Greetings All

In her “purest form”, a traditional wife (or the more hashtaggable Tradwife) is a woman who takes a traditional gender role in their marriage and household, and forgoes a career to focus on their family and raising children. One could be forgiven for wondering what makes tradwives different from housewives, for which the answer is the emphasis placed by tradwives on submission to their husband, as well as a heavy dose of 1950s aesthetics or rural landscapes, along with a variety of homey and benign hashtags like #homemaker or #cooking, and the occasional scripture if Jesus is on your speed dial.

Recently I received an email that purported to be from the anti-virus company Norton that was blatantly a scam, but I decided to follow through as much as I could to see what the scammers were trying to do. There's often a side effect of doing this, which is that I can waste the time of the scammers - the more time they're on the phone to me, the less time they'll have for scamming people who are at risk of falling for the scam. Plus maybe, just maybe, the scammers will start to question their career choice if many of their potential marks end up making their life a frustrating misery. Below is a series of events that, all in, might have taken about an hour from start to end.

Back in the distant past of … checks calendar… March 2022, I first wrote of a long running scheme of Scottish souvenir plots. In brief, you pay a bit of cash for a square-foot of land, and in return you get a certificate declaring you a laird or lady and the dubious privilege of buying branded kitsch. You can read more about the loopholes that companies that sell souvenir plots exploit in that original newsletter.

Our year in NZ Skeptical History is still moving along, with the goal of getting it finished (or as close as possible) by the end of 2022. December 5th to December 11th is surprisingly full of interesting skeptical events.