PurpleCar

Just don't open the email.

You know the email. It goes along the lines of the urban legends we told each other as teens. Masked man in the back of the car (because naturally, you wouldn’t notice a MAN in the back seat of a Corolla). Delivery van full of poison, don’t open your packages.  Whatever the flavor of the week was, you heard it.  Now, instead of around a fire on a camping trip, these tales are delivered right to your inbox. Lovely.

The internet spreads so much fear. Even once my neighborhood knew the following report was false, they conceded that perhaps it is best for us to be wary of the real dangers the false story presented. Basically, they were warning each other to be aware of something that isn’t there, just to “be safe.” Well, that safety comes with a cost.

See, that’s the rub. This type of fear isn’t free. By vowing to “stay alert” at the level of an MI-6 assassin, you overlook the real petty crime that may hurt you, you give away your sense of safety and community, and you stress yourself and others out to the point that they doubt their very useful gut instincts. (These are the very gut instincts, by the way, that you need to keep you safe when something truly dangerous is going down. We don’t want to learn to ignore them.)

Yes, violent crime happens. Protect yourself. Learn when and what type of crime happens in your neighborhood and the places you frequent. Take a self-defense class. Sending around sensationalistic urban rumors won’t do crap in protecting you from what crime you more likely will face. Depending on where you live, you should probably concentrate on how not to get your purse snatched or your vehicle broken into instead of giving yourself hyper-xenophobia and a false sense of bravado because you “know” what can happen in a Target parking lot.

Why am I bringing this to your attention now? Today this email was sent to a Yahoo group I belong to. It has over 100 members of my neighborhood in it. I wanted to share this exchange with you to remind you that this type of fear isn’t free. Think twice before you mindlessly forward it on and pat yourself on the back for keeping people “safe.” It degrades community and actually supports an environment where even more violent crime will flourish. We only have each other; distancing ourselves from our neighbors isn’t the answer.

Here’s the whole exchange. Please share this widely. Let’s breed community, not crime.

My Mom sent this to me — it’s a legit story from Illinois (verified on Snopes) but who knows if it could happen here… be careful!

A new way to abduct a female . This is very scary!

Please pass on to all your girlfriends, wives, etc.
Just to be on the safe side. Please be aware and pass it on to anyone you think this will help.

Sunday afternoon around 5 PM I headed into the Target in Wheaton, IL
where crime is VERY RARE and mostly it is with bikes being stolen!!
It was still light outside and I parked fairly close to the entrance.
As I got out of my car and began walking towards Target, an older lady shouted to me
from the passenger seat of a car about 30 feet away from me.

“Ma’am you must help me, help me please, help me Ma’am!”
I looked at her in the eyes and started to walk towards her when all of a sudden
I remembered an email my Mom had sent me a week or two ago about rapists and abductions
using elderly people to lure women in.

I paused, memorized the license plate and immediately headed into Target to get a manager
to come help this lady, just in case something was up.
While the woman manager headed out there, I kept a close watch just because I was curious
what was wrong with the lady an wanted to be sure nothing happened.

As the Target lady walked up towards the car and got very close to the old woman in order to help her,
the back door of the car flies open and a large man with a stocking cap on, jumps out and sticks a gun to the lady’s stomach as he shoves her into the back of the car.

I yelled out “call 911” several times and just as I was saying that, a policeman who happened to be on the other side of the parking lot!   And who, luckily had seen the entire thing happen, raced over to the car.

He was able to stop the car and arrest the male as well as the old lady, who was involved in the scheme.
By God’s grace everyone was all right, including my self, although I think we were both shaken up.

Like many of you, I would not in a million years have left an elderly person who was yelling for help if it weren’t for the e-mail I had read last week. So, I wanted to pass this along so you all can be aware and remember that you really can’t trust anyone these days.

You just never know when something like this could happen. I would have never dreamed it to happen to m e especially on a Sunday afternoon at a Target in a safe area!

It definitely was not a coincidence that my Mom sent that email just a few days before this all happened. Please, be careful and always be aware of your surroundings.

Just because you individually don’t go over to help someone doesn’t mean you have to leave them in trouble, but don’t go ALONE, you really don’t know what might be going on.

This was checked with Snopes.com http://snopes.com/ – this is true – and they also use children to lure the victim !!

Thankfully a second member posted a reply to this message, quickly stating that it was a false rumor that was, in fact, chronicled on Snopes.com:

actually, i just checked snopes http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/wheaton.asp
and it said this was false!
it always pays to check yourself – but it maybe also pay to follow the advice of this email anyway.

This is great, of course. But I had to take issue with the last statement that perhaps the false advice to good to follow anyway. That kind of thinking comes a price. A price too costly to pay.

