Hassling spammers for fun and profit

So I got one of the Nigerian-style fraud emails a few minutes ago (though this one, technically, by the TLD, seems to come from Denmark, it's the same basic 'you've won much money; please send us your personal info so we can con you out of sending us your life savings and/or do some identity theft stuff' thing).

Normally, I ignore these. I get so many. It's the background noise of the net, when you've got email accounts linked to highly public addresses, as do I.

But somehow, today, I decided I was in the mood for some correspondence with a Danish con artist. I like to enlarge my circle of acquaintances, now and then.

So I responded. The spam (or an excerpt thereof) and my response follow:

From: Anthony Arinze
To: C8H10N4HO2O2

I am Barrister Anthony Arinze a legal prationer, a personal lawyer to my client late Engr Willy Bubenik who made a bequest to you.I am very happy to contact you and also would like speak with you. however , I now write on behalf of the Trustees and Executor of the estate of Late Engr. Willy Bubenik, I once again try to notify you as my earlier letter to you through the Post Office was returned undelivered. I hereby attempt to reach you via your e-mail address...

From: C8H10N4HO2O2
To: Anthony Arinze

Ya know, dude, if you're really gonna have any hope of defrauding anyone, you're really gonna have to work on your spelling. Ain't no one gonna buy a presumed barrister whose legal secretary can't apparently spell 'practitioner'.

But I'll tell you what. For a modest upfront fee of 1,000 Euros and a mere 5% of future gains from this letter (off the gross, dude, as I don't feel like auditing your 'expenses'), I'll spellcheck your letter for you.

Savages in this town.

(Walks off muttering)

I'll let you know if I hear back from him.

In Hajibirgit's fields

... So it's now the eleventh month, the eleventh day, the eleventh hour.

I really have nothing to say. Maybe I'll do two minutes without blogging in recognition. Somehow, it almost seems obscene in the current context to post a picture of a poppy or somesuch--or even the fields of Europe in 1918, under grey skies.

You wanna honour the spirit of the day? Go look at some of the photos of kids and other civilians killed by cluster bombs and mines (anywhere this has happened, which is plenty of places) in the last year or so. And get back to me. I'd search 'em out and post them for you, I would, but frankly, I've had enough for now. And I just ate.

Kinky sex for electoral healing

Now this bit from Salon has to be the best bit of advice on recovering from the electoral blues I've seen yet. From the highlights:

... Holing up alone and abstaining from nooky is letting the terrorists -- and the abstinence advocates -- win! Plus, what better way to annoy the family values brigade than having really kinky sex. Make like Toni Bentley and celebrate your right to sodomy, now legal in all 50 states, though, let's be honest, probably not for long! Take a page from Paris Hilton's book and flip on a camera. Distribute it on the Internet, tell your friends. Feel free to dress as your favorite Bush twin...

...Read a book. And when you're done with it, donate it to your local public school. Start with "The Origin of Species" and move on through some other tomes sure to expand the minds -- if not the church-sanctioned morality -- of the young. Yeah yeah, make sure to include the standard baddies: Margaret Sanger's "Family Limitations," "Huck Finn" and "Go Ask Alice." But look to some of the lesser knowns for more nuanced inspiration: Pick up Maurice Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen," where Mickey shows his willy, and Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," which covers the poet's sorrow over seeing his nation divided and gay sex! Reread the whole Judy Blume canon (masturbation, sex, periods, erections, birth control, religious questioning, yadda yadda yadda) and then box it up and ship it off to a sixth grade class. You can scare yourself silly all over again by reading Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale" and then make a gift of it to the local junior high...

-- from Perverse Pleasure is the Best Revenge, in Salon

(Snif!) It's beautiful...

My daughter the road warrior

So my little one and myself have just convinced ourselves we've settled in for the evening when the phone rings. It's my lovely wife, in need of a ride.

The little one, normally fairly charitable for a four year old, isn't into this. She's comfy, there's no talking her into joining me for the short jaunt to pick up her mother, even if it is getting kinda dark (in this burgh, in the winter, it's pretty much always dark), and mommy's kinda tired.

