Livingston, I Presume

Awwww, the Nigerian Scam is all grown up!

Waiting in my email inbox this morning was this intriguing offer:

Dear Friend,

I am Prince Fayad Musa H. Bolkiah, the eldest son of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, former Finance Minister of Brunei, the tiny oil-rich sultanate on the Gulf Island of Borneo.

I will save your time by not amplifying my extended royal family history, which has already been disseminated by the international media during the controversial dispute that erupted between my father and his stepbrother, the sultan of Brunei Sheik Muda Hassanal Bolkiah. As you may know from the international media, the sultan had accused my father of financial mismanagement and impropriety of US$14.8 billion dollars.

This was as a result of the Asian financial crisis that made my fathers company Amedeo Development Company and government owned Brunei Investment Company to be declared bankrupt during his tenure in office. However my father was kept under house arrest, his bank accounts and private properties including a crude oil export refinery were later confiscated by the sultanate. Furthermore during this unfortunate period, I was advised to evacuate my immediate family outside the sultanate to avoid further prosecution from the sultan and his security operatives, but before I could do that I was placed under house arrest after a little gun fight by the Sultans security men and I had no access to phone, but I have a laptop from which I am sending you this mail. Some of the guards here are still loyal to me.

Before my Incaseration, I went ahead to dispatch the sum of Four hundred and twenty Million United States Dollars (US$420,000,000.00) in cash with the assistance of a foreign diplomat who now resides in Europe.

The money has now been deposited as valuables into different private security and trust company for safe keeping abroad. The money was split and kept in the following countries in this proportion: US$50 Million is in London, US$160 Million is in china, US$40 Million is in Thailand, US $170 Million in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Please if you know you can assist in claiming and investing it in real estate/property to guarantee the future survival of my family, contact me fast so that I'll give you contact information of the security  company in Europe and other parts of the world where the funds are deposited. For your assistance i will compensate you with 25% of the total sum and another 5% shall be set aside to defray any expenses that may arise.

Please I count on your absolute confidentiality, transparency and trust while looking forward to your prompt response towards a swift conclusion of this business transaction through my email address as follows: [[email protected]]:

Thanks & May Allah's blessing remain with you.

I remain yours sincerely,

Prince Fayad Musa H. Bolkiah

I have to tell you that really, this is such an improvement over the Nigerian Scam emails of old! I remember receiving those first hesitant emails with their charming spelling mistakes and odd syntax so many years ago, and here we have a letter that dazzles with its nearly correct usage ["Incaseration" vs. incarceration might trip up a few Americans!] and telling details [I especially like the image of "a little gun fight by the Sultans security men"--almost Bryson-esque in its understatement]. This indicates to me that the Nigerian-type scammers are either enrolled in some serious English classes--like Defense Language Instutite good--or that they are now employing native or near-native English speakers to edit their prose.

So here's my offer to the prince: I'm sorry that I can't help you with your attempts to get your money. It's so hard to find a decent private bank around here, you see. I could, however, edit your future scam emails to help you reach the next level of competence. You're so very close now, but with an experienced native speaker at your side, you could hit the jackpot of scam letter composition. I am awaiting the favor of your prompt reply most anxiously.

The trouble with yards signs in Livingston

Could we get some wind going the other direction for a change? Please?

(No subject)

For those of you who have been playing along with our latest parenting-related fun at home--sharing folk remedies, offering up prayers, fedexing cases of prune juice--I have but two words for you:

Holy. Crap.

Thank you, Jeffrey Ricker

Via Angry Black Bitch comes this post from Jeffrey Ricker, whom I don't know but now admire fervently for this post, entitled "Why NPR must never speak to Paul Weyrich ever again."

For anyone who wasn't listening to "All Things Considered" on Wednesday evening, Paul Weyrich is the chairman and CEO of a group called the Free Congress Foundation. (I don't know what they do, but I'm guessing the Congress that they're referencing is not sexual in nature.) He was brought on as a guest to describe the impact of the Foley scandal on the so-called "values voters"--you remember, the ones who were credited with leading Bush back to the White House thanks to their drovey turnout to prevent scary, scary gays from getting married? In the course of his "analysis" came this exchange with NPR reporter Michele Norris (there was more in between these comments, but the transcript highlights the, well, lowlights):

Weyrich: It has been known for many years that Congressman Foley was a homosexual. Homosexuals tend to be preoccupied with sex - the idea that he should be continued, or should have been continued as chairman on the Committee for Missing and Exploited Children, given their knowledge of that is just outrageous...
Norris: Now, before we go on, I think I can say, Mr. Weyrich, that there quite a few people who would take exception to the statement that homosexuals are preoccupied with sex.
Weyrich: Well, I don't care whether they take exception to it - it happens to be true.
Norris: That is your opinion.
Weyrich: Well, it's not my opinion, it's the opinion of many psychologists and psychiatrists who have to deal with them.

When I heard this, I began screaming at my radio, which I often do, much to the fright of my family and the amusement of my neighbors. Of course, nothing coherent comes out, which is why I'm lucky that Mr. Ricker has taken that burden of coherency from me. He says everything I could want to say on the matter, and without any inelegant jumping up and down and waving.

