Tetherd Cow Ahead

If it wasn’t for the constant company of my spammer scammer friends, what a lonely person I would be! Well, that’s obviously what they think anyway, judging by their eagerness to fill my inbox with their irksome pleadings and promises. One of the things that really does continue to amuse me, however, is the impressive level of desperate creativity that the Have I Got a Deal For YOU!-type scammers show in their introductory lines.

Spam pal George Nduka has been to one too many Mark Jansen ‘Brainpower’ seminars:

Pardon me for not having the pleasure of knowing your mindset before making you this offer and it is utterly confidential and genuine by virtue of its nature.

Well George, my mindset is that I think all spammers are the scum of the earth, and I entertain a probably futile hope that, if you’d had the pleasure of knowing that beforehand, you might not have bothered writing to me.

Mrs Ella Randy adopts a now well-worn approach:

It is indeed my pleasure to write you this letter, which I believe will be a surprise to you as we have never met before, and I am deeply sorry if I have in any manner disturbed your privacy.

Not sorry enough to stay out of my life, unfortunately.

Mr Gregory Adom goes one step further than being merely ‘pleased’:

I am enchanted using this tremendous opportunity to converse with you in this medium of communication.

Enchanted! Well then! I think it is extremely probable that Mr Adom thinks the internet is powered by magic. Allen Azuka takes a rather more strident tone:

KINDLY ATTEND OT THIS. Be informed that my previous mail was not responded and do not know what to take your non response to mean.

Mr Azuka, I think you can take it that my non-response means that I think you are an annoying shit-head and have no desire ot have anything ot do with you.

Burgi Nitzmann attempts the chummy approach:

Hi, how’s your work doing? The answer is quite clear. You’re sleepy, man, I can tell! But take a deep breath, lot’s of people have the similar problems.

Lot’s of people have problems with the use of apostrophe’s too, Burgi, especially spammer’s.

Al Walid Khalid is concerned about ethical matters:

Do accept my sincere apologies if my mail does not meet your personal ethics

Apologies accepted. Now go and kill yourself.

Speaking of killing oneself, Zubair Hoyett affects an air of desperation:

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here are bad.

It has evidently not occurred to you that if you wish to achieve both those objectives, Mr Hoyett, you’d have to do them in the reverse order. Not that we care either way. Actually, come to think if it, scratch that – I have sympathy for your dog, at least. It’s not his fault that he ended up with a scumbag. Maybe he’ll find a better owner once you’re dead.

Spam buddy Hunke Heinz has been smoking a few too many coleus leaves:

Oko kocky ma podobnou stavbu jako oko lidske, nicmene jsou zde. ((Babelfish tells me that this Czech phrase means something like ‘A cat’s eye has a similar structure to the human eye, though there are some notable differences’ adding a whole new level of clarity to Hunke’s communiqué…)) Hello mr. Look! You may 12 lobe on new stimulator?

Hunke’s offer, such as it was, rambled on in a similar fashion. I’m not even sure what he wanted from me. Maybe he is just plain mad. I like the appellation though and may henceforth be addressed, by anyone who cares to do so, as Mr Look.

Mrs Susan Shabang has roped the whole family into her spamming schemes:

After careful consideration with my children, we resolved to contact you for your most needed assistance in this manner.

… and Ikuku Masanga has plans for me to change professions:

I have decided to use this medium to extend a prosperous business hand shake with you and welcome you in the Oil & Gas industry.

Petros Alexandrou thinks it’s Christmas already:

Compliments of the season and good day.

…unless he’s just talking about Autumn.

Mr Liu Yan begins his offer:

This mail might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore it as frivolous could come into your mind, but please consider it a divine wish and accept it with a deep sense of humility.

I’m sorry Mr Liu – the temptation to ignore it as frivolous came into my mind quicker than my desire to consider it as a divine wish and I trashed it. And generally, the only deep sense of anything that I get from any spam is a profound loathing of the perpetrator.

