UTTERLY DISTURBING NOTICE: SOME EVIL BUGGER EVIDENTLY HACKED INTO MY MICROSOFT ACCOUNT (WHICH I’VE NEVER USED) YESTERDAY AND MY OPTIMUM EMAIL SERVER TODAY. NEW EXPERIENCE FOR ME, MORE SERIOUS AND WORRISOME THAN BLOCKING. I EXPECT THE MALIGNANT BUGGER WILL DO A HACK A DAY AND THEN DEMAND BLACKMAIL OF SOME SORT. SO IF EVER YOU DON’T GET A DAILY LINK, YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. AFTER PRAYING, OF COURSE.

21 March—Banggood.com is a Hong Kong-based internet retailer of all kinds of merchandise made in the People’s Republic of China, a.k.a. Red China. A few years ago, when my two digital kitchen timers decided they’d had it, I bought a five-dollar ultra-wide-brimmed sun hat from Banggood to keep rain off my eyeglasses but mostly to get the digital kitchen timer they were offering as a freebie.

I’ve worn the hat several times. Thanks to the new lenses installed in my eyes as part of the phacoemulsification I had done a few years ago, I no longer need to wear eyeglasses in the rain.

I use the timer almost every day. I prefer it to the far more costly ones I almost bought at the late, truly lamented Torrington Bed Bath & Beyond.

No surprise that I get a daily email or two from the nice folks at Banggood with lots of tempting stuff I don’t need and even some I could use. But I’ve been able to resist temptation. I should have been a Franciscan monk.

Well, yesterday I received an email from Banggood offering a few smartphones at various price levels. I still haven’t learned how to use all the features—even the useful ones—of the phone I bought earlier this month. But I like to see the other crap that’s out there. So I clicked on the link for a Poco phone.

This is what the link took me to:

“Due to policy reasons, this product does not exist” indeed. That’s a new one. To me, anyway. Amazon and other free-world internet retailers, in my experience, just say the product isn’t available. Are Banggood’s policy reasons a matter of politics or security, perhaps? Can the policy have something to do with an autocratic government?

In all events, wouldn’t it be nice if any of us could make things not exist for our own policy reasons?