Received this email today:

Dearest,

I got your contact from the internet and decided to contact you for my investment plans, hence it is the cheapest way for today’s communication.

I am 19yrs old girl and sincerely wish to have your assistance in investing in your country so as to enable me relocate there to continue my education.

As the only child of my parents which gave me the right to inherit a huge amount my late father deposited in one of our local banks here; coupled with the recent presidential election of November, 28th 2010 in my country (Republic of Cote d’Ivoire), which resulted into civil war and political instability that just ended few month ago. This crises caused the life of my father because he was suspected to have been secretly rendering financial assistance to former president and his elites and my mother died when I was only 4years old.

Please let me know your willingness in this project so that I can furnish you with every detail needed.

Sincerely,
Miss. Angela Koffi

I laughed when I received this. I guess the Nigerian prince scam doesn’t work anymore; they have to ratchet up the allure.

“Oooh. I could get rich, *and*….maybe she’s cute!”

Michael Kazin penned a piece on The New Republic attacking “independents” in the U.S. (i.e., people who are neither Democrat or Republican, which as we all know are the only two schools of thought that can possibly exist).

I single him out because his column reeks of the kind of narrow-minded thinking that stifles true political debate in the United States, and perpetuates the kind of endless tit-for-tat idiocy that fails to spark progress, designed to trick average Americans into an “us vs. them” game so that corrupt individuals in the background can profit.

I have provided this little translation, and side commentary, because it shows how political pundits like Kazin would prefer that no one actually thought for themselves, thereby allowing people like him to keep profiting off the same tired, broken system.

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I went to Kuala Lumpur about a year ago, and had visited Malaysia Airlines’ website in search of some information. This is the gigantic splash screen image that greeted me, which I saved and then forgot about until now:

It says “World’s Best Cabin Staff. More than just an airline code, MH is Malaysian Hospitality”. (MH being the code for Malaysian Airlines.)

I ended up stuck on the splash screen, staring at this image for a bit, trying to put myself into the marketing executives’ brains, imagining exactly how this image conveys either “world’s best” or “hospitality”.

Oh well, I had to take a crack at some dialogue for the scene. Option one:

Flight Attendant #1: “Can you believe the woman in 15B is wearing ankle-high boots with capri pants?”

Both: [LAUGH]

Option 2:

Flight Attendant #1: “That guy in the back asked me out.”

Flight Attendant #2: “He actually thinks you would date a guy in coach?!”

Both: [LAUGH]

Came across this humorous article on BBC News today. Indeed, a major gaffe for the company to paint SHCOOL in giant white letters across a road. FAIL indeed.

Then, I read the related links at the bottom, though, and the BBC…you guessed it…spelled the name of the school wrong.

Oy vey. (It should be Southern Guilford High School.)

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Today my current RSS reader of choice alerted me to an article at one of my favorite publications, the Christian Science Monitor. The title of the article says it all:

“Top five greenest nations on the planet.”

Naturally, whenever you read something like that, your bullshit detector should be beeping and flashing, because apart from the fact that such a thing is essentially impossible to rank, generally the media will take something like a study, over-simplify it in order to break something complex down into bite-sized chunks that the masses can easily digest, and then declare it in such a way that it sounds like “fact”.

I checked out the article, linked through to the study itself, conducted by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy. Called the 2010 Environmental Performance Index, it left me troubled by one thing: the study almost completely ignored what is perhaps the biggest contributing factor to “greenness”: consumption.
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I am a twitter user and a facebook user. On facebook, I have it set so that the status message is automatically pulled from my twitter stream. Recently, I’ve noticed that many of my tweets don’t make it onto facebook.

One reason I like the twitter messages going to facebook is that facebook has a superior comments system, and often my friends say interesting things about my status messages; otherwise, I have friends on facebook that are not following me on twitter, and they might like to hear what’s roaming around in my brain every now and then.

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As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s somewhat rambling post on the subject: even if the government expels the company, Google won’t be leaving China.

Seemingly lost amidst all the windbaggery on this topic is the fact that according to Alexa, google.cn is as of this writing the #3 most-trafficked website in China. google.com, though, is #6.

I’m now beginning to think that Google’s strategy here might have something to do with the fact that google.com is already one of the top websites in China, with or without google.cn. Sure, by exiting the country entirely, they lose some leverage with the government, but monetarily, one would guess that at least some of the viewership and revenue from the Chinese operations will transfer back to the mothership.

Of course, the Chinese government could block Google’s domain entirely, like they do with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and they well might, but I would rate such a prospect as somewhat unlikely, since the GFW can already filter particular search queries when it wants to begin with.

The Chinese expat net-o-sphere is abuzz this week with Google’s challenge to the Chinese government. I’ve seen commentary ranging from mindless protestor-like exaltations of a company “sticking it to The Man” to the more patronizing and pragmatic “why would Google want to give up all the money they can make?”

First, as someone living in China, I’d like to explain some things. Google operates in China as a separate entity from Google’s main headquarters in the USA. I’ve frequently seen this misunderstood by people who post on sites like slashdot, whenever there is a story about Google censoring information. In the past, Google has agreed to censor information on google.cn (from Tiananmen Square, to Falun Gong, to the Dalai Lama, and so on).

However, these same searches are not censored on google.com, and google.com is not blocked by the Great Firewall. The Great Firewall, though, does detect your search queries, and will itself block access to information coming off of google.com (and others) if it finds material it has flagged as objectionable. (Of course, it should be said that anyone who gives a shit about free access to information in China uses a proxy, VPN, or some other secure means of avoiding the Great Firewall entirely.)

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As an expat I don’t do much driving in the U.S. these days, but in May I went back for a visit, and after a little drive through 5 states, I was reminded of a problem that needs to be addressed: civilian Ford Crown Victorias.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone wants one anyway; they’re huge, unattractive, gas-guzzling beasts, and unless you’re getting the policeman’s special in a used car auction, they’re not especially fast or nimble, either. As far as I can tell from my admittedly unscientific study of the situation, three groups of people buy Crown Vics: police departments, NY taxi companies and old men.

Image courtesy of JLaw45

So, I have a message for my fellow Americans: stop buying Crown Vics. Like the picture above, leave them for the Secret Service and police. You’ll be doing a service for the rest of us.

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I was going on with a normal day, getting work done, listening to music, and now, here I am drowning my sorrows in beer and questioning the significance of my existence.

I visited a site that I never visit today: Walmart. This screen capture is a portion of the site’s header.

But it was this bit that caused me to trip and fall into the endless pit of despair:

Hey, wait a minute, Walmart! I am not null. No no, I am not! I am much more than that! And furthermore, now I’m confused: should I click “not null”, or should I “Log out”?

Agh…what to do, what to do…