So I come up with an incentive--one of my laptops, powered by a 12V adapter, playing one of her favourite Land Before Time DVDs.

Works marvellously. But it's awfully funny peeking in the rear-view mirror to see my little one sitting in her car seat, a laptop in her lap, gazing intently at the screen, lookin' for all the world like any of the businessfolk at the airport checking their email by wireless. Gotta wonder what anyone in the next lane seein' that must have thought too.

Sigh. My daughter the road warrior. They grow up so fast.

In one sentence

So I've been lurking around a few YA authors' and agents' blogs now and then, looking for a little insight into the business. Holly Black, one such author, is spreading a meme started amongst others she reads: post one sentence from a current work, something representative or intriguing.

Okay. Guess I'm there.

Now it might be cheating, though only a bit, using this, as this work is currently in the 'done until someone who wants it wants changes' stage, and I'm not really doing any current work on it, apart from occasional bouts in which minor refinements occur to me. But I think I'm going with:

[She] sang a strange, wild lament, her voice surprisingly clear and high, turning the melody into a ragged breath of beauty.

And I'd like brownie points here, insofar as I honestly stuck to the one sentence thing. Had a buncha passages with a few more in them which I liked a bit better.

But hey. There are rules, people.

Van Gogh's Submission

So Theo Van Gogh's Submission (yes, the film that got him killed) is available for download (warning re previous link: 27 Mb A/V file). It really has a lovely look, and some remarkable moments. Including such lines as:

...you remain silent, like the grave I long for.

It's also, I'd say, really got some power. Give it a look if you can handle a 27 Mb download. I was able to convince MPlayer (Linux) to play it; I'd think it should be a cinch for Windows and Mac folk.

In de ghettoooooohhh...

Thank you, Cartman.

So as some of you know, I've been chipping away at selling a novel recently. Or, more accurately, I've been chipping away at getting someone else to sell it. As in, I've been trying to find an agent I can convince to represent my sorry butt. A publisher friend (you know who you are) advised me to give this a shot at least, as its his feeling that in the probably rather commercial world in which the book I just produced is mostly likely to find a home, promoting it on your own is only so practical. And let's face it, I've never really been a sales kinda guy.

It's a bit of a pain, needless to say. As noted in previous posts, the agent thing can be a key in the trunk dilemma for someone trying to sell their first book. As in: it's hard to get an agent if you haven't sold a book and hard to sell a book until you've got an agent. Neither is impossible of course. Just dicey. (And I'd like to think a few years as a published reporter and occasional freelance fiction guy might have some weight, though that remains to be seen.)

In the case of the thing I'm trying to get sold, I've been getting some ghetto anxiety over the whole thing too.

The trouble is: I went and wrote, for my first completed novel, a book that leans heavily on the fantasy tradition, and a book I conceived principally as appealing to the young adult demographic slice.

Right. "Leans heavily on the fantasy tradition." Let's just say it:

It's a fantasy novel. Pretty much archetypally so.

There. I said it. I'm so proud.

Why did I write such a thing? I've no idea, really. I'd never really considered doing so, before I sat down at the keyboard, though I did read my share of them as a kid. Somehow, it just seemed to be the book I felt like doing at the time. I'd taken a shot or two at more clearly 'literary' books, and still think I might have a few in me, but I haven't yet drawn one of those to a satisfying close. The kids' book, somehow, it got done.

The trouble with that, however, is I've now gotta find an agent who'll represent such a book. And it seems to be looking more and more as though such agents are a bit specialized. And those that don't do those things, including folk who've sold books I rather liked, and who I'd love to have represent me, seem to me to be rather quick to turn up their nose at such things. I've a few 'no thanks' slips sitting around here now that seem to say so rather clearly, I'm afraid.

