s older brother. Kim Jong-il, the father,\u00a0had been grooming him to be\u00a0his successor, but in 2003 Kim Jong-nam\u00a0tried to get into Japan on a false passport and has been living in exile\u00a0ever since. The mastermind behind the whole thing\u2014the secret visit to Tokyo Disneyland, the exile, today’s assassination\u2014was probably Kim Jong-un. Gangnam of Thrones, anyone?<\/p>\n
Our elderly friend from Las Vegas paid us another visit this weekend. He’s home now and we’re recovering. His visits are tough on us. Tough on him too, because he’s too feeble to travel, but I suspect the anticipation of coming to see his friends in Tucson keeps him going, and we don’t have the heart to close our house to him. We’ll be there ourselves sooner or later.<\/p>\n
In honor of today’s Hallmark holiday I’m cooking dinner, and Donna gets to choose what to watch on TV tonight. It’s the least I can do after she cleaned up\u00a0the mess our guest left behind.<\/p>\n
Every day we\u00a0lurch closer to a\u00a0Mike Pence presidency, and I wonder if we’ll\u00a0be sorry Trump was too incompetent to hold onto his ill-gained office. I suspect we will\u00a0be. They say\u00a0everyone’s reading Orwell’s “1984” and Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” in an effort to understand the current regime. I think that’s off the mark. We should be watching the Coen Brothers’ movie “Burn After\u00a0Reading” instead,\u00a0plus re-runs of the “I Love Lucy” chocolate factory episode. And of course Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.”<\/p>\n
Sorry for the short post. The kitchen awaits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the second time in two months, my debit card’s been compromised. Donna picked it up right away: four small charges from Angeles City in the Philippines. I always examine\u00a0card readers\u00a0on gas pumps and ATMs and am pretty sure I haven’t fallen victim to a skimmer. Well, who knows? This time I had to make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18,15,10,2,8],"tags":[2243,90,2237,2024],"class_list":["post-20071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-consumerism","category-cooking","category-current-events","category-personal","category-politics","tag-fraud","tag-north-korea","tag-pence","tag-trump"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20071"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20077,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20071\/revisions\/20077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}