Cut-rate scam!

'mary' writes to me on myspace. She's in a refugee camp in Ghana but she's from Sierra Leone. She has a business proposition for me:


I am mary james from sierra leon,but based here in Ghana in
the refugee camp. I am the daughter of the late James ben.who was
killed in during the sierra leon crisis. Please I do need your help. I do want
you to help me to retrieve the sum of 3.4million USD.with some pieces
of gold and diamond. Which my late father kept in a security company here in Ghana. Please I do need your help. Is difficult for me to get to the security company, because is illegal for me as a refugee to go to the security company. And the purpose of deposit is for foreign investor. So that’s why I need you to be my foreign
partner. Which will enable me to retrieve my consignment. I beg of you in
the name of God.

I have every necessary document here with me. and i will like to inform you that as soon as u claim the boxes of money i will come to u in u country were will can invest the fund on a good business and i will give you 20% out of the total fund and after you have reply me i will send you all u need to know to enable you claim the boxes for me and please if you are ready to help me please do send me your really name the name of your country and your picture and phone number so that i will know u in person because this boxes of gold and money i my life i will not like to lose them in any way hope to hear from reply me on my private mall address
blessing.mike@yahoo.co.uk
hope to hear from you soon thanks mary james

I'm certainly used to getting these sorts of emails, but what's the deal here? Usually it's the widow of the late emperor of the CAR, and she's got $80billion in gold and diamonds which she needs my help in getting out of a swiss bank account. Or if not the widow, some henchman. But this one, it's - wait for it - $3.4million! What sort of low-rent sucker does she take me for? It's insulting!

I do like the email address though, 'blessing.mike' has quite a nice ring to it.

These boots are made for selling

There are many ways I can tell I'm getting old - my lower back, left hip and butt are giving me grief, for example. But another way is that I'm starting to feel quite disconnected from popular culture, and to the extent that I do encounter it I'm appalled.

At the gym the other day they showed the video of Jessica Simpson doing 'these boots are made for walking'. On the one hand, she really is hot, but on the other hand, she's such a wholesome and gormless woman that the whole song sounds completely wrong - it's like when you hear a talented child vocalist singing 'my way'.

As so often happens (R&B and rap videos have the same effect) instead of feeling agreeably titillated I just feel tawdry for having been marketed to in such a witless way. It is, however, much better with the sound turned off.

fog lights and distance

An observation from driving around Melbourne a bit on school holidays: the further you get from the CBD the more cars there are with fog lights. Not surprising, really.

Curried Sardines?

I was leafing through 'One Continuous Picnic' the other day, which describes itself as a gastronomic history of Australia. For me, eating's like sex; I like thinking about it and talking about it just about as much as I like actually doing it. Anyway, there's a lovely chapter about food during the Depression, and it details some dishes which have mercifully become extinct. Such as, among other things, curried sardines, marrow cream (made from marrow and sugar) and mock tripe. This last one is richly archaic. Tripe itself must have been such a common and desirable foodstuff that making something that resembled tripe (from mutton flaps!) was a selling point.

I'm not a fussy eater, but I can't stomach (if you'll excuse the pun) tripe. I'm up for most kinds of offal, and in general will try to pick the weirdest thing on any menu. I used to do this to gross out my wife, who was very fussy, but it's also a bit of dare for myself. Mae West is supposed to have said "When choosing between two evils, I like to try the one I've never tried before". (Now i think about it, it's another parallel between food and sex.)

A colleague and I once had a themed lunch at (St John's Bread and Wine that consisted of faggots, bath chap and spotted dick. The bath chap was a bit gelatinous, but agreeably challenging. The faggots were good, as always, the highlight being when the waitress put them down in the middle of our table (we were sharing) and said accusingly 'faggots!'. The spotted dick was good, if you like that sort of thing.

Fatal

I had a strange flashback the other day. Years ago (8, 9?) I was in Budapest with my then wife. We were having dinner in a restaurant called Fatal. I would have gone there anyway just for the name, but it was good in a couple of other ways too. The food was good, and big. Huge serves of very stodgy middle-european food with lots of pork and cabbage and sour cream (my wife wasn't overly impressed, but I loved it). There was an agreeable touch of what my friend Ivan and I (who seek out this sort of thing) would call 'bizarricality' about it. But it got stranger. On the table next to us was a group of well-dressed people in their 40s. Having a good time, enjoying the food and a night out. One of the party, a fairly attractive and otherwise-respectable middle-aged woman was doing something which I caught out of the corner of my eye and registered as being a bit odd even before I saw what she was doing.

She was leaning forward, her face just above a serving bowl. And she was vomiting. Not in a big make-a-fuss way, but in a very controlled and decorous way. And noone else at her table seemed to think anything much of it.

I loved Budapest.

Melbourne. Footy.

I do like to think of myself as being tremendously cosmopolitan and sophisticated (Ivy League educated, I play piano, I know modernism from post-modernism, I've been to the Opera in Kiev and so on) but like anyone who spent formative years in Melbourne I have a strong attachment to AFL football - more so now that I've lived away for so long.

I took my sons to the MCG to watch a match. (Pies v Saints, if you must know. I was there as a neutral observer. I can't go for the Pies, and the thing that vaguely troubles me about St Kilda - my second son's team - is that nobody hates them. What's the point in that?) It was a great footy day in Melbourne. Cold, drizzly, grey. Walking from Richmond Station up to the MCG you start to feel like Melbourne's reached out and embraced you, clutching you to its bosom. There's nothing quite like that feeling of being part of a large happy crowd.

I was musing at one point about how people say that Hawthorn and Essendon dominated the 1980s. That's ridiculous. Carlton won 3 premierships in the 1980, so Essendon and Hawthorn can't both have won more. And ultimately, premierships are the only thing that matters.

Hep C - and Pamela

Peter Helliar - a TV comedian, and rather a good one (he's on my second-favorite show, among other things. And no, I certainly don't mean 'Rove') has had to apologise for a joke about Hep C and Pamela Anderson. He was asked what would be the best birthday present for Pamela, given that she has everything. He replied "Hepatitis". Then added "oh wait, she already got that last year".

This was seized upon by Hepatitis Australia, and Peter had to issue an apology. And then do a bit grovelling to boot. This seems unfair... for one thing, it was a very funny line, and while Hep C's not a great experience (I had it - and still have the antibodies to prove it) sometimes if you have a funny line you just have to say it. (If you go back far enough in this blog you'll find something I said to my PA which I knew at the time was at best ill-judged, but was also irrestible.)

For another thing, how does it humiliate or demean people with Hep C? Pamela Anderson's effectively a cariacature anyway, and she really does have Hep C.