London Calling

I have been a bit of an anglophile since I was in the second grade. That was when one of my favorite teachers, Miss Schafer, fresh from her world travels introduced us to other countries. Although she superficially covered several nations, it was the U.K. that stuck with me. As I grew as a gardener, I came to appreciate the many contributions that the English gardening tradition made to the world of horticulture. In fact, my 40th birthday present to myself was a gardening tour of the Mother Country. Our first few days in England were centered in London, with most of our time spent at either the Hampton Court Flower Show, Kew Gardens or Wisely. Mind you I was thoroughly having a marvelous time, but regret that we did not get to see more of the city itself. It is a great hope of mine that one day when time, and particularly money permit, I will return.

According to an urgent email sent to everyone in my company's address book, I apparently went to London over the holidays, but am in a bit of a situation there. To solve this little problem, the message instructs people where to send $2000 dollars. Here, read a part of the note for yourselves:

Hello,

Complement of the season. I am in London for an emergency trip but having little problem now. Please can you assist me with two thousand US dollars ($2.000) to enable me complete my activities here. I will pay you back as soon as I come back home. Send it through western union with this information:

(next the writer listed an address where to wire the money, but I will not post it here - in case any of you feel compelled to help out and are generous to a fault)

Despite a recently installed security system on the computer at work, someone was able to get our password and hijacked our mailing lists, and not only did they send the above note, they also erased the address book. Several of our vendors and customers called to alert us about the scam, and from the awkward way this note was written, I seriously doubt that anyone would fall victim to it.

Since the New Year is upon us, I suggest that we all celebrate with a full round of new passwords, for all of our accounts, especially if they have not been changed in some time. Please don't use your home addresses, phone numbers, pet's and children's names, the word "password" or anything else easily figured out by a determined no-goodnik. Make it a long mix of numbers and letters (both upper and lower case). It is also a good idea to make a list of your new passwords and conceal it someplace safe. Now if I can only remember where I hid that list.

(These non-restricted pictures were taken from the Library of Congress site which is a great resource for old photos and documents. These images of London were taken at the turn of the last century and used the photochrom process, which was an early way to turn black and white negatives into color photos.)