Here’s my reply:

There are a few take away lessons from this for all of us:

1. Always check Snopes.com, even if it says “verified on Snopes.”

2. Always do a general internet search on keywords if you can’t find it on
Snopes.

3. Make a decision about what fear is worth spreading. It doesn’t come without
cost.

Do we really want to live our lives as if ridiculous, senseless violence is around every corner? If you want to truly be fearful, inform yourself about real crime statistics. Our neighborhood is relatively safe. Sure, a certain amount of “street smart” caution is needed at all times anywhere, but there’s no reason to doubt your regular instincts. Emails like this seem helpful, but they just work to spread baseless fear and degrade feelings of community.

Do we really want to live in a world where we don’t help our elderly? Granted, if said elderly is in an effed up van and your common sense is sending off crazy alarms, by all means call 911. But let’s not build this idea that we are to be on alert for violent crime around every corner. It’s just not real. What we would pay in stress and loss of community isn’t worth it.

Actual odd crimes like this get plastered all over the world news. You will not find out about them via email, trust me.

Ok, that’s the end of my rant.

Your loving pro-community internet queen,
(PurpleCar)

photo credit: mikebrown666 on Flickr.com

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Book 1 of 3, called “The Millenium Trilogy,” written by Stieg Larsson (deceased).

You can find a story synopsis at the wikipedia entry.  Please see it for a synopsis.   This post concentrates on my experience with the book and its themes.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson was translated from its original Swedish into English by Reg Keeland. Before I get into the review of the book, I feel I must mention the controversy that surrounds the English translation of the novel. The translator Reg Keeland was apparently so aghast with the English editor’s after work that he insisted that the credit of translation be given to a pen name; he was so disgusted with the final output that he wanted no part of it. He especially seemed annoyed with the change in title.  The original Swedish was either “The Man Who Hated Women” or “Men Who Hated Women.”

I consider myself a pretty typical American reader, and I have to say, I’d have never, ever picked up a book with that kind of title. “The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo” plays to our American sense of intrigue, and it does refer to a trait of one of the main characters. I have more issue with one version of the cover image.

The hair should be black and spiky and the skin should be pale.

The hair and skin color of the woman in the photograph don’t remotely match the description of said “girl” (a woman of about 25 years old). [I have a whole other issue with calling women over age 18 “girl” but I’ll mention that in a bit.]

I haven’t found any interviews with Mr. Keeland to know exactly what his complaints are, but I found the book to flow well regardless. I was never stopped abruptly by unfamiliar cultural nuances or odd dialogue. Knowing that Mr. Keeland was severely disappointed with the final English translation makes me curious what I missed. I’d love to know how this excellent book could be better.

Finding out the original title whilst in the throes of the plot was a strange experience. Before knowing the original title, I really had no idea where the plot was going. Once I had “Men Who Hated Women” in my head, I had different suspicions on where the events were leading. I almost wish I didn’t know, because the shock of the final battles would be even more startling. Then again, I’m not too sure I could’ve stomached it without the forewarning.

If it weren’t for the buzz and the interesting title, I’d have avoided this book. I’m not much of a crime thriller reader. I read all 4 Dan Brown books and enjoyed them, but I don’t search out crime novelists. When I heard rumblings about Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I didn’t catch that the book was in the crime thriller genre. It sounded interesting, so I picked it up from the library.

The book is massive: 465 pages. I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish it in the small amount of time I had it on loan from the library; it’s a new book and it had limited release time. I turned to the audio version. By listening to the book on CD, I could fit in some “reading” time while I was running, cooking or cleaning. When I could, I’d pick up the story in the print version right where the audio book left off.

It took weeks and a few different tries to finally get a hold of the UNabridged version of the audio performance of the book. For some reason, the library records have the abridged version and unabridged version under identical records. Other people had requested the print book, so I had to let it go for a while before I could get it back. I’d returned and then signed out the print version again while I waited for the unabridged copy of the audio book to show up.

When I did get the print book back, I was even more eager to continue on with the story. The first few chapters set up the characters so beautifully that I was haunted. Like an “earworm,” an incomplete song that repeats in your head, the characters and scenes would come back to haunt me. The only way to solve an earworm, psychologists say, is to look up the lyrics of the song and sing them through, from beginning to end. It’s thought that earworms occur because your brain is trying to resolve the discrepancy in the lyrics. Solve the discrepancy and the lingering haunt of a refrain disappears. That’s the theory, anyway.

The characters kept coming back to me. [continue reading…]

Thursday night in Philly is packed with events, people! I’ll be hopping around. First I’ll hit the Philly Startup Leaders’ Entrepreneur Expo then over to GeeksWhoGive.

Check out Startup Leaders Entrepreneur Expo. Here’s a quote from the site:

Formats Available: iPod/g1 Video (.m4v) | Audio (.mp3)