Mr Adrian Davidson is a little too personal for my taste:

How is your day? I am writing with utmost Confidentiality and Trust confides in you; I wish to hint you briefly of my Biography, so that we can both be familiar with each other.

Mr Davidson, I wish to hint you briefly that I don’t want you attempting to be familiar with me in any way at all.

And as for Amar Afiz:

Dear beloved one. As you read this, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday.

I hope that day comes very quickly and painfully for you, Mr Afiz, and believe me, I won’t feel in the least bit sorry when it does.

And finally (until the next flood of rubbish comes down the pike) Mr Philip Ozuol thinks he has transcended the virtual:

This letter will definitely be amazing to you because of its realistic value.

As far as I can tell, Mr Ozuol, the realistic value of this letter is well shifted into the negative, and so its amazement factor is not all that impressive. In other words, if you’d not send it, I’d be having a much better day.

It seems to me that these scamspammers are so enthusiastic about their letter writing and the making of acquaintances that there should be some venue where they can all get together and annoy one another, rather than take it out on me. A Facebook for spammers! ‘Spambook’, perhaps. It could only be a good thing.

While we’re on the subject of television, in the last couple of weeks I’ve also caught a few episodes of a show called ‘Criss Angel: Mindfreak’ playing on A&E. Now, for anyone who doesn’t know, Criss Angel is an illusionist in the tradition of David Copperfield, Doug Henning, Chung Ling Soo (William Robinson) and Harry Houdini. That is, a Grand Illusionist. He does the kind of BIG magic that requires a stage crew of a few dozen people, a room at a venue in Las Vegas and (in case you haven’t inferred it) money.

Criss Angel’s schtick is to attempt shake off the stuffiness and shmaltz of his tuxedoed predecessors and instill into his act a semblance of anarchistic punk, ((Indeed, his logo is the anarchist ‘A’ in a circle, with a kind of Nike-slash flourish.)) but it is, the leather and the chains and the bandana notwithstanding, exactly the same kind of spectacular theatrical routine that has defined stage magic for the best part of a century. You know the sort of thing: cut a girl in half with a circular saw/escape from a locked box dangling over a precipice/make people disappear.

I want to say from the outset that Criss Angel is VERY good at what he does. And what he does, in exact terms, is to make people believe things that seem contrary to the laws of reality. The key words here are ‘believe’ and ‘seem’. ((Criss Angel’s Las Vegas show is, in fact, called ‘Believe’. The word, etched in twenty foot high letters on billboards across the city, seems more like a brute-force brainwashing command than an advertisment.))

Watching his show is a revealing exercise in how the impressionable mind works, and an excellent disciplinary pastime for the rational thinker.

Now I don’t know how Criss Angel accomplishes many of his illusions. I’d be disappointed if I did, because I really like good stage illusionists and I expect them to be able to outwit me if they’re worth their paycheck. But there’s one thing I can tell you for sure: Criss Angel, when performing his act – despite his frequent declarations to the contrary – does not care too much about telling ‘the truth’. ((Just like Britain’s Derren Brown who masterfully uses any method available to trick his audience.)) And neither do his stage crew or his film crew. What you see on Mindfreak is rarely what you have been told you’re seeing. ((I need to point out here that this is not surprising – stage illusionists excel in leading you to believe things that aren’t true. It is, after all, their job. Criss Angel takes things one step further by exploiting the ‘natural’ trust that people have when they see something on television. For some reason it doesn’t occur to most people that a magician on tv would use the medium itself to trick them. Think again folks!))

Here’s an example: Criss appears outside his permanent ‘magic’ home at the Luxor in Las Vegas, with a crowd of ‘random’ bystanders. He reaches into a bush and introduces them to a ‘pet’ that the management of the Luxor won’t let him keep in the hotel: a large scorpion. It’s a real live scorpion for sure – there’s no doubt about that.

