Friday, December 04, 2009

Strange days.

I have to come to terms with something. An acquaintance, a friend of a friend, a man I have been fishing with and thought a decent sort of chap (if a bit odd, but that's not illegal) has just been convicted of child porn offences.

Nobody knew. The friend is in shock. I am stunned. You hear about such people but never think you'll meet them. The offences took place in 2007, before I (or the in-between friend) met this guy. We had no idea. Needless to say, he's off the fishing party list for good. For his own good, too. Next to large bodies of water, accidents happen.

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On a less sickening note, the UK Ministry of Defence has closed its UFO hotline. For 60 years, anyone could report anything unusual in the skies and the MOD would record it and often look into it. They weren't looking for UFOs. For most of that time they were looking for Russian spy planes and that's why they wanted to hear about odd aerial activity. It's not closed because the cold war has ended. It's closed because the country is skint. They can't afford it. That's all.

It's a shame because if you wanted to look at past UFO sightings and the results of investigations of them, the MOD files were the most complete in the country. They would tell you whether the sighting was explained or unexplained. You can bet if there was something unexplained, they looked at it very hard indeed.

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I watched another Doomsday film. There are a lot of them about at the moment. This is the one in which Scotland is sealed off because of a deadly virus. The virus then turns up in England, and since there are people alive in Scotland, the English assume they have a cure and send in troops to beat it out of them.

Trouble is, it's Glasgow they visit and it hasn't improved at all in the 25 years it's been isolated. It's exactly the same. Not many of the crack troops get back alive. Great film but seriously gory. Some very nasty deaths and not for the faint of heart.

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My mind is still baffled by the revelation in the first part of this post. I'll be back when I've sorted it out.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's the name of the Doomsday film? Sounds interesting.

Sorry about your ex-fishing buddy.It is very unsettling when you find out people you thought were normal are really very dangerous. Makes you wonder about all your other acquaintances.

Romulus Crowe said...

The film is imaginatively entitled 'Doomsday' which isn't much help these days. Neil Marshall is the director and it stars Rhona Mitra and Bob Hoskins.

It's a blend of Tomb Raider, Mad Max, Escape from New York, with elements of Ivanhoe, the Railway Children and Nascar.

Lots of gore and lots of pure escapist fun. Not for the easily sickened.

It takes your mind off wondering who else you know, who appears normal, might be a child molester in secret.

That really creeped me out and considering what I do, that's really saying something.

astrologymemphis.blogspot.com said...

Convicted as opposed to charged. Wow. Let me say I'm not sticking up for this guy in any way ... pervs are one thing, but pervs that feed off children are a different matter entirely, and there is no punishment severe enough ... but I was reading a news article not long ago about how "professional" child pornographers have learned to hide their files in other people's computers, in places the innocent and unsavvy computer owner wouldn't ordinarily go or think to look ... files we're told not to mess with because it can cause all kinds of problems with the computer. I know for sure that music downloading sites such as Limewire make it fairly easy because porn has ended up on my computer from there (not child porn, just the ordinary kind). Lots of convicted felons on death row have been proven innocent by DNA testing. Innocent people do get convicted all the time. Since everyone is so shocked to learn of this, is it at all possible the guy is actually a victim and not a perv perp? Just asking. If there's no chance of that, then I hope he gets what he deserves.

Romulus Crowe said...

He was caught by backtracking his IP address from 'certain sites' that the police were watching.

His excuse was 'research' but he works in retail so would have no reason to be 'researching' anything of the kind.

No, this one wasn't a victim. I didn't know they could hide files on other people's computers. I don't use any filesharing software myself but I think maybe it's time to run a few of the scanner programs and see if anything odd shows up. Just in case.

JustPeachie said...

There was a famous case here in the US a couple of years ago about a man whose life was ruined after kiddie-porn was found on his computer (tracked to his IP address). Turns out his computer was being remotely 'botted' by the real offender. Scary. Another reason (besides saving energy) to keep your computer off when you are away from it for more than a few hours.

Romulus Crowe said...

When I first started using computers, it was CP-M or MS-DOS and if any strange files appeared, you could find them and delete them. Likewise with cars. I could strip and clean a carburettor, adjust valves, and once took the bold step of decoking a cylinder head. Not something I'd want to do again.

Now, with Windows (I have XP still, but Vista on a laptop) it's just like with modern cars. I open the bonnet (hood, in the US) and barely recognise anything. No coil, distributor or carburettor and if you want it tuned you have to hook it up to a big computer at the garage.

I have no idea what Windows is doing most of the time and if there were any dodgy files in there, I'd never find them.

I've been considering Linux but don't really know where to start...

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