Tetherd Cow Ahead

You know those daft motivational posters that have been well-and-truly pwned by Despair.com? Well, a guy named Douwe Osinga, who works for Google, has made a fun web time-waster called Auto Poster that allows you to make your very own inspirational pontifications to send to your friends and colleagues. Just as I am doing for you, dear Acowlytes.

The app draws from Google’s vast cataloguing of the cyberworld for its images. ((Be warned – the images are selected via Google’s Image Search, and the intellectual property is likely to be reserved. Whatever the crap that actually means in this day and age…)) All you need to do is provide the wisdom. Auto Poster even thoughtfully chooses appropriate text colours for you!

Go now. Waste time. Post your efforts back here and make me laugh.

Hmmm. Smells mostly like bullshit to me…

Actually, only one of those three mentioned things has any smell at all and I don’t think I’m alone in not having the faintest inkling of what a palm tree smells like. ((It can’t smell like coconut, otherwise they’d have said ‘smells like coconut’. Surely.))

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.

Even though I’m very fond of the ‘yarn’ type joke, I think my favourite kind of prepared humour is the one-liner. There is consummate comedy skill in creating a joke that is as funny as possible in the fewest number of words. Many of the best one-liners are crafted in the ubiquitous someone-walks-into-a-bar format, and I’m sure you know a few. My favourite of these is:

A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entrendre and the bartender gives her one.

The briefest one I know is:

A baby seal walks into a club…

One-liners are not limited to the ‘bar’ joke though. Another one of my favourites you’ve all heard (and I like to think you laughed at it, even if Yuliya didn’t):

A man walks up to a Buddhist hot dog seller and says ‘Make me one with everything’.

So, faithful Acowlytes – your favourite? Remember – one line (my purist aesthetic decrees this should be one sentence, although I know there are those who disagree with this strict ruling).

Anomalous Radar Activity Around Melbourne
I just love it when event transpire such that I can bring you two of my favourite subjects in one Tetherd Cow Ahead post. Today’s is such a post and it’s brought to you by the Melbourne Age which is carrying an article that combines the stupidity of the newspaper business with the beliefs of a loony. It runs under the headline ‘Weather has conspiracy theorists strung out’

INEXPLICABLY odd images ((Why, why, why do reporters continue to use this kind of language? The images are ENTIRELY explicable in any number of ways. They are ONLY inexplicable in the mind of Colin Andrews. Stephen Cauchi, you are an IDIOT.)) on Bureau of Meteorology radar. Cyclones off the Australian coast and the most intense storm to hit Melbourne in living memory. A controversial US military facility in Alaska suspected of research into weather control … It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi conspiracy thriller.

Yes, there’s no quibbling there – that’s exactly what that hodge-podge of unrelated factoids sounds like (although I’d be inclined to add the word ‘bad’ just before ‘sci-fi’). So the implication here is that it’s going to turn out to be The Truth, right, as opposed to the fiction of a ‘sci-fi conspiracy thriller’? Well, you’d be totally wrong if you were thinking that.

The story goes on to detail the following points:

•The Bureau of Meteorology radar has been recording ‘a number of very strange patterns – rings, loops, starbursts’ around Melbourne.

•There have been some big storms here.

•The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Alaska has powerful transmitters and radars.

From this, the correspondent spins up a vacuous story that says in essence that websites ‘specializing in pseudoscience’ have ‘leapt on the notion’ that the three things above are connected and the ‘government’ is trying to control the weather.

Is anybody else feeling the need to stick their head in a bucket of ammonia?

To simplify: this is a story which is actually just a free plug for the nutty ideas of lunatics, while all the while pretending to ‘news’ by distancing itself from aforementioned lunatics. And, to put the icing on the cake, the story is embellished with an image of the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, which has exactly NO relevance to anything at all.

As I’m reading this, I find myself thinking ‘Who the hell is responsible for this guff and how do they get to be working on a news desk?’ So I scroll up to the byline. It will probably come as no surprise to you at all to find that the literary genius behind this story is none other than reporter Stephen Cauchi, who has provided us with much mirth previously here on The Cow with his non-news style of journalism.

Which brings me to the second of my favourite Tetherd Cow subjects – insane people. Mr Cauchi’s main source for the above-mentioned conspiracy turns out to be someone who is very familiar to anyone who’s spent time around the pseudoscience traps – a fellow who goes by the name of Colin Andrews. Now, just to set you up, Mr Andrews has about ZERO credibility as any kind of authoritative source. In fact, if you were actually trying to find a less credible spokesperson (for anything except nutty ideas I guess) you’d have your work cut out for you.

Colin Andrews first came to prominence as an ‘expert’ on crop circles back in the 1980s, and contrary to all common sense, still believes that they are made by ‘aliens’. Since that time, he has advanced all manner of implausible conspiracies across numerous disciplines. In this case, Mr Andrews’ ‘government weather control’ paranoia centers on some ‘anomalous’ radar screen captures from earlier this year when the south coast of Australia suffered some unusually fierce storm activity. This is a couple of them:

Well, yeah, sure, these ones are from the Bureau of Meteorology radar in Broome in Western Australia, but close enough, right?

These are the ‘inexplicably’ odd radar images to which Mr Cauchi refers in his first paragraph. Rather than conclude (as might any rational person) that the radar images are simply quite explicable as imperfections in the way that a meteorological radar functions, Mr Andrews’ brain oscillates to the most wildly improbably alternative – that the images are some kind of government weather control experiment that has been cunningly contrived to appear like a radar imperfection.