The onlookers ook and gasp as he lets it crawl over his hands, and then, with a nice piece of sleight-of-hand, magics it away in a puff of smoke. But the real trick is yet to come. Angel reaches over and grabs an attractive (of course) girl from the crowd and gives her a big kiss, whereupon she mugs wide-eyed and ‘surprised’ and opens her mouth to reveal the scorpion crawling out.

This is one of the the oldest and most frequently-employed gambits in the book of magic – the girl, despite her convincing acting, is indisputably an accomplice. There is simply no other way to achieve a illusion like this. You can’t get a seven-inch-long scorpion into an unsuspecting girl’s mouth without her consent. I know – I’ve tried. ((That’s a joke.)) Seriously – this is the only way this trick can work, and even though no-one wants to believe it, magicians make frequent use of accomplices. ((If you still don’t believe me, watch the video very carefully – despite what Mr Angel wants you to think, there is no way he passed the scorpion from his mouth to the girl’s mouth with that surprisingly chaste ‘stage’ kiss. His ‘mouth acting’ of regurgitating the scorpion is, of course, purely a distraction. Therefore there are really only two possibilities: the scorpion got into the girl’s mouth via real magic, or, when the camera wasn’t on her, and when the crowd was totally engrossed with Angel making the first scorpion disappear, the girl was surreptitiously stuffing a second scorpion into her gob. You decide which of those two scenarios seems most plausible…))

Now I don’t want to seem like I’m making light of Mr Angel’s accomplishments as an entertainer. As I said, he’s good at what he does. Many of his tricks (especially the smaller ones) are quite astonishing. ((Even if quite a few of them have a pedigree stretching back a good many decades.)) But when Criss Angel ranges through the adoring crowd after setting the scene for his next conjuration and proclaims that there’s ‘NO BULLSHIT!’ there’s one thing that’s for certain – the greatest piece of magic in his entire repertoire is his ability to convince his audience that that statement is true.

When I’m at home in my normal life, I don’t watch much tv, but living in LA without my family commitments I do end up with the odd spare half hour at the end of my day that needs to be filled with a little mindless distraction. And if mindless distraction is what you’re after, American television excels. For some reason ((I think it’s some vestige of a long-dashed hope that someday, somewhere, someone might actually make a decent science fiction movie – you know, one that is actually intelligent… Maybe that’s just too much to hope for.)) my brain is drawn to what used to be known as the Sci Fi Channel, but has recently been idiotically re-branded as SyFy. Judging by what SyFy dishes up, I can only assume this naff baby-speak appellation has been applied as an opening gambit in a profit-inspired move to drift the channel away from science fiction programming into a domain that consists of, well, anything that can be loosely assembled under the heading of ‘Crap’.

It’s a category which is headlined by one of SyFy’s own creations, Fact or Faked. Paranormal Files. ((It REALLY annoys me that there is no question mark after the ‘Faked’. If it’s not a question and is just a statement, why do we need a tv show, you morons?)) The premise of the show is this: a bunch of ‘experts’ review a selection of videos sent in each week by viewers, and then pick their favourites to ‘investigate’. The opening credit sequence, weighty with overblown seriousness, introduces us to the members of the intrepid Fact or Faked team:

Ben: Former FBI Agent

Bill: Lead Scientist

Jael: Journalist

Larry: Special Effects Expert

Chi Lan: Photography Expert

Austin: Stunt Expert

Call me shallow, but the very first time I watched the program I took an instant dislike to both Chi Lan and Jael – the former because she’s an opinionated airhead and the latter because I hate her name. Larry is basically an overly-serious nerd, Austin is a gullible prat and Ben looks like he was roped into the whole debacle against his wishes ((No doubt so the producers could flaunt his FBI credentials…)) and is constantly planning his escape from the show.

