Co Durham and Utah Weirder Than I Imagined

Last updated on November 22nd, 2015

Link Rot

Fingernail Lady

While clearing up some link-rot on this website, mainly due to me moving the image locations and insertion methods, I came across the picture of the weird woman and her nails from earlier this year.  That’s her at right, with a link to the original nail-biting tale of her heart-rending car crash and it’s aftermath.

Salt lake City, Utah!

Home of a zillion scams and scammers (see google-revolution-different-name-same-scam and more-on-google-profits-and-pacific-webworks, for instance).  Location of a strange moral code, and now, I’ve just noticed, residence of the fingernail lady.  I never noticed first-time round.

County Durham Credit Card Thieves

UK Online Fraud Map

Amazingly, given the connections between the UTAH scams and a host of County Durham addresses located in small, former industrial towns, it now appears that the similarly small village of Shildon is a credit card crime capital of Britain! (see Shildon: An unlikely crime capital).  In this separate article, Small town ‘online crime hotspot’, it’s reported that,

Last year, 24% of all internet purchases there were made using stolen credit card details

The News of the World goes one better and says,

A shocking 26.8 per cent of all transactions made in the tiny County Durham town (population just 10,000) used stolen card details.

For a little place, made famous as the departure point for the very first passenger train in the world (27 September 1825) because that was where the workshops were, it’s a rather ignominious claim to have on it’s scorecard.

But in light of the scammy folk not far away hanging round Consett, not that surprising.  It’s well-known that a criminal in one field does not have much regard for many other laws either.  That’s one of the reason’s that coppers pull dodgy looking cars with a tail-light out……

Old-Time law

Shildon Workers (see Rules here)

Now contrast this modern behaviour with the ‘rules’ listed for employees of the Stockton & Darlington Railway when it started, like for these gentlemen in the coal truck.

They got fined a shilling for everything, no matter how small!