I saw a bumper sticker today that read, “The road to hell is paved with liberals.”
That would explain a lot. I mean, conservatives have been walking all over liberals for the past six years. Now we finally know where they’re going with it!
Author Archives: Kelson
New trend in 419 scams: UK Artists
In the past two weeks, a new variant of the advance fee scam has dropped into our spam traps: supposed UK-based artists needing help selling their works overseas.
The classic Nigerian scam involves someone claiming to be the relative of a deceased or deposed dictator, general, etc. is trying to smuggle money out of the country and needs to borrow your bank account to do it.
It’s usually a third-world country, often one with political strife, so that the average westerner won’t be too suspicious of the level of corruption implied. You never see this scam claiming to come from, say, France, or Japan, because the process would set off too many alarm bells. Someone needing to transfer that much money would either do it through normal banking channels or through organized crime—not by firing off an email to some random citizen in a foreign country.
The first-world variation, at least up until now, has been the “International Lottery” scam. In this variation you get a winning notice, but of course you need to pay them before they can send you the money, etc. This one generally claims to be based in Europe, often several countries in one message. The idea of a lottery seems much more plausible in the first world.
Someone has come up with a way to bring the 419 scam into the first world. The two samples I’ve seen so far both involve UK-based artists trying to sell their works in the US. The premise is that their customers want to pay by some method that is “difficult to cash” in the UK, so they want you, a US resident, to accept the travelers’ checks, or money orders, then wire them the amount minus a 10% commission.
Right.
I’m seriously waiting for someone to offer a commission on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The setting has changed—instead of a dictator’s widow who has hidden away ill-gotten gains in “darkest Africa,” it’s a happy Londoner living with his or her “two kids” and “the love of [their] life” and selling art on the international market. All shiny, happy and yuppie (with just a hint of bohemian). But the script is the same: Someone wants to clear huge amounts of money through your bank account.
I was going to post some quotes, but as I started looking at them, the similarities really go through the entire message. Continue reading
Professional…Building?
Don’t trust your office to some amateur building! Hire a professional!
Of course, what I’m really concerned about is what it does on its day off…
Irritable Liquid?
Found on the side of an AM-PM convenience store today:
That’s one cranky glass of water.
Or maybe Odo?
My best guess is that they were trying to say something like “inflammable,” decided it wouldn’t fit, and misused a thesaurus.
Variations on a Theme
I read Shadowpact #2 last night. So far the book does read better than Day of Vengeance, probably in large part because Bill Willingham can set his own schedule instead of the must-be-6-issues policy of the Infinite Crisis lead-ins.
One of the villains struck me as familiar, though: an albino swordsman with a magic sword, apparently allied to a sinister god-like being, who has picked up the nickname, “the White Rabbit.”
Maybe it’s just the timing—just a few days ago I read a comic about Elric, an albino swordsman with a magic sword, allied to a sinister god-like being, with the nickname, “the White Wolf.”
Actually, I was first reminded of Count Zodiac from Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, largely because Zodiac is based in the 20th century, rather than an ancient sword-and-sorcery landscape. Count Zodiac is one of at least three versions of Count Ulric von Bek*—the others appear in The Dragon in the Sword and the trilogy that begins with The Dreamthief’s Daughter—and, like Elric, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion.
The Eternal Champion in all his forms fights for the balance between order and chaos, and often finds himself fighting for order while indebted to a lord of chaos. At least two versions** of von Bek are albinos who wield the Black Sword (Ravenbrand, rather than Stormbringer), and while I don’t recall Ulric himself being linked to a demon the way Elric is reluctantly linked to Arioch of Chaos, the von Bek family has ties to Lucifer going back to the Hundred Thirty Years War. Continue reading
When it has to be there in a Flash
A while back I was driving on the freeway and noticed a truck with this logo:
OK, so I’m maybe a bit focused on the Flash, but then I started looking at the design.
- Red as the main color
- Sans-serif capital italics (just like the longest-running versions of the Flash logo)
- A lightning bolt that runs from the upper right to the lower left.
Hmm…
It got me thinking about commercial applications of super-speed. Not something that turns up often in the super-hero genre, but it shows up occasionally. Kapitalist Kouriers is the first one that comes to mind. They were a trio of Soviet defectors who decided to sell their services as couriers and, from time to time, heroes for hire.
¿Cómo se dice, «duh»?
NPR’s “Morning Edition” ran a story today on the rise of the Spanish-language television market, and Univision in particular. They led into it with a remark that Spanish-language coverage of the World Cup has been getting higher ratings than the English-language coverage.
This should surprise no one, given that soccer (as we norteamericanos call what everyone else seems to refer to as football) isn’t terribly popular in the USA, with two notable exceptions: Parents of 6-year-olds who want to put their children into a sport, and the duration of the World Cup. El fútbol, however, is wildly popular in Europe and Latin America, and we have a lot of recent immigrants from Latin America.
So no, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that there are more Spanish-speaking hardcore soccer fans than English-speaking ones.