Mr Andrews persists in this belief even when told as much from someone who works for the Bureau of Meteorology:

Re: The round radar prob in WA, it is a BOM Radar unit which has its lower rain level threshold setup too low, ie, too sensitive, which gives the noisy radar reading like that. Nothing to do with HAARP, which, as you know, is in Alaska. I see images like this a lot, as I work for the Bureau of Meteorology in QLD.

And you know what? You too can see images like this on Australian meteorological radars if you feel like clicking on every radar station that the BOM offers. If you think like Mr Andrews, you’re likely to find a LOT of government hanky panky. It’s a wonder the government has any time for actual governing.

After giving plenty of airing to Colin Andrews’ hair-brained ideas, the Age article goes on to seek opinions from authoritative skeptics, who quite reasonably call the idea ‘silly’. We could have started with that conclusion and made the whole story one sentence long, viz:

We asked a sensible person, Mr Tim Mendham (president of the Australian Skeptics), what he thought of noted loony Colin Andrews’ idea that the government is controlling the weather, and he said it was silly.

I guess that doesn’t make for ‘pizazz’ but the content is exactly the same as the story as it stands.

Anyhoo, after a lot of stupid waffle, the article rounds off with:

The Sunday Age tried to contact Mr Andrews, who is based in the US, but there was no reply. That could be because, according to his website, he was in Oregon for last weekend’s 11th annual UFO Festival.

Smirk smirk smirk. Well if that’s your attitude Mr ‘cynical’ Stephen Cauchi, why are you making this nitwit’s ideas out to have any credence at all?

It makes me feel quite nauseous to note that this was No. 1 on the ‘most read’ list of Top National Articles in The Age today.

Well done Melbourne Age! Another pin on the board for the Great De-Braining of the Human Race. ((Or, one optimistically hopes, another nail in the coffin of the old news media.))

UPDATE: At the time I wrote this yesterday, there were no comments on the article. Now there are 19. After reading them I actually feel like walking over to the train line near my house and throwing myself in front of the 10:15 to Flinders St Station. WHY WAS I BORN INTO A WORLD WITH THIS MUCH STUPID?!

The comments are now closed and the one I left was evidently deemed unsuitable for inclusion – evidently it made a little too much sense.

‘Single mum fleeced of $8700 through Nigerian eBay scam.’

So screams the headline in this story from The Melbourne Age this morning, the exclamation mark surely struck off only minutes before it went to press.

When I started reading the article I had sympathy for the ‘single mum’ in question – apparently she’d been attempting to sell a PlayStation on eBay when she fell for a scam involving ‘paying for the shipping costs’ of the Nigerian buyer. Well, sure, to you and me even the very word ‘Nigerian’, when associated with the internet and monetary transactions, starts ringing alarm bells, but hey, not everyone out there in intertubes land is a savvy geek, right?

Those Nigerian bastards picking on our dinkum single mums! Why, I oughta…!

However, reading on, and picking out the threads of actual story from the sob story, I found my sympathy waning somewhat as the details emerged. It turns out that our poor single mum did in fact become suspicious of the transaction at some stage and contacted Consumer Protection, who told her in no uncertain terms to stop dealing with the fraudsters. She made her first major mistake at that point by completely disregarding the Consumer Protection advice and sending the Nigerians a copy of the email containing it.

Upon forwarding this email to the scammers, she then received fake emails back from them featuring WA ScamNet and WA government logos, which advised her to co-operate with Nigerian authorities.

The hoax escalated when the woman received a phony eBay email saying the case had been reported to Nigerian Police who then emailed her to say that the fraudster had been arrested.

Later, the fake police email told her that the courts and president of Nigeria had awarded her compensation amounting to $US250,000 ($278,000).

Aha. Now even the dimmest of us is stuffing cotton balls in his ears to drown out the clanging sound. It doesn’t take much to predict the next step. In order for our poor battling mum to get this $US250,000 she was asked to send the ‘Nigerian Government’ a ‘bank transfer fee’ of $US7000 so that the money could be ‘released’ to her.

I don’t know about you, but I just can’t see myself sending off a cool $7k to someone in Nigeria who I don’t know – someone whom I’ve never even heard of – on a promise, even if they do have a nice Nigerian Government letterhead. ((The matter of the SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLAR bank fee notwithstanding. It’s no wonder the Nigerians need money if their banks are screwing them that bad!)) But that’s exactly what Ms Single Mum went ahead and did. I think it’s reasonable to assume that she didn’t just have a spare $7k lying around the house, so she plainly went to some effort to round up the money. WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?! Well, I guess that was actually a rhetorical question – what she was thinking was ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I’m gonna be RICH on Nigerian money!!!’ ((Even though I don’t want to seem to be endorsing these Nigerian scamsters, you really have to admire how they’re evolving. Now that they realise that everyone is onto their scam they’re turning the scam itself into a scam. ‘The Nigerian government is SO distressed at all the problems caused by these terrible terrible scammers that we really want to give you money to compensate you!’))

Apparently, once the situation became plain she told Consumer Protection staff she felt ‘violated’ by the scam, but I suggest that what she really felt violated by was the realization that her own greed had gotten her into deep shit. People! I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – if something on the internet (or anywhere) seems too good to be true, it probably is!

The real flub here, though, must fall in the laps of the press (again). What is it with the ‘victim’ story here? Who the fuck cares if the woman in question is a ‘single mum’ and what does it have to do with anything AT ALL? I guess a headline that says ‘Gullible & Greedy Aussie Woman Keeps Nigerian Scammers in Clover’ doesn’t tug the heartstrings quite as poignantly. The lesson for us all is surely not simply caveat emptor but is also writ clear in the wisdom of the great Lao-Tzu:

There is no greater calamity than lavish desire.
There is no greater curse than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.