Thus my ghetto anxiety. I really don't want, based on one book (or, okay, a few; as the kids who read this for test really liked this one, I'm thinking I might give them a sequel; it had always struck me as a sensible enough course) to wind up pigeonholed as a fantasy author, or a young adult author. As delighted as I'd be to make the people who read such things happy with this work, I do not wish anyone to assume I'm a one-trick pony based on it.

I suppose at this stage in my writing career (as in, the stage at which I really don't have one, or at best, the stage at which I have a rather rusty one left sitting some years back), I should probably just worry about getting any kind of attention from the publishing world, agent or press, and worry later that I might turn into the literary equivalent of one of the poor beknighted Star Trek actors, who will never, whatever they do, escape the shadow of a show they did 40 years ago. But you know me. Why worry about one thing when you've ample processing power to worry about several simultaneously?

I mean, I gotta do what I do best.

The hell of it is, if you ask me (and okay, I'm biased), I'd like to think the book really has a shot at overturning some of the perfectly valid reasons people do sniff a bit at fantasy. Yes, I used a very traditional (even hackneyed) fantasy plot line. But I always saw that as a way of making it accessible, and as a way of giving myself a nice, obvious framework on which to hang the thing, rather than as craven exploitation of a cliche. There is still a decent literary novel only cursorily hidden in there, if you ask me, with some reasonably involved characterization. It sure as hell ain't Prince Valiant. Or at least I sure as hell hope it's not.

Not sure what I'm gonna do about it, if anything. Just muttering to myself, I guess.

Probably, partly, it's submission fatigue. I really do deeply hate the business of making queries, sending queries, tracking queries that never return due to the vagaries of international mail and who knows what else.

I am still motivated to get this damn thing out to someone who might be able to promote or publish it... But let's face it. It ain't my favourite activity.

Anyway. Back to the trenches. Hand me my shovel, please.

Kona

So the marketing folk at a company I consult for poured me a cup of Kona this morning... had some left over from a promotional drive... ver' tasty.

Yes, that is a caffeine molecule in the background of this page, and yes, I do dig good coffee. Can't claim to be a truly literate connoisseur who can go on and on about a coffee's nose and character, but like a certain school of art fancier, I do know what I like (besides bein' damn capable with an espresso machine, if I do say so myself).

The Kona, I can report, was cool. Though I wish I'd known it was coming. Woulda brought in my french press; we coulda prepared it right.

Got from that onto the subject of Kopi Luwa, which yes, some day, I suppose I'm gonna have to try so I can give a fair opinion. Though honestly, it's not at the top of my list of things to do.

No, it's not that the stuff really is passed through the digestive tract of a civet (yes, a mammal, with, one must presume, the usual urea-style nitrogenous wastes down toward the nether end of the same digestive tract) that puts me off. I'm sure they clean it fairly well. It's that honestly, it sounds suspiciously to me as if the stuff's reputation has more to do with a certain pretension to the exotic, and with the high cost, than with the stuff's actual flavour. I note that the reviewers quoted in the Telegraph seemed less than impressed... Kinda sounds like the yuppie phenomenon again: it's expensive. Ridiculously so. Therefore, it must be good...

Still. I will put it on the list, get around to trying it sometime. I mean hell, I'll try anything once.

Go Amy

Democracy Now today:

For the past week backers of the Bush administration have attempted to describe last week's election as a major victory for Bush that gave the president a political mandate. In fact, it was one of the closest presidential races of the past century. The election would have turned if only 70,000 Bush supporters in Ohio had switched to John Kerry. Bush won by 24 electoral votes, the second closest electoral margin since 1916. Only the 2000 race was closer. And while losing, John Kerry received more votes than any previous winning presidential candidate ever has--including Presidents Clinton and Reagan.

Indeed.

Not that such inconsequential things as the facts are gonna stop BushCo™ from arguing the American people are now behind them, whatever incredibly, monumentally destructively hare-brained scheme they might choose to pursue.