But you will have sensed that I have saved my vitriol for Bill, the ‘scientist’. Simply put, Bill is an idiot. He is certainly not a scientist in any meaningful sense of the word.

In an effort of forbearance I will refrain from further description of the dumbness of the show itself, and instead just concentrate on a story that was on last night and one that I think demonstrates the full credentials of this team, who must surely all be card-carrying alumni of Scooby Doo University.

The story in question concerns a phenomenon called the Paulding Light Mystery. A video from YouTube shows a tree-lined hill with a bright light waxing and waning in a dusk sky. A ten second long grab (which Fact or Faked repeats over and over) features a mysteriously appealing visual effect as the light is refracted by atmospheric conditions or possibly some kind of lens aberration.

The Facts: If you go to a certain spot just outside the town of Paulding, Michigan, and look toward the south after dusk, you may see, depending on the weather conditions, a bright light just on the top of the tree line. The light may vary in brightness and duration and even sometimes in colour. It is an unusual phenomenon in the annals of the paranormal, in that the light appears quite reliably, with a frequency that has allowed a bit of a tourist industry to have risen around it. In other words, if you visit Paulding, there’s a pretty good chance that you too can see the light.

The Myth: The Paulding Light is said to be the spirit of a dead railway signalman who was crushed to death while trying to warn an oncoming train about another train stalled on the tracks ahead.

So there you have the setup. Let me try and give you some idea of how the Fact or Faked crew typically proceed when investigating something like the Paulding Light.

Dusk approaches. Jael, Austin and Bill have been assigned to this story. They arrive in their Scooby Doo Mystery Machine with a fully decked-out Paranormal Investigation Kit: gas sensors, Geiger counter, FLIR camera system, walkie talkies and a two-person mini all-terrain vehicle. People are already milling about in anticipation of being on television an appearance of the mysterious light.

To fill in some time the team does a couple of vox pops. First of all they badger some poor old lady into saying that she thinks that, yes, the Light is the spirit of the dead signalman. Her demeanour is less ‘genuine conviction’ than ‘How much are you going to pay me?’ Next, a rotund geeky chap steps up to the camera and says that, in his opinion, the Paulding Light might simply be car headlights. Uh-oh. A sensible person! Quick! Cut away to Austin leaping into the ATV – the Light has appeared!

This is as close as Fact or Faked ever comes to presenting anything like a balanced point of view.

The members of the Fact or Faked team then set about deploying their peculiar notion of what constitutes ‘science’ in an attempt to find an explanation for the phenomenon. In this show, Jael and Austin head off to the place where they assume the Light ‘must be’ and traipse around in the dark with the Geiger counter and the gas detector arriving at the conclusion that the Light isn’t produced by radioactivity or swamp gas. Around now I start throwing things at the television. Of course it isn’t, you pillocks – even the most obtuse of dunderheads could make a quick assessment of that theory and throw it out the window. It is obvious that you’d need a mighty outpouring of gas or nuclear energy to generate something as bright as the video shows – that’s not the kind of thing that goes undetected for 40 years. ((These people plainly haven’t got a clue about how nuclear fission works. The amount of radioactivity generated by something that could create a light as bright as the Paulding Light would have contaminated everything within several hundred miles. The lame Ghostbusters-style traipsing-around-in-the-dark-with-a-Geiger counter is nonsense of the highest order.))

Nitwits.

Austin then heads off to a local airport and, with an ultra bright electric torch, ((Now THIS is impressive – 25 million candlepower, according to Austin. Mind you, since ForF plays loose and fast with the facts everywhere else, I’m not sure we can take his word for it. This of course is one of the problems with a show like this – if there are actually any facts present, they get swamped under the tide of make-believe, rendering everything questionable…)) attempts to duplicate the phenomenon by getting a pilot in a light plane to fly low over the area in question. Well, it does make a bright light in the sky, but it’s plainly not the ground-level geographically fixed light that everyone is seeing. How is it that I don’t need to fly around in a plane to figure out that this is also not a plausible contender?

