Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts

Sep 24, 2014

Spot the difference

We had this interview on The Way She Writes about "linguistically challenged" writers like us, where we were saying typical &t-things like...
I am (and have always been) fairly absent-minded. Absentmindedness is a strength, I think, not a weakness, in general it’s a good thing to be somewhere else with your mind.
...and there was this author picture...


...and people responded with nervous emails along the lines of...what's your secret, what's your secret...?

Here it is (the secret):


Spot the difference.

PS: Cathy Ulrich from Hollywood Hates Me writes: "What difference? I can see no difference."

Jul 25, 2014

"That's not enough!" (French for beginners)

Please read this...it's only one paragraph  from the London Review of Books connecting our recent Foucault post (by Mr. E.) with our own faux-French background with our quest for happy endings (just so that you know, Alain Robbe-Grillet was the inventor of the nouveau roman)...please read this:

Alain Robbe-Grillet

"By now, most readers in France had ceased to care [about Robbe-Grillet]; even his intellectual champions lost interest, although  [Roland] Barthes stood by him. ‘Transgression’ had come to mean l’écriture féminine and gay erotica; Robbe-Grillet’s hetero-sadist fixations looked decidedly démodé, quite possibly reactionary. (Fredric Jameson wondered whether his books had become ‘unreadable since feminism’.) At the party for  Barthes’s 1977 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault confronted Robbe-Grillet: ‘I have told you this already and I will say it again, Alain: when it comes to sex, you are, and always have been misguided!’ Barthes rose to his defence, reminding Foucault that Robbe-Grillet was, at the very least, a pervert. Foucault replied: ‘Ça ne suffit pas!’"

Sep 16, 2012

Why have they stopped wearing white collars? (reposted)

Nigerian scam poster Like everybody else, we're getting these letters from Nigeria. Here's the latest (from .pl, actually, that's Poland, I think, the full email address is: mrzacom@gazeta.pl --- in case you feel the need to reply):

Dear MICHAEL
Please pardon me for not having the liberty of knowing your mindset before writing you this letter without any formal introduction.My name is Mr. Zaco Mohammed I am the present branch Manager in one of the Barclay's Bank here in London I write to solicit for your partnership in claiming of $15.million usd from an account at our Head Office .
The aforementioned fund $15.million usd is my share percentage from a Gold Mining project that i helped financed, influentially.
Furthermore, as a Manager in the bank, I am not allowed to be part of such a deal, because it's against my company's professional practice policy. So I am compelled to ask that you stand on my behalf and receive this fund into
any account that is solely controlled by you. I will compensate you with 35% of the total amount involved as gratification for being my partner in the transfer.
Please contact me immediately you received this mail
Yours Truly,
Mr.Zaco Mohammed

Do we have to point out what's wrong with this letter---besides the ploy? Everything is off, style ("MICHAEL"), spelling (the first person pronoun is not capitalized), interpunction (spaces between the last letter and a dot, for example), grammar ("that i helped financed"), idiomatic usage  ("for not having the liberty of knowing your mindset") etc. And it's always thus.

Who is writing these letters? In my days, we were told with great fanfare of highly intelligent---that was always the qualifier: "highly intelligent"---individuals that were cheating unsuspecting victims out of their money by means of wit, deception, guile, and other nonviolent forms of behavior, all this while the perpetrators were wearing white collars.
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