LILEKS (James) :: The Bleat

Woke up to credit card fraud. Got a message on my watch for a charge I had not made, at an appliance store in Hollywood FL. Sigh. How. HOW. It makes you tired, because now you have to change all the sites online where you’ve stored your card for future use. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN

Uh maybe because you stored your card for future use

I only have this on two, and one is Amazon. The other is a cigar store -

Hey wait a minute

A cigar store in Florida.

Let us call up the location of the cigar store on the map. Ah. Let us plug in the address of the appliance store.

The purchase was made 20 miles from the place where I just bought cigars.

So! Let’s call ‘em up and see what they have to say.

They put me through to the IT security guy, who was, shall we say, intrigued. He explained how they can’t look at the numbers, they’re all encrypted, all he ever sees is the last four and the expiry, and they’re set up to detect any hacking attempts, etc etc. So it’s unlikely someone hacked their system and stole the numbers, but. BUT. He admits it is curious.

I like this, because it indicates he has an imagination. None of this “nope can’t happen at all we’re vault-tight no one gets in, can’t be us.” He’s intrigued.

I said when this has happened before, the charges were fast and furious and came out of Malaysia. This was not the case here. One purchase, also a test deposit of .01 on something that sounded like a crypto exchange, I couldn’t remember exactly what the bank said. He wondered if I could call the store and get an address to which the item was going to be shipped, because that, you know, would certainly be helpful.

In other words, if it’s some dumbarse on our end we can fire his stupid patoot pronto. I am now on hold with the store, which took getting through several levels of phone tree hell and bad hold / transfer protocols.

Okay, now I’m off the phone with the store, which entailed lots of bad hold music and explanation and transfers until I got someone in security. It was indeed an online order, made this morning.

AirPods.

Shipping address: Minneapolis

What. The.

She asked my email address, and none of the ones I gave her matched. It was a name I’d never heard of, gmail address. I thank her and look it up - the only thing that comes close is a Quora thread about bitcoin recovery services. At the end of all this I know no more than there was a criminal who tried to steal something, and he was unsuccessful. Happens every day all over X 1,000,000.

Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.


		So! How do we get from here . . .

		. . . to there?

I snipped this utterly typical jumble of STUFF from the back page of a 1939 paper.

Moroline would be like Vaseline: petroleum jelly. AKA, Rod wax.

Really, Rod Wax. Encyclopedia Brittanic says:

“Rod wax” was a byproduct of oil drilling that workers used to heal wounds and burns. Noticing its benefits, chemist Robert Chesebrough refined and purified the “rod wax,” and in 1872 he marketed it as Vaseline.

The origin of the name has a few theories. The first, being the sort of thing self-satisfied pedants who overestimate their intellectual abilities like to say, strikes me as suspect.

According to online sources (e.g., Demand Media 2010), Chesebrough originally filled all the containers in his home with his new petroleum jelly, then began using his wife’s vases to hold the overrun. On a whim, he combined the word “vase” with the medical suffix “line” to form the new name for his product: Vaseline.

Eh. Or:

Weisinger (1953:130) offered an alternative explanation: “The brand name ‘Vaseline’ stems from the German word for water wasser (pronounced vahser), and the Greek word for oil, elaion.”

I’m not sure about that one, either. The same site notes:

One fairly successful imitator was the St. Joseph’s Laboratories,
with plants at New York and Memphis. The product was called
St. Joseph’s Moroline Petroleum Jelly. The early colorless jars were unusual in shape, half-round with five vertical panels on the other half.

I thought they might be connected to the children’s aspirin we knew and loved, but apparently not. Later containers of Moroline have the name Plough, which I recognized.

In 1971, the Schering Corporation merged with Plough, Inc. (founded by Memphis-based entrepreneur Abe Plough in 1908) to form Schering-Plough. On November 4, 2009 Merck & Co. merged with Schering-Plough with the new company taking the name of Merck & Co.

No link to Abe Plough? Hmm. Newspapers.com, here we come . . .

Ah.


		A lot of hagiography, and no doubt well earned; the man was regarded as the city’s #1 citizen when he died in 1984, and did a lot of philanthropic work.

A 1951 story has a picture of the new Plough plant:

It still exists, although it’s used for other purposes. Up the street, as long as we’re on the subject of OTC drugs, there’s the Bayer Building.

Yawn. Anyway, when I was a kid, Bayer was synonymous with aspirin. And yet, there's this from USA Today:

Bayer still owns the "Aspirin" trademark in most countries, but not here. The U.S. was among a handful of countries that confiscated the trademark, along with a lot of other Bayer assets, during World War I.

USA Today also notes:

Before you applaud Bayer and Hoffman too loudly, note that they also synthesized diamorphine -- heroin.

Back to Plough, or at least its successors:

Schering-Plough also received much publicity for a drug AICAR which mimics the effects of exercise, having especially potent effects when used alongside another drug GW1516 developed by GlaxoSmithKline

This should pique your interest, no? Don’t hear a lot about that. An exercise pill! Well:

In 2009, the French Anti-Doping Agency, suspected that AICAR had been used in the 2009 Tour de France for its supposed performance enhancing properties.

It was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, an organization of which I was previously unaware. I'm sure someone still makes the stuff. Wonder what the street name is.

Speaking of dope, though, we have to go back to the top, to the Luden’s ad. I have the feeling I’ve discussed this before. They hired Zappa to do a commercial.

I’d like to tell you more about Dora Steinberg, the face in the Luden ad, but this is what comes up when you google her name for 1939.

Last week I said, as ever, that this week’s second visit might be better. Or it might be worse.

A practical people built this place, I suspect.

It does the job. It has dignity. It does not seek to overawe the citizen.

Yes, a very practical sort of people.

I’d love for each Watson to have his own wing. You’d call and ask for Watson, and the receptionist would ask “which one,” and you’d say “Left Watson.”

OH LOOK WHO’S PUTTING ON THE FANCY ROMAN AIRS NOW