Then the team (grudgingly it seems to me) get down to the most frequently offered explanation for the Paulding Light – that it’s caused by car headlights from either US Highway 45, or the old Highway 45. They choose a segment of the highway that they have deemed the likely place for car headlights to be the culprit and Austin and Jael use their television credentials to get the cops to block off the road. They then drive back and forwards while communicating with Bill back at Sighting Central. Not a sausage. Bill can’t see them.

Instead of even contemplating that the spot they’ve chosen might actually be the wrong stretch of the road, the team hastily dismisses the car headlight explanation. Then, conveniently, before anyone can raise a finger in objection, the Paulding Light has reappeared. Now, with no explanation that satisfies the Fact or Faked ‘professionals’, it falls to Bill to suggest the next course of action.

I want to pause here for a moment and remind you that Bill is featured as the ‘lead scientist’ of this show. Are you containing that concept in your minds? Right then, lets forge on.

So, what is the best scientific strategy that Bill, lead scientist of Fact or Faked, can come up with at this juncture? I hope you don’t snort whisky out your nose like I did, when you learn that Bill’s suggestion is that they try EVP. ((You may remember that I discussed EVP at length on The Cow some time ago, including my personal experiences with it.)) Yes, that’s right, having ‘thoroughly exhausted all possibilities’, Bill, the scientist, determines that they should attempt to contact the Spirit World to find out more about the restless wraith of the phantom signalman. The next few minutes of the show, with Austin, Jael and Bill wandering around the Ottawa State Forest attempting to coax the spirit of a dead railway worker to leave a message on their audio recorders must rank as one of the most risible things I’ve ever witnessed on television. The Scooby Doo-ers seemed genuinely deflated when their recordings turned up nothing.

Jesus H Christ. What kind of dimwitted, brainless lunacy are these people peddling?

And that was where the show ended. With every single scientific explanation exhausted and without any spirit communications from the Ghostly Signalman to set the record straight, as far as Fact or Faked. Paranormal Files is concerned, the Paulding Light remains a total and unfathomable mystery…

The End.

So utterly unconvinced was I by the team’s findings that I immediately leapt from the couch and did what any sensible modern person would do – I searched for the full YouTube clip of the Paulding Light from which Fact or Faked clipped the brief segment that they used on the show.

I’ve embedded it below for your viewing pleasure. Just listen to the credulous amazement of the onlookers as they gaze upon the perplexing riddle of the Paulding Light! Ponder on why Fact or Faked chose to present to their audience the very small snippet at the head of the clip, rather than a bit at, oh, around about the 1 minute mark. Indeed – listen to someone on the audio track at around 3:15, tell you EXACTLY WHAT THE PAULDING LIGHT IS (as if you need to be told by that point because to any normal rational person it’s as obvious as a pig at a christening).

But heck – view the clip and make up your own mind about what the ‘mysterious’ Paulding Light might be: the spectre of a dismembered signalman? A nuclear explosion? Too much gas? I’m pretty sure you’re not going to come to the same conclusion as the insightful investigators from Fact or Faked.

How often have you noticed the numbers 11:11, 12:12, 10:10, 22:22, 12:34, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44 or 5:55 popping up all over the place? These number sequences are not necessarily only time prompts. They can also be number sequences, like 333, 1111 etc. To your mind, is this a coincidence, or are they too frequent to be random? Perhaps you are puzzled or amused by this phenomenon? Possibly even a little bit nervous?

The question everyone is asking is “What does 11:11 mean?” and “Is there a reason for this?”

That’s actually two questions, as it happens, and I have, in fact, asked each of them exactly NO times in my life in relation to any of the ideas advanced on 1111 Spirit Guardians, the website from which this information comes.

1111 Spirit Guardians is a spectacular outpouring of mindless claptrap, which sounds almost like it could have been put together by the same people who brought you Special One Drop Liquid.

