So I met up with King Sheep last night for a rare evening of theater and amazingly good garlic cheese bread (if there is a Keg restaurant near you, stop reading and go now). It's rare because we live a good 300 miles apart, so popping by for a quick visit requires a little more than a slow afternoon and 15 minutes of spare time. It requires planning, coordination, and the occasional misdemeanor moving violation. What did we see at ye olde theatre? Jumper. Review is forthcoming. I promise. Moving on.

What I'm really writing about is a wonderful event that seems to be worming its way into my work life as a Friday morning perodical. For the dozen people on this blog who don't know me personally, I spend my daylight hours as a manager in a press shop, and one of my main duties is e-mail management. A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a reverend who urgently needed 10,000 full-color flyers printed. After excitedly working up a quote and going back-and-forth over the e-mail with him, I find out that he wants the flyers shipped to West Africa via a very specific shipping company. Call me thick, but that was what finally set off the alarm. I Google the shipping company's name and discover it's a scam.

It works like this: Joe Printer makes 10,000 flyers and gives them to the shipper. The shipper requires a money order to do business. The reverend tells the printer to roll the cost of shipping into his bill, which he pays with a credit card, which turns out to be fake. Printer is now out a couple grand plus labor, paper, and ink.

The "reverend" has tried e-mailing me several times since then using different names but always asking for immense quantities of flyers, and it always starts like this:

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Hello Sir/Madam
Goodmorning and My Name Is Mr Walton Smith and am the Owner of Smith & Company Inc, I Am Contacting you to Know if you can make an Order for same Flyers .and i will need the Qty 90,500 with the size of 8.5''x11'' in full copies Black Ink on Yellow Paper l want you to write of the flyer (Smith & Company Inc).,I want you to go ahead and quote me the total pick up prices plus tax without shipping,and also addvice me the methods of payment that you accpet so that as soon as i get the price here i will go ahead and make the payment for you right away , so that we can schdule for the pick up whe it is ready for pick up. so that i can get back to you as soon as i can .Try and get back to me with your Name and Phone Number.

Thank you and hope to hear again back from you..
....

Best Regards.
Mr.Walton

Reverend. Moore

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Incidentally, the name of the shipping company is always Federf Cargo and Trading Company. Another thing this scammer does it use a TTY connection or phone relay to send his order. If you've been contacted with a similar message, report the phone number or e-mail address and let's try to get these guys caught.

Peach out.

Every so often, I wake up in the morning and feel genuinely peaceful. I feel in tune with all of creation, and that there are nothing but possibilities at my fingertips. It's usually mornings like this that life decides you need to be taken down a notch, shown that you certainly are not "all that," and reminded that you are still a bumbling goof.


This morning, my car ran out of gas on the way to work. See, I'd been puting off a trip to the gas station because money has been flowing in a strictly outward direction these past few weeks, and I was hoping to make it to Friday without bending over to Big Oil for my monthly beating. Not surprisingly, my car lurched and died five blocks from home. I had to run home because I'd also forgotten my cell and needed to call work and let them know I'd be late. I borrowed the keys to Becky's car, and drove to the gas station where I borrowed a 3 gallon can and put a couple gallons in Becky's car as well (she was almost out). I was half-way home when I noticed that I'd not only left Becky's fuel door open, but I could see in the side mirror that the gas cap was still precariously balanced on the open door.

I made it back home without incident, but in my haste to get back home, I'd also forgotten to close the air spout on the back of the gas can. I should explain that my wife owns a hatch back, thus there was no trunk to put the can in, so it was sitting behind the driver's seat. I'd rolled down the windows to keep from asphyxiating on the fumes, but apparently left the air cap off so that droplets of gasoline could soak the papers beneath it. Even destroying the papers didn't lessen the chemical stench in the car. Becky's not happy about it, but it actually affects me more.

I once had to do the old siphoning trick on my grandpa's pickup truck to get to work about a decade ago. Anyone who's done that knows that it takes about two days for the taste to get out of your mouth, followed by another three days of smelling gasoline everywhere you are. The memory has stayed with me.

So, I've had better mornings. How about you?

New voting incentive on Coming Distractions!

So, Nate, what's the most retarded thing you've heard today?

Well, the day is still young so there's not much of a competition, but I feel like there's already a clear enough winner to make the call early (unlike the ridiculously over-publicized state caucuses). The biggest Do-Nothing Congress in half a century have teamed up with the chimpanzee in the White House to bring you the NRA (or National Recovery Act). I'm sure the fact that it has the same acronym as Georgie's favorite charity is a coincidence. A great and reputable article on that act can be found here, but allow me to streamline it for you: the US government is going to give money to millions of Americans under the banner of "tax relief" with the hope that those folks will immediately go out and spend it, thus giving a much-needed boost to the economy.

The amount of money depends your household. Individuals will receive a check for $600, couples will get $1200, and $300 per child. But how do you qualify for this great little chunk o' change? You have to get about half-way down the page to see that you need to make, as an individual, at least $75,000 a year, or $150,000 as a couple. They called that "middle-class." If that's true, then I'm sitting right around poverty level. The other option is if you paid no income taxes but earned at least $3,000, including through Social Security or veterans' disability benefits, then you would get $300. Let me see if I can illustrate that for you:

Yes, it's true, I'm greedy. They give money to the poor people who are going to use it to buy the things they need to survive, and to the rich people who are going to blow it on something they aren't going to want five minute later. What do I get? Passed over like doorway with lamb's blood on it, penalized for having neither too much or too little. I just have to wonder where all these hundreds of millions of dollars are coming from. Considering that if I ran my personal credit the way the government runs theirs I'd be either homeless or incarcerated, I know that there isn't any actual money to be spent. Therefore, I have to assume that this is just getting tacked onto the National Deficit, a monster so dark and horrifying that I believe it was the inspiration for the film Cloverfield.


If you had a friend who was as in debt as our government, would you accept a gift from him? I think that if the folks on Capitol Hill really want to give their people something great, they can get themselves out of debt. But what's their answer to over-spending? Spend more. A bunch of freakin' brain surgeons is what they are.

I have to say that this is just the latest bad idea in a long, sad history of bad ideas from the Bush administration, and my one shining hope is that a few years after he's been kicked off of the world stage, George W. Bush will awaken suddenly in the middle of the night and burst into wracking sobs of anguish over what he's done to this nation.