Don't Get Scammed

 

In Bible class last week we were talking about how Satan operates by telling subtle lies. Not outrageous ones, but “little” lies that counterfeit the truth so closely that many people are deceived.

Scams work that way, too. I’m not sure how well the Nigerian prince’s plea succeeded in the beginning, but few people fall for it now. What we do fall for are the scams that use the logo and email letterhead of a real bank to tell you that you are overdrawn or of a real credit card company to say a payment has been declined.

Or the new one that I almost fell for. I typed in my bank’s web address on my computer and tried to sign in, only to receive a notice that my account had been compromised. The notice included a telephone number to call so that they could remedy the situation. Since the web address I had entered was real, I was fooled into calling the number. The person who answered asked for permission to log on to my computer remotely so that he could check for other breaches and fix them. I continued to act like a fool and gave him permission, and he showed me the many “breaches” that had occurred on various popular sites, such as Amazon, where I have accounts. An hour or two later, I was getting both impatient and suspicious, so I shut down my computer and didn’t answer the phone when he tried calling me back. Fortunately, I figured it out before any damage had occurred, but I later saw a notice from a government agency warning people about this fraud.

Poker players talk about “tells” that give clues to someone’s hand. One player’s right eye might twitch whenever she has good cards, while another player may unconsciously scratch behind his left ear while bluffing. There are usually “tells” in scams, too.

If you go into those emails that appear to be from your bank and hover your cursor over the “From” address, it will tell you who the real sender is. Most of the time, anyway, since I can’t guarantee that no scammer can figure his or her way around that. But hovering your cursor there tends to give the scheme away.

Or, in the scam I almost fell for, after I shut the computer down I went into the bank’s app on my cell phone and got in fine, with no warnings that anyone had broken in. So even though I had already figured out that something was wrong, that confirmed it.

Satan’s lies have their own “tells.” If something leaves you wondering, check it against the Bible. And not against a single verse, such as Mark 11:24, but against the Bible as a whole. The prosperity gospel claims that God rewards faithful believers with health, wealth, and overall well-being in this life, which is directly contrary to what Paul suffered for Christ (see 1 Corinthians 4:11-13 and 2 Corinthians 11:24-30) and to verses such as Matthew 16:24-26 and John 15:20. Following Christ does bring great rewards, but they are promised for the next life, not for this one. (See Matthew 5:12 and John 14:1-3.)

So look for those “tells” and don’t get scammed.

Doesn't Count

 

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials from a company called “Trust & Wills.” A couple are talking about who will be guardian for their children, or a man tells his wife that he wants part of his money to go to a wildlife charity, and suddenly a man pops up and says, “Doesn’t count.” The point of the commercial is that the only way to guarantee that your wishes will be carried out is to have a will.

That’s true, but it’s also over-simplified. Roland and I have had wills for years and paid for our funerals and our final resting place a long time ago. (The photo at the head of this post shows the columbarium where our ashes will go.) We had also put together written funeral instructions and slide shows for our visitations.

But that isn’t enough. A complete estate plan doesn’t just cover the period after death—it also comes into play before then. What neither of us had were a living will, an advance health care directive, and (most importantly from my point of view) a durable power of attorney. We’ve been talking about completing those documents for a long time but just never got around to it.

Until now. I won’t go into the circumstances that prompted us to get it done, but we contacted an attorney and completed our estate plan, updating our wills at the same time. I’m particularly relieved to have the durable power of attorney, which authorizes somebody else (initially each other, and then our children) to make financial decisions while we are still alive. That way, if either of us gets Alzheimer's disease or is otherwise unable to make sound decisions, we won’t have to ask a judge to appoint a guardian.

An online service such as “Trust & Wills” may be adequate if you want something simple, and it is certainly better than not having a will at all. But my wishes are more complicated, and it takes a live human being licensed to practice law in the jurisdiction where I live to understand them. Even the lawyer we hired had a little trouble following my requirements, especially since I rethought some of them during our initial conversation.

