Paranoia

I am getting a bit concerned about some of the wheezes circulating on the internet these days. The one that triggered this post being a circle of rotating purple blobs embedded in an otherwise ordinary looking email, which if looked at in the right way turn green or vanish altogether, a wheeze which presumably exploits some tricky timing feature of one's vision machinery, perhaps akin to that whereby the wheels of cars in films always seem to be going backwards. My concern is that such a wheeze is interfering with the workings of one's brain in an intimate way. Is doing damage? Could it trigger an epileptic fit? Is it planting some kind of a time bomb? Are the relevant authorities on the case?

The relevant authorities do seem to have been asleep on the job with a former press aide to a former prime minister. It seems that this gent. was sufficiently on the sauce, when he was near thirty mind you, not some wet behind the ears at university, that he was hallucinating on the morning after, before he started again. To the point where he was behaving oddly near a very important person, was scooped up by Special Branch and carted off to the nearest mental hospital. At which point one might have thought that said relevant authorities would have put a blot on his record, but no. He goes onto greater glory and the rest is history. And if the event did find its way to the blotting department, odd that booze is OK but youthful membership, say, of a fairly lawful hunt protest group is a killer blow. Then what about the youthful snuffling of white powders? What about the potentially dangerous harassment of badger cullers going about their lawful business?

PS: I would not usually identify a real person in this way, but as he chooses to top up his already fat pension by kiss-and-tell, I think he forfeits the usual courtesies.