You are a winner

Kevin Kirkpatrick
Posted 11/17/22

I know some of you readers out there who are probably too young to remember the days before Al Gore invented the Internet or even the time he claimed to have done so. But believe it or not, prior to the www-everything, U.S. Mail was the primary carrier of outrageous claims and promises to your mailbox.

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

You are a winner

Posted

I know some of you readers out there who are probably too young to remember the days before Al Gore invented the Internet or even the time he claimed to have done so. But believe it or not, prior to the www-everything, U.S. Mail was the primary carrier of outrageous claims and promises to your mailbox. It started out pretty slow at first but then someone decided it was their God-given duty to deforest the entire planet by jamming everyone's mailbox with offers of outlandish proportions. I guess the most famous was the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. Now while I cannot recall specifically how that all worked, you basically got a slick advertising envelope with promises of a million dollars. And this was long enough ago when a million dollars meant something.

Fast forward to today and the Internet has taken over the role of long promises and hope for a windfall but with a new twist altogether. ‘Nary a day goes by now that Ol’ Dutch does not receive some great news via email about winning something or some offer of great financial gain if only I will open said email. Why just this past week I have emails from McAfee, offers of free non-stick pans, generators on sale, can’t-miss annuities, Medicare plans, clinical trials, Walmart rewards, free government money for the taking and a Walgreens gift card.

Now as good as those all sound Ol’ Dutch wasn't born yesterday as Miss Trixie so often likes to remind me, and the old adage “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is” never rang truer than it does today. I learned long ago that none of these offers are true and in fact if you click on them it only leads you to getting more of the same as now they have your email as a willing participant.

This is how a lot of my friends get viruses on their computers if you answer some of these, you have opened yourself up to scammers and hackers worldwide. And when you do that, Miss Trixie gets the call from friends and relatives to somehow come save them from such scrupulous people and rebuild their computer.

And it appears that now all you have to do is look online at something like a new truck and suddenly your computer screen is inundated with offers and information about trucks close to where you live. It is amazing and wondrous in fact that some computer somewhere keeps track of all your preferences and searches on the world wide web and then tries to hook you up with things like that.

And now I heard that soon they will be able to interface that same infernal machine with a person's brain so that all you have to do is think about something and it will appear on the screen. Which may in fact help as we age as all we would have to do is search the history on the machine to find out what we have forgotten. But I can see two definite problems already. One being finding people with brains to interface with may be a real issue in the U.S.A after all the events of the last few years.

And, secondly, scientists have proven that men think about sex every seven seconds which will lead to a lot of unproductive time online and make working with a computer almost impossible at least in mixed company.  I guess it's inevitable that these advances will come and there is probably nothing we can do about them if we want to continue with smartphones and laptops. It looks like Ol’ Dutch may need to clean up his thoughts, however, before the brain-reading Artificial Intelligence takes over and displays it for all the world to see.

One good thing about it is we will be able to see what the politicians are really thinking and how they are lying ahead of the elections and maybe, just maybe we can rescue this nation from its problems.

Kevin Kirkpatrick and his Yorkie, Cooper, fish, hunt, ATV or hike daily. His email is Kevin@TroutRepublic.com. Additional news can be found at www.troutrepublic.com or on Twitter at TroutRepublic.