The basic gist of the site is that celestial beings called Midwayers are communicating with humans by arranging numbers in such a way as to send ‘signals’ to chosen recipients via digital clocks. Apparently (according to the site) this is happening to a lot of people.

11:11 signals are driving me nuts!

This is a very typical comment from folks who reach this site.

I should think a more typical kind of comment is “Wow, what a load of gobbledygook”, or “Do you also sell Space Diamonds?”

So how is it that these strange supernatural entities have become fixated on the numbers 11.11?

O-k-a-y… So they asked the digital chip makers to reserve them a few numbers…? I guess that does demonstrate some forward thinking. It seems like a kind of a roundabout way of communicating though – why the rigmarole?

Hey – they started it! I would have simply suggested conversation in the first place. It’s extremely tedious trying to get your ideas across in clock language.

What do I have to do?

Acknowledge it out loud. Say – OK guys I hear you, tell me what you want. This speaking out loud is to get around the problem that Midwayers do not automatically have access to our thoughts.

Our clocks, yes, our thoughts, not so much.

What proof have you got?

Well it’s getting so that this is now pretty much proven, simply because by following our instructions, so many other people have found these guys, and talked with them.

Yeah, now see, that’s not actually proof. That’s just you telling us something that may or may not have any truth in it. Proof is independent of personal opinions. You might like to see if you can dig up any of that.

The 1111 Guardians site is, apparently, the handiwork of one George Barnard, a self-styled ‘psychic’ and writer. Barnard claims to be able to ‘channel’ the Midwayers and has transcribed a mind-boggling amount of material from them.

George has been dealing with these guys for over 60 years. He sees them, and talks to them. Mostly he sees with his spiritual eyes, but there have been cases of physical manifestation as well. You could not expect a psych (George) to believe in the voices in his head if they did not turn up physically, could you?

The last sentence seems somehow metaphysically tautological. I don’t think anyone would be surprised if George has, aside from seeing the Midwayers with his ‘spiritual’ eyes, ((I idly find myself wondering if you need to wear ‘spiritual spectacles’ if you’re shortsighted?)) talked to them, shaken hands with them or stayed up late playing poker with them.

What I find intensely (and fascinatingly) strange about people like George, is that they are somehow completely unable to understand the process whereby our brains naturally knit together unrelated incidents in an attempt to find some kind of cohesion for them. We all do this, but most of us realise that it’s just a curious ability that evolution has bestowed upon us – some vestige of our pattern-matching skills honed way back in our time on the veldt, that has now gone into idle mode and leaps to the fore when our brains aren’t productively engaged. Sure you notice the clock is on 11:11. It’s a pattern. As is 12:12 or 10:10 or 12:34 or a wide variety of other numerical combinations. Our brains like patterns. We notice patterns because they are pretty. If the number on the clock is 10:52 or 09:48 it doesn’t ‘stick’ as much and therefore goes completely unnoticed, like nearly every other set of numbers on a digital clock that denote the time. ((Unless of course the numbers 1052 or 948 have particular meanings for you, in which case, you might remember them.)) People like George are completely unable to see that this process is totally normal. It’s as if their world filters are somehow broken and they are obliged to find meaning in the vast drifts of meaningless trivia that the rest of us are able to tune out.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty making fun of people like George. It is quite probable that he has come to completely and profoundly believe his fantasy about Midwayers and meaningful communications via clocks. How is he different, for instance, from the millions upon millions who believe they have meaningful dialogue with a discarnate entity called ‘God’ who lives in a place called ‘Heaven’ and has an adversary called ‘Satan’? How is George’s communication with his Midwayers any different from praying to God, or taking Communion or giving Confession?

Yes, sometimes I feel a little guilty, but then I glance at my digital clock and see it flip over to 4:44. And then I realise that it’s the Midwayers telling me to make fun of him. And everything is alright again.

