The other day I was having a quick scan through my email junk folder. It’s always interesting what can be found there even if it’s just scammers pretending to be a pretty girl who is in love with me. Oh well, poor girls, can’t blame them really.
One email that caught my eye before hitting the permanently delete button was one asking me to follow a girl called Olivia Casta. Looking at her picture she seemed to be a very pretty girl but even so, I wasn’t going to click the link on the email, after all, that’s what the scammers want you to do; click on a phony link. I did a search for her on google and she came up as a popular model and influencer on Instagram.
I am on Instagram although not knowing that much about it I rarely post anything there apart from the occasional graphic trying as usual to bring in more readers to my blog. Come to think of it, I don’t even look at Instagram that much at all.
Olivia Casta
I did a quick search for Olivia on Instagram and there were various people associated with that name, most of whom seemed to be posting pretty much the same pictures of the same pretty girl dressed in various skimpy outfits.
Going back to Google I was about to search for something else but looking down the list there was another hit on Olivia. This one at a site called caveman.com claimed that Olivia Casta really wasn’t Olivia Casta.
That looked kind of interesting so I clicked on it and it claimed that Olivia Casta was really another lady called Maria Tretjakova. There was even a picture of this other lady in the same pose as a picture of Olivia. Whoa, this was really odd! It seemed that this author claimed that Maria was using a face app teen filter to make herself look younger, the giveaway was apparently that each picture of Olivia Casta has the same sweet smile, in fact exactly the same sweet smile.
Well I decided to take a look and see if I could find the Face app. I looked on my iPad and the app was available in my app list. I tried to download it but like a lot of apps I try to download these days, a message came up asking me to upgrade my software to version 14.0. Now that is a problem because my iPad says I’m on 12.5 but it also says that I am fully updated. In order to update my iPad I would actually need to go out and buy a newer model which is really just not acceptable because I spent a lot of money on my current iPad only a few years ago. Oh well, I won’t be exchanging my blog profile photo for a faceapped one of me looking considerably younger any time soon.
After this little excursion into face imaging it got me thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald. I’m sure you will probably know that Lee Oswald is the man accused of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Lee worked in the Texas School Book Depository and three shots from the 6th floor were fired at the President on the 22nd November 1963. One shot hit Kennedy in the head causing a wound from which he could not possibly have survived.
A rifle was found at the scene, a rifle that had been ordered by a man called Alex Hidell and Lee Oswald, when later arrested at the Texas theatre was carrying an identity card in that exact name.
image courtesy wikipedia
Oswald turned to the TV cameras and asked for ‘someone to come forward’ presumably to help him but no one ever did. Oswald himself was in turn later murdered by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner right in the underground car park of the police headquarters and people have been asking ever since, was Oswald guilty? Did he shoot the President? Did Ruby shoot Oswald to silence him?
Well one of the things that looked pretty bad for Oswald was a photo of him holding a Mannlicher Carcarno rifle, the same rifle apparently that fired the fatal shot. The thing is, Oswald said that the photo was a fake, a manipulated photo designed to frame him. So was it?
There is quite a nice scene in the film JFK where Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison is explaining things to his team, that they have to look at things like the CIA and that black is white and white is black. As he does so, on the screen is a montage of someone manipulating an image, taking a picture of Oswald and fixing it to a picture of someone holding the rifle.
Now despite all this controversy over the photo and Lee Oswald claiming it was a fake, Lee’s Russian wife Marina, actually said that she took the picture. It was taken at 214 West Neely street in Dallas, a rooming house where Lee was living at the time of the assassination. Was Oswald lying or was it Marina? Marina was taken into protective custody by the FBI after the assassination so was she telling the truth or just going along with what the FBI had told her to say?
These days, images are so easy to manipulate. I spent a short while messing about on my computer and ended up with a version of the Oswald picture with my face in place of Lee’s but but back in 1963 some serious and professional work would have been required to fake the picture.
Lee on the left and me on the right.
Changing your image digitally is one thing but there are those that want to change themselves physically. One way of doing that is to get plastic surgery but there can be pitfalls if you go down that road. Marilyn Monroe was rumoured to have had some surgery done to the tip of her nose and her chin but clearly if the rumours are true, the surgery was minimal and turned out pretty well. Others have not been so lucky.
Leslie Ash was one of stars of the TV comedy Men Behaving Badly. I’ve always thought she was rather pretty but it looks like she wasn’t happy with her looks and had filler injected into her lips giving her what the newspapers called a ‘trout pout’. I don’t think I’ve seen her on TV since.
Meg Ryan was another pretty lady who perhaps was worried about her advancing years, she was born in November 1961 making her 61 later this year. Searching through the internet there are claims Meg has had her cheeks filled, some work on her nose, botox on her forehead and volume in her lips. She claims she left Hollywood for personal reasons but perhaps Hollywood didn’t want her anymore when she started to look a bit odd.
Of course, the way we look is important to all of us in some way, however small. Even someone like me, I’m not immune to wanting to look my best. The profile picture of me that accompanies this blog was one taken by Liz back in 2006, 16 years ago. I could argue that I keep it for the sake of continuity rather than wanting to look younger but if I’m honest, I’d have to admit I just like the way I look as my slightly younger self.
Not only do we aspire to look our best and present ourselves at our best to the public at large, whether we are going for a night out or going to the shops (or pinning a profile picture to our blog posts) but we also look up to others who look good and who we find attractive.
When I was a teenager up on my bedroom wall alongside pictures of various racing drivers was a poster of my first crush, Olivia Newton John. In fact, the very first vinyl singles I ever bought were records by Olivia; The banks of the Ohio and What is life? A chart single at the time in 1973 cost about 48p and as those two singles had dropped out of the charts they were half price. To this day one of the few songs I can correctly recite the lyrics to is one of her other songs, Country Roads. I bought many of her albums and followed her career with interest. It was sad to hear of her death last week.
A few years ago, I did a blog post about my own internet presence. I googled myself and talked about what I found. I didn’t feature on Google until page 3 of the results but now in 2022 I come up on page 1. Steve Higgins an American TV personality came up number one just as he did a few years back, then there was Professor Steve Higgins of Durham university and various other Steve Higgins’ until I slotted in at number 7 with my YouTube page which is apparently more popular than this blog which was down there at number 10. I was pretty pleased with 7 but I’m still not happy that my YouTube page rated higher than my blog. After all, I do put the effort in here, writing a new post every week. I don’t post regular videos, just the odd one every now and then.
Not only that, how did Professor Steve Higgins of Durham University get ranked ahead of me?
Update: When this post appeared on Facebook, one of my readers told me in the comments that she had the Face App Teen Filter and sent me a photo of herself using it. The result was really amazing and later she sent me a picture of myself, suitably Faceapped. Actually I kind of like it. Should I start using it as my profile picture? Well, I like it but I’m probably better sticking to reality.
Sources: Instagram, caveman.com and Wikipedia