The bottom line, though, is that waiting to put an estate plan together is a bad idea. You may think you have all the time in the world, and then you have an unexpected stroke or are killed in a car accident. Too many things in life are unpredictable.

I’m feeling much better now, and you will too if you get your estate plan in order.

Friend or Foe? Technology and Historical Research

 

Is technology a friend or foe of historical research? It depends on the use to which it is put and how well it retains information for future generations.

Some of my best historical research comes from letters, diaries, and journals. I’m very concerned that they are being replaced with electronic documents that may not have the same permanence.

Let’s start with the telephone.

Before the telephone and afterwards while long-distance calls were still expensive, most people used letters to communicate with those who were far away. Although letters are often lost or destroyed, some remain and are valuable historical resources. Consider, for example, the letters between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson while Madison was drafting the Bill of Rights. Jefferson was in Paris at the time, but we know his thoughts because he put them on paper and sent them to Madison. Unless they are specifically recorded, telephone conversations don’t have that same permanence.

On the other hand, the telephone does has some advantages for historical research. Interviews can be conducted over the telephone so the researcher does not have to spend time and money on travel, making it possible to conduct interviews that might not be feasible otherwise. Furthermore, the interviewer gains additional knowledge about the interviewee’s thoughts and feelings from hearing the person’s inflection during the call. With ZOOM and similar services, even more information can be obtained by watching the interviewee’s facial features, nervous hand gestures, and so on.

Then there is photography. In the days of film cameras, the only way to see your pictures was to develop them. That increased the chances that the negatives and the prints would be retained as historical records. Think of the photographs taken by Dorothea Lange and her colleagues to record the Japanese-American experience in the internment camps during World War II, as shown by the second image above. With the advent of digital cameras, there is no need to create a permanent copy of a photo unless you want to hang it on your wall. And if you take the photo on a cell phone, you don’t even need a hard copy to share with friends and family.

On the other hand, digital cameras do have their advantages. Every image on a film camera costs money to develop and print, so my father rarely took more than one shot per subject on his 35 mm slide camera. Since he couldn’t see the images in advance, he missed some good pictures because he didn’t realize the one he took hadn’t come out. With digital cameras, you can not only see a low-grade copy of the image immediately but you can take dozens of shots of the same subject, increasing the likelihood that you'll get a good one.

Word processing programs also have their pros and cons. In this case I’ll start with the pros, which I believe far outweigh the cons. I remember the days when I had to type on a typewriter. Correcting errors was miserable because I had to erase them and type the correction in the same spot as the original. If there were significant changes, it was a matter of retyping the entire page, which was a disincentive to rewrites. (I won’t even get into the misery of using carbon paper.) Now, with word processing programs, changes are easy and my manuscripts go through several drafts.

The con for word processing is that it’s too easy to rely on it to preserve your work. Unfortunately, systems crash, or human error can erase an entire document. That’s why I back my work up with a print copy and one on a thumb drive. Of course, it’s possible to lose paper manuscripts, too. Hemmingway tells of the time his wife put both the original and the carbon of most of his unpublished manuscripts in her suitcase to take on vacation. She thought she was doing him a favor, but when her suitcase was stolen (and never recovered), those manuscripts went with it. (The story is from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.)

The final piece of technology is the web. Many people replaced letters with email, although those are becoming outdated, too. People used to write diaries and journals in blank books, and many of those have survived to increase our knowledge of history. Now they have been replaced by blogs. Obviously, there are ways to retain both emails and blogs for perpetuity, and I’m thankful for the ones that have been archived. Still, many of them seem to eventually disappear into the ether.

Again, however, the pros are significant. Many historical documents have been scanned and are available on the internet. This means that a researcher does not have to travel to a distant library (which may be cost prohibitive) but can read them in the comfort of his or her home. There are still some documents that can only be read in a brick-and-mortar facility, such as when I spent several days at the Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis while researching a story about a German-Lutheran girl living in Illinois during World War I. I enjoy that kind of research, but it isn’t always practical. So it’s nice to be able to find historical documents online.

