Tuesday, October 19, 2004

An Offer You Can't Refuse

Lately, fewer of my e-mail correspondents are interested in selling me drugs and more want to loan me money. Here's an e-mail that just now arrived, somehow making it past my intricate series of Spam filters...

Here is Buford Craft. I write to you because we are accepting your mortgage application. Our office confirms you can get a $220.000 loán for a $252.00 per month payment. Approval process will take 1 minute, so please fill out the form on our website.

Now, there is zero chance I will ever order drugs from a stranger on the Internet. I don't really need any drugs but if and when I do, I'll get them from a slightly more reputable source...say, buying them from that guy who came up to me the other night in a parking lot and asked if I wanted to score some "dynamite crack."

And I don't need to borrow any money, thank you, but if and when I ever do, it won't be over the Internet...and it especially won't be from someone who calls himself "Buford Craft." Where, I wondered, did the presumably-overseas person who composed this message pick up that name? I mean, the guy was clever enough to insert an accented letter "a" into the word "loan" so no Spam filter would flag it. Couldn't he figure out that Buford Craft was not a name that would suggest a stable, reliable business associate? I wouldn't buy live bait from someone named Buford Craft.

So I googled Buford Craft...and don't waste your time. All you'll find is that someone by that name was a pallbearer at a funeral in 1970, and the obit is posted on the web. I'm guessing the loan shark just scours the Internet at random for proper names and plugs them into these inviting e-mails. Perhaps an automated bot does it, the same way it scans for domain names and e-mail addresses.

But the nice part is that whoever transmitted this e-mail wasted his time — and not just because almost none of us will fall for this racket. Most of these things, I'm told, are sent out by people and programmers who work on commission. If they somehow manage to snag a sucker and deliver them into the main scammers' clutches, the e-mailer (Buford, in this case) gets a fee or a cut. Just to see what would happen, I clicked on the link that was included to take me to the website where I was to fill out the form...and got a dead end. No website there. They probably either fled or were closed down. You can't trust anyone these days.

• Posted at 11:46 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

Today on the news, I saw George W. Bush saying over and over that he will never allow a new military draft. I usually think Bush believes what he says even when I think he's dead wrong. In this case, he didn't convince me he wasn't thinking, in the back of his mind, "If and when we need more soldiers, we'll find some way to draft them without calling it a 'draft.'"

Actually, I would have believed him if he'd said, "No one running for president can swear to you that a draft will never be necessary because no one can anticipate what battles America may have to fight." I think that would have been an honest statement. I also would have believed Bush if he'd come out with some explanation of how, apart from a draft, this country can increase the size of its army. The most likely answer, however, is something Bush probably wouldn't want to say because it's what Conservatives always accuse Liberals of doing: Throwing money at a problem.

I don't think it would be a bad idea to make military service more financially attractive. We say we love our soldiers but we don't seem to pay them very well. Earlier this year, I wrote this post all about this.

I also heard Bush say that Kerry will say anything to be elected. This was just before he said, "If you vote for me, I'll buy you a pony."

• Posted at 11:14 PM · LINK

Break a Leg...

As you may have heard, there was a sudden change in the London company of The Producers, which is about to open. Richard Dreyfuss was going make his musical comedy debut in the lead role of Max Bialystock. Just the other day, citing medical problems, Dreyfuss pulled out and he's been replaced, only days before opening, by Nathan Lane...who at least knows the part. So a show that's about a show where the leading man is injured at the last minute and replaced has just replaced its leading man at the last minute because he's injured.

A lot of people immediately began presuming that the medical problems are a cover story; that something more serious prompted the switch. This article in a British newspaper says that Dreyfuss was just not ready.

So now the speculation can shift over to wondering how much it cost to get his replacement. I'm guessing that after twelve weeks at Drury Lane, they'll be replacing the "Drury" part of the signs with "Nathan."

• Posted at 1:23 AM · LINK