Atrios on the voting thing

...sez:

Yes, there are serious problems with the way we count the votes in this country. Yes, no electronic voting machines without paper trails should exist. Yes, all machine counted votes should have random audits to ensure their reliability even if the election isn't thought to be close. Yes, no one should stand in line for 4 hours to vote. Yes, the media should be demanding, and the authorities providing, answers to obviously legitimate questions about various anomalies, such as more people voting in a county than were apparently registered. And, yes, I'm sure I can think of a few more things.

But, irregularities and questionable results are not necessarily "proof" of "fraud" and "proof" that the "election was stolen. " If people want this issue to be taken seriously they need to stop thinking that any of the information floating around right now - and yes, I've seen it all multiple times - provides proof of any such thing. Yes, legitimate questions have been raised, but I fear people on "our side" have started to confuse the legitimate questions with the answers to those questions they've imagined. I'm fully ready to believe that everything was corrupt in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere, but thinking and knowing are different things entirely.

-- Atrios, Voting issues

...strikes me a an opinion worth counting, with all due respect to Bob Harris, who does seem to be adding up stuff worth adding too.

On balance, my response to this whole thing is the same as it always seems to be in politics both in the US and at home--which is: whereinhell is the mob with pitchforks and torches when you need them, anyway? What does it take to get folks riled enough to demand a little better? Whether or not the bastards actually stole a few states last week, it looks like it was entirely too easy for them to have done so, and all those odd little jitters in the stats are a bit too suggestive for my taste, given that fact. Which leaves the unsettling question: did they? Will anyone ever know? And howinhell is it that this door was ever left open?

Paper ballots, people. Paper ballots with little circles for marking an 'X', and multiparty scrutineers peering over the shoulders of the counters. And real databases, with integral audit trails and lotsa people watching them do their thing, for adding them up. Or am I just talking crazy talk here?

Wot?

Apparently, Diebold's much ballyhooed voting system uses a marvellously and eminently unprotected database system for its central tallies--and editing it is about as hard as opening an Access .mdb:

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

-- see Common Dreams, Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked

... wait, it looks like that's actually because all you're doing is opening an Access .mdb...

Yikes. And take a good look at the probabilities on those optical scanners too...

See also this link on the reality that there is no audit trail... and the appearance that this is intentional...

Access for the back-end DB? What the fuck is wrong with these people?

See also Bob Harris' page... and this rather intriguing set of results.

This paid commercial software guy (who has, incidently, done some database work, in Access and in real databases like Oracle and MySQL) hereby declares: they shoulda gone open source with paper trails. They really, really shoulda. I don't like the looks of this.

Tales from the easily impressed

Y'know, one of the annoying things about the web is, whatever you're thinking, you can always find someone who's already said it, and said it well... I'd been wondering about this whole alleged 'mandate' thing. I mean sure, it has been a few years since the presidential winner took a majority, but hey, this is a majority by what, a few percentage points?

Call it the tale of the easily impressed pundits. Anyway, FAIR seems to have beat me to it:

While White House officials tout the total vote count for Bush as evidence of wide support, the increase in voter turnout and the size of the U.S. population also means that greater than usual numbers of voters opposed the victorious candidate. As Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher put it (11/5/04), "It's true that President Bush got more votes than any winning candidate for president in history. He also had more people voting against him than any winning candidate for president in history."

And Bush's slim majority is not all that impressive for an incumbent; Ronald Reagan, for example, claimed 51 percent of the vote in 1980, while gaining 59 percent four years later. Lyndon Johnson was the choice of 61 percent of voters in 1964, as was Richard Nixon in 1972. In terms of margin of victory, Al Hunt observed in the Wall Street Journal (11/4/04), Bush's victory was "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916."

If a "mandate" is the same as an uncontested victory, then George W. Bush has that-- but so does just about every president, so it's hardly newsworthy. It is understandable that the Bush administration would tout its victory as evidence of a "mandate" for pursuing its second-term agenda. Responsible journalists, however, should refrain from simply amplifying White House spin.

"The narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916." Hmm...

Yep. That sings.

Fuck the south

... cos I never saw a bandwagon I didn't wanna jump on... seems this site has been getting some hits of late. From their deathless prose:

...the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

I'm a laughin'.