Still, it will be a loss to researchers from subsequent centuries if we don’t leave enough permanent records for them to discover more than dry facts about our lives in this one.

Bottom line? Technology is both friend and foe of historical research.

I’ll leave it to you to decide how it balances out.

__________

The first image at the top of this page is a Frank T. Merrill illustration for the 1896 edition of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It is in the public domain because of its age.

The second image shows a mess line at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. It was taken by Dorothea Lange on June 16, 1942 as part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain.

Bees, Bees, Bees

 

My stories aren’t meant to be autobiographical, but occasionally some of my own experiences do creep in. I was working on a chapter where the characters harvest honey from a bees’ nest, and it reminded me of my own experiences growing up with a father who raised bees as a hobby.

They started in LaPrairie, Illinois, where Daddy had a country church. I was probably four or five at the time.

Daddy got his first bees when they swarmed on the grape vines in our yard. He knew bees didn’t sting when they were swarming, but he didn’t know much else, so he put them in a wooden box approximately the size of a bee hive but without any frames for them to build their honeycomb on. The first photo shows the honeycomb they created in that box. Unfortunately, according to Daddy’s memoirs, he didn’t know enough about bees at the time and they froze to death over the winter.

Daddy learned more before his next attempt, when he had a regular hive with frames and ordered the bees through the mail. The second picture shows him wearing his bee bonnet and harvesting the honey from these tame bees. Then he added wild bees when they swarmed around the outside light over the entrance to the church. Daddy’s memoirs say the tame bees were gentle but the wild ones were mean. Fortunately, he kept them in different hives quite a ways apart.

In the summer we ran around barefoot, and it wasn’t unusual for me to step on a bee that was sitting in the grass. Looking back, it’s very fortunate that neither my brothers nor I were allergic to bees. I’m sure Daddy would have gotten rid of them immediately if we had been, but then we would have missed out on all that delicious honey.

I especially liked it when Daddy harvested the honey and cut up some of the comb for us to eat. It dripped with the sweet taste of honey and chewed like gum. Most people don’t have that experience these days, but it was as good as any treat.

When Daddy decided to take a sabbatical in Jordon, we had to leave the bees behind. His memoirs don’t mention working with bees again until I was in college, when the bees were at my Uncle Lester’s tree farm.

That doesn’t mean he didn’t have bees in between, however. I don’t remember it, but my brother says we had bees at DeTour Village, Michigan, where Daddy took a church after we returned from Jordon.

Although the days at LaPrairie were the only ones where I remember the bees being “up close and personal,” those are good memories.

The Beauty of Castles

 

I’ve been putting together a presentation with photographs of castles for my photo club. As I was going through my pictures, it struck me that they might make a fun blog post. So here are a select few of the photos from my presentation.

The first photo above shows Eilean Donan, located in the Scottish Highlands. It has been used as the location for a number of movies and television shows, although nothing was filming when Roland and I visited it in 2019.

The photo below shows Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye, which we saw on that same trip.

In 2023, we traveled to Ireland, where we visited Kylemore Abbey and Kilkenny Castle, respectively.

The greatest riches came from our cruise on the Danube and Rhine Rivers in 2015. This one is Hinterhaus Castle along the Danube in Austria.

The second photo at the top of this page is Marksburg Castle, one of many along the Rhine. The following images show other castles along the same stretch of the Rhine River Valley, which has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In order from south to north (or more northwest), the photos below show Furstenberg Castle, Schoenburg Castle, Katz Castle, Maus Castle, and Stolzenfels Castle.

Finally, here is Golubac Fortress in Serbia, taken during a 2024 cruise.

I hope you enjoyed this castle tour. Maybe it will even inspire you to see some for yourselves.