If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time, you’ve gotten one of those emails from some person who has a relative that skimmed millions from some (other) corrupt small country dictator and now have no way (except with your help) to get their illicit millions out of their country. Those people send out emails on a fairly routine basis and, up until now, I’ve always figured they were scammers trying to steal my money. Some of their emails must work, though, because they keep trying.

However, just today I got not one but two emails from Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI! And he is so helpful and considerate!

Through our Fraud Monitory Unit we have also noticed that over the past you have been transacting with some impostors and fraudsters who have been impersonating the likes of Prof. Soludo of the Central Bank Of Nigeria, Mr. Patrick Aziza, Anderson, Wallace Fred, none officials of Oceanic Bank, Zenith Banks, Kelvin Young of HSBC, Smith Williams, Daniel Wilson, Ibrahim Sule, Dr. Philip Morgan, Dr. Usman Shamsuddeen and some imposters claiming to be The Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Cyber Crime Division of the FBI gathered information from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (ICCC) formerly known as the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) of how some people have lost outrageous sums of money to these imposters. As a result of this we hereby advise you to stop communication with any one not referred to you by us.

See? They’ve verified that the guy they’re recommending I use is okie-dokie! And, they’re using acronyms. Nigerian scammers couldn’t know how dependent we are on acronyms. It can’t get any better than this, can it? Yes, it can!

We guarantee 100% receipt of your payment, because we have perfected everything in regards to the release of your Two million and three hundred thousand us dollars to be 100% risk free and free from any hitches as its our duty to protect citizens of the United States of America.

Risk free and free of any hitches! Wow! True, it’s only $2.3 million now instead of $26 million, but I’m not greedy. I’ll do ok on that. Not as lavish a lifestyle, but then I’m not some Kardashian-wanna-be or anything, just a regular guy.

And, if that wasn’t enough, they gave me the FedEx tracking numbers for two other people who have gotten their money. I’m so pumped about this.

According to the Associated Press, Pennsylvania police last week charged 55-year-old Donald Wolfe, of Brookville with public drunkenness after several witnesses saw him trying to resuscitate a long-dead possum on the side of the road.

Why else would so many “you can’t make this shit up” stuff start appearing out of nowhere. We enjoy attending plays. We’ve gone to the Broadway series of plays at TPAC for decades and we’ve gone to local company plays as well. What we haven’t done is gone to the Klingon Christmas Carol at the Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis. We’ll probably miss it this year too.

Klingon Christmas Carol

Scrooge has no honor, nor any courage. Can three ghosts help him to become the true warrior he ought to be in time to save Tiny Tim from a horrible fate? Performed in the Original Klingon with English Supertitles, and narrative analysis from The Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology.

The Dickens classic tale of ghosts and redemption adapted to reflect the Warrior Code of Honor and then translated into tlhIngan Hol  (That’s the Klingon Language).

A co-production of Commedia Beauregard and the IKV RakeHell of the Klingon Assault Group.

A merry Christmas to you, too.

If your parents took away your Xbox as punishment when you were fifteen, what would you have done? Gotten pissed probably, sulked, slammed doors, etc. The kind of emotional outbursts people with developing hormones and immature social skills would do. Normal behavior, given the circumstances and the individual. (Of course, this assumes there were Xboxes when you were fifteen, but if there weren’t, just play along, OK?)

Not one fifteen year-old in Buffalo Grove, Illinois (near Chicago). Nope. He called 911 to ask if his parents had the right to do this. He called at 12:50 pm on a Sunday to seek emergency assistance for his grievous injury and hung up in the middle of the call. First, calling 911 is only for real emergencies, like being robbed or in a car accident with serious injuries or someone’s been murdered right in front of you, that sort of thing. Someone is in real danger of dying or seriously hurt or in imminent peril. That’s what 911 is for.

Second, don’t hang up on the 911 people. They are supposed to make sure everything is OK before they close out a call. In this case, they found a couple of nice police officers who had the time to go by and explain to the young man that, yes, his parents did have the right to confiscate his Xbox for as long as they damn well pleased. One would also assume they discussed what is and is not an emergency for the purposes of calling 911.

Recent studies of the human brain show that all those hormones rushing through the blood stream do affect the brains of men and women differently. That may explain this (and it may not):

The mayor of one suburb of Paris (Patrick Balkany of the suburb Levallois-Perret) is having a little dispute with the mayor of the adjoining suburb. Mayor Balkany, a conservative, decided there was too much commuter traffic going through his town on the D909 highway, so he made it one-way up to the city limits. Gilles Catoire, the socialist mayor of Clichy-la-Garenne, the adjoining town, got upset with this because it made HIS town’s traffic more congested, so he decided to do the same thing, turn his section of the D909 into a one-way thoroughfare. The only difference was that he made it one way in the opposite direction.

Oddly enough, there’s a traffic problem now – some sort of gridlock. Thousands use this road to travel to and from Paris during commuting hours. Of course. And we think our governments are screwy.

Yep. it’s official. When you think of me, now think mega party animal. It seems that a NYC -based food editor (I googled her, she’s real) is going to use the beer margarita recipe I got from my brother-in-law’s friend Frank. It’s going to be used in an on-line mega-party resource that AOL is apparently creating.

Go ahead, be amazed and bask in the glow. It’s ok. My glow does not have any bad UV rays.

Well, a neighborhood in Durham, NC, has an idea about that. And it worked. They could have joined hands with the badge or some such, but they decided to take matters in their own hands and start shooting at the offenders. Not like Charles Bronson, though. They pulled out the paintball guns.

According to the local CBS affiliate WRAL reports that the group, Angry Neighbors with Paintball Guns, has posted signs throughout residential Durham warning speeders that they will be met with a hail of bullets of the Sherwin Williams kind. Needless to say, speeding in the area has been curbed significantly and the members of ANPG have become a sought after commodity on the local news.

The crime of speeding in residential neighborhoods has pretty much vanished, despite a law on the books making it illegal to shoot paintball guns at cars. And they didn’t have to fire a shot. I love this idea.

That apparently stands for the citizens committee for the right to keep and bear arms. They sent me an email linking to an emergency gun rights survey. The company behind the survey appears to be something called Diener Consultants.

Did you know that since Barack Obama was elected President 3 people make a donation to an anti-gun group every minute?

That’s almost a million and a half contributions aimed at you — and your gun rights every year!

With Obama in the White House and anti-gunners in control of key committees in Congress, the gun grabbers are out for blood.

Make no mistake. Our guns and our right to use them could be wiped away by Barack Obama, the most anti-gun rights President in history, at any moment.

They already are being attacked in Congress, state legislatures and cities and towns from coast-to-coast.

We at the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms have launched this new nationwide campaign to rally gun owners and freedom loving Americans behind an effort to protect our constitutional rights.

I could only afford to send out surveys today to a special group of key people like you who I knew would be most interested in helping us at this time.

Did you notice that last line? “I could only afford to send out surveys today to a special group.” I know exactly what they mean – I’m totally bummed out at the cost of each of my emails. Oh, wait. They’re free. Idiots.

Apparently, there are gun grabbers everywhere. (I’m checking the shrubs as soon as I get home.) Who knew.

Update: The part arrived yesterday at the dealer in Clarksville and I took off from work to go get it. By 5 pm I was mowing and I finished mowing and sweeping up 90 bushels of