Some entertaining links from the 1111 Guardians Site:

•A conversation between George Barnard and what appears to be a veritable cavalcade of Midwayers, in which we find out that parrots like to chat with the spirits.

•A conversation with a Midwayer named Sharmon in which we see biblical links with this mythology (the Christian links are profuse throughout Mr Barnards’ channelling).

•A conversation with a Midwayer named Mathew that sounds rather a lot like stuff I’ve read from the Unarius Society.

•Some Midwayer humour (oh, my belly still aches from the laughing!)

Acowlyte Ed points me to this late breaking news from India which I just know you all need to know.

It appears that traffic police in Nagpur have decided that the best way to deal with road accident black spots is to install 30 centimeter tall pyramids by the roadside in order to disperse ‘negative energies’. Cos’ everyone knows that’s what causes car accidents right? Bad vibes. ((It could have NOTHING to do with the huge number of untrained Indian drivers, the atrocious roads or the lax law enforcement – factors that contribute to the deaths of more than 114,000 people in India every year…))

The brains behind this scheme is one Sushil Fatehpuria, an ‘expert’ in Vastu, a kind of Indian feng shui. “I will energise the pyramids,” he says,“I will transfer my positive thoughts into the pyramids.” Mr Fatehpuria has (quite surprisingly, considering) offered his services free of charge.

I can see the reasoning behind Mr Fatehpuria’s idea – how many car accidents did the Ancient Egyptians have? Yeah – find fault with that logic if you can!

Personally, though, I think that Mr Fatehpuria is not really making a big enough commitment. Why not campaign for the the introduction of pyramid-shaped cars such as the one above featured on Geekologie? ((You should go visit Geekologie – they are cool dudes.)) Surely these cars would be completely accident proof!!!! And why stop at piddly little 30cm pyramids? What about putting in some really big motherfuckers – that’s unquestionably going to have a much greater effect! I’m sure there are some statistics to show the dramatic reduction in car accidents in Cairo and Las Vegas!

Of course it is conceivable that pyramid power works on some kind of homeopathic principle, meaning that the smaller the pyramid is the more effective its powers. In which case, Mr Fatehpuria is wasting his money with those whopping huge 30cm behemoths.

Damn. This new-fangled science is SO confusing!

(Quite coincidentally, while I was writing this, a documentary came on the History channel about pyramids. The basic gist of it was that the Ancient Egyptians couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids with the technology they had to hand, and the purpose of these huge stone monoliths was to generate microwave power via hydrogen ((I didn’t quite follow that bit…)) to communicate with aliens. I have three observations to make:

1. This is not HISTORY.

2. I’m scared that because it’s on the HISTORY channel, some people think it is.

3. There is a lot of stuff on the HISTORY channel that is like this…)

You may remember, dear Acowlytes, that some time ago I was contacted by Kofi Anan from the United Nations, in regard to money that he owed me. Evidently, someone pointed out that he’d spelled his name incorrectly in that first communication, because he’d altered it in the email I received from him this morning: ((Heck – when in doubt, just add letters!))

From: Koffi Annan [idiotspammer@nevergiveup.ru]
Subject: ARE YOU DEAD OR ALIVE?CASE FILE:54AC003.
Date: 7 August 2010 8:00:03 PM PDT

Dear Beneficiary

We received an email that you are Dead and you asked one Mr. William Thomson to come and claim your funds related to your compensation funds $750,000.00 United State Dollars that has been with us since two weeks now and he has also agreed to pay for the fund release charges of US$150. ((If I ever catch that Mr William Thomson there’ll be hell to pay!))

So I am writing you to know if you are DEAD OR ALIVE, if you do not reply back before 48hrs we will have no other alternative than to believe that you are truly dead.

Usually, at this point in the post I try and make a witty or scathing observation about spammers and their mental capacities but on this occasion I feel that anything I might say would be entirely superfluous.