Why did the squirrel cross the road?

Don’t know the answer to that, but at least he was in the crosswalk… 🙂

The increased squirrel activity is definitely a sign of fall around here.  I still remember my first fall here, 3 years ago, when I saw a veritable squirrel stampede — what looked like 20 of the critters flooding out of the window of what (I hope) was an empty house. Wish I’d had my camera with me then.  Or better yet, a video camera.

Fall is also the season for NaNoWriMo.  I signed up to participate again this year.  It may sound crazy, but it’s the only way I can justify spending time on writing during this month, when I have so many other things on my plate.  Will just have to wait and see what happens…

Spam Email from the Future!

Last month, during a routine e-mail check, I saw I had a message from a “Captain James T. Kirk.” Now, being a bit of a geek, I immediately thought of Star Trek, which is  the main reason I didn’t delete it immediately, to share with my husband.  We had a good laugh over my e-mail from the 23rd century.  I suppose a real life person could have the same name, but you’d think he would have been teased too much about his fictional counterpart to want to use his full name plus middle initial in this way.

Of course, the real message of the e-mail had nothing to do with Star Trek.  It turned out to be a standard spam/scam e-mail, along the lines of the old “Nigerian” prince scams, but it tried to give itself a kind of validity by  claiming to be from a US Army captain in Afghanistan, who wished to send me $10,500,000.  All he needed were my bank account details and personal phone number  😯 Now, being an Army wife, I do know a lot of servicemen who have served there, so many of the details of the sender’s “service” sounded particularly bogus.  For one thing,  the “captain” claimed he was using his “official” e-mail:  a G-mail account.  Soldiers have Army e-mail accounts that have nothing to do with Google.

Adding a final note of absurdity of the whole thing was the closing line, asking me not to respond to the official e-mail address, but to his “private” e-mail, instead — which just happened to be completely identical to his so-called official one.

Sounds to me like this particular spammer is just a little bit confused… 😉

Kotex, Bank of America, and Saddam Hussein

What do those three have in common?  They’re all part of yet another spam e-mail I received the other day.

The Subject line said simply: Kotex (Have to wonder if the people who make up these e-mails know what the real company by that name sells.  Would be pretty funny if they didn’t.)

The e-mail claimed to be from Bank of America.  Didn’t realize that Bank of America used Yahoo e-mail addresses with the country suffix of .cn, which is the country code for China. 😉

According to the body of the message, I’m one of the heirs of Saddam Hussein.

Right.

That’s about as believable as the deposed African prince who desperately needs my help moving funds out of his former country.  What will these spammers think of next?

Spammer vs. Spammer

There has been another deluge of spam and phishing e-mails being sent to my work e-mail lately.  At one point, I received fifteen of them in one hour! Some of them have actually been so kind as to actually include “Spam” in their subject lines, which made it easy to delete, but the others, with vague or no subject, unfortunately have to be waded through to make sure that I don’t miss anything that is actually important — such as an e-mail from a potential customer.

One e-mail particularly caught my attention the other day.  The subject line read, in all caps, no less: Stop Contacting Those B*******! Since this is a business e-mail account, I don’t usually get anything that has even the mildest of swear words in it, so this was definitely different.  The message turned out to be:

Good day,

I am Mrs. Tasha Raymond; I am a USA citizen, 45 years Old. I reside here in WASHINGTON.

My residential address is as follows: – (Address deleted.  Don’t know if it’s real or not but I didn’t want to post it in case it’s someone’s real address) United States, i will soon relocate since I have collected my compensation money.

I am one of those that took part in the Compensation in Nigeria and West Africa many years ago and they refused to pay me, I had paid over $10,000 while in the USA, trying to get my payment all to no avail.

So, I decided to travel down to Nigeria west Africa with all my compensation documents, And I was directed to meet Mr. Larry Longman, who is a member of the UN Compensation Committee, and I contacted him and he explained everything to me, He said whoever is contacting us through emails are fake.

He took me to the paying bank for the claim of my Compensation payment. Right now I am one of the most happiest women on earth because I have received my Compensation funds of $800,000.00 Moreover,  Mr. Larry Longman showed me the Full information of those that are yet to receive their payments and I saw your Email address as one of the beneficiaries, that is why I decided to email you to Stop dealing with anybody, they are not with your compensation money, They are only making money out of you. I will advise you to contact Mr.Larry Longman.

You have to contact him directly on this information below.

. Mr. Larry Longman
De-factor Chief Compensation Officer
EMAIL:

You really have to stop dealing with those people that are contacting you and Telling you that your funds are with them, it is not in any way with them, they are Only taking advantage of you and they will dry you up until you have nothing.

The only money I paid after I met  Mr. Larry Longman was just $110 for the paper Works, take note of that.

Once again stop contacting those people, I will advise you to contact  Mr. Larry Longmanso that he can help you to deliver your funds instead of dealing With those liars that will be turning you around asking for different kind of Money to complete your transaction.

Thank you and be blessed as you contact him today.

Mrs. Tasha Raymond.

**************************

Is the world of e-mail scams so competitive now that they have to resort to bashing each other? Or is this some twisted attempt to make themselves look more “legitimate,” now that the pool of gullible victims must be dwindling?

Interesting times…

An Orange Moon and Standing Brooms

On March 9th, the day that the massive solar flare was due to hit earth, my husband’s Facebook feed blew up with people posting photos of brooms standing up “all by themselves.” Apparently one of the major theories going around at the time was that the solar flare was altering the earth’s magnetic field, thus, brooms could stand on their bristles without apparent support.  Well, this photo was taken today (although in all fairness, a couple of new flares were reported last night, though those were of the lowest level on the recorded scale):

According to snopes.com this is an urban legend that was originally associated with the equinox.  That brooms — and eggs — would stand on end with “the right amount of gravitational pull.”   But this isn’t true.  It has more to do with finding the center of gravity on the broom or egg, and is something that can be done at any time of the year.

No matter what the reasons behind the “standing broom,” I wonder what those who were freaking out over the “phenomenon” would think if they had happened to walk outside that night and see this:

This is a photo I took of the full moon on the 9th, from my backyard in Eastern Alabama, USA.  And yes, this was the actual color of the moon.  No filters or other photo color changes were applied to this image.  Looks like a practice run for Halloween, doesn’t it?

Insulting Spam? Really?

In my day job, I run a website that contains a blog:  mostly new product updates, media features, things like that.  Not really interesting reading, I’ll be the first to admit.  But I must admit I was taken aback at first when the site started receiving messages like this(I copied and pasted it from the original, so all bad grammar and missing punctuation is the responsibility of the original poster):   When Someone said your blog post, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me just as much as this one. What i’m saying is, It was my choice to read, however i actually thought youd have something interesting to state. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you could fix in the event you werent too busy looking for attention.

Huh? First, I’m not sure how a post about a new product design that is about to be added to the website  is whining.  Second, do they really think repeating  the same message, almost word for word, from different user names, will really make whatever point they’re trying to make? I know a lot of these “spam” posters are just posting to blogs to try to build up “back-links” to their own sites, but they can’t really expect people to allow these kinds of comments through.  Can they?

Looks like the wild and wacky world of internet spam has just gotten a little wackier.

“Final Notice”

That was the name I saw emblazoned on a tow truck the other day.  Guess it really is the “final notice” if they take your car away, because that was the only information printed on the truck.  No company name, no contact information.  Good luck getting your vehicle back…