Homosexuality is a just a subject on which I cannot be rational. It's why I end up sarcastically lecturing near-perfect strangers on the anal sex patrol. What I really want to say is, "How fricking stupid do you have to be to believe that? Do you know any gay people? Have you ever talked to a gay person?" Needless to say, those questions are not on anybody's top-ten list of how to win friends and influence people. But increasingly I'm finding that anyone I would truly want to influence--or, indeed, be friends with--would agree with me about this issue. I'm all for plurality of views, but I know when something makes me crazy. Ignorant, presumptuous homophobes? Crazy-making and not worth my time.

Living the Word

Who would have thought the Amish could make me cry into my coffee?

The first thing I read in the paper this morning was an AP wire story that the Amish community devastated by the school shooting earlier in the week is urging forgiveness of the shooter and "reaching out to the family of the gunman":

"...a Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.

'I hope they'll stay around here and they'll have a lot of friends and a lot of support,' Daniel Esh, a 57-year-old Amish artist and woodworker whose three grandnephews were inside the school during the attack, said of the Robertses.'"

Talk about living the Word. It's a stark contrast to the disgusting antics of a certain pseudo-Baptist preacher who shall not be named (or linked to) for fear of giving his so-called mission of picketing funerals--including now-canceled plans to picket the funerals of the slain Amish girls--any new publicity. But that's a cheap shot. There are probably no more than a handful of Christians who believe that asshat is doing the work of God or Jesus Christ, and most of them are related to said asshat.

I would argue that it also represents a pretty stark contrast to some other actions by some people calling themselves Christians in today's America. There's the mother of four in Georgia trying to get Harry Potter banned because the books are an "evil" attempt to indoctrinate children in Wicca. (To borrow from the late, great Lloyd Bentsen, "Lady, I've read Harry Potter, and I know some Wiccans, and lady, Harry Potter is no Wiccan!") There's the grieving father of another school shooting victim who claims that these tragedies keep happening because of abortion and the teaching of evolution. And then there's our self-proclaimed born-again president whose administration "doesn't torture" but is plenty happy to kidnap people and send them to other countries to be tortured and has orchestrated the removal of the protection of habeus corpus for prisoners of war. Real Christian, all right.

Let me admit here and now that my own bona fides as a Christian are sorely lacking. Kicked out of Sunday School at an early age for proclaiming--in apparent contravention of Sunday School etiquette--that Jamie and not Jesus was my best friend, I question whether my baptism alone continues to make me a Christian. Certainly I have never been able to warm up to the kind of Christians who--in the name of Jesus Christ--ban books, kill abortion doctors, rejoice in the AIDS epidemic as a plague on gays, or blame feminism for the downfall of society.

On my best days, I aspire to be the kind of person my Grandma Martha was, and she would certainly have counted her Christian God an important part of her personal moral code. But you know what? I don't know that she ever would have called herself a Christian. A Lutheran maybe, but just as an identifier, not as some mark of goodness.

I always saw her brand of Christianity as a striving to be worthy of being a Christian--not for the sake of the name but for the love behind it. She was from a generation that rarely had to deal with things like premarital cohabitation or homosexuality, and she wasn't quite sure that she approved. But when some of her own grandkids starting moving in with their partners--including at least one same-sex partner--she didn't love them any less. She may not have understood it or approved, but she damn well wasn't going to let that stand in the way of her love for them and she sure as hell wasn't going to judge them. If someone needed food, she fed them. If someone needed a place to sleep, she gave them a bed. If someone needed love, she gave it freely.

The way I understand Christianity as practiced by my grandmother is pretty simple: Love each other. Pray for and with each other. Forgive each other. Repeat. It sounds pretty similar to how the Amish are dealing with this tragedy, actually.

What's not in that Christian code? Judge each other. Oppress each other. Torture each other. Kill each other.

Especially not if you're going to do it in the name of God.

Demon rum, etc.

I'm quite sure that I can't add anything original to the state of comment around Foleygate. What more is there to say about someone so criminally stupid--or deluded into thinking that he is above the law--as to think he could get away with propositioning teenaged boys while serving in the U.S. Congress? How can I add to the chorus of howls from Americans of all political orientations that the House Republican leadership knew about this and did nothing? Is there any way I can adequately express my outrage that Foley--representative of the party of personal responsibility--is blaming alcohol for his criminal stupidity? And how many more times can the Republicans try to backhand their way out of this by insinuating that Foley was just a dirty homasekshul who fooled them all and what can you expect from someone like that?

I quite like what Jay's guest blogger Kevin K. had to say in response to the ridiculous Family Research Council statement (no link--don't want to give them any extra traffic) that blamed tolerance of homosexuality for Foley's crimes:

So (the Family Research Council) is shocked even though (it) shouldn’t be, the Democrats are equally responsible for this mess, gay marriage creates pedophiles, and, I think, he wants the Minutemen to start policing our children’s borders.

Gah. It's a brave new world, people. I'll end with another question, since I seem to be stuck in a "Who's Line is it Anyway" sketch in which contestants can only speak in questions: How can anyone living in the modern world think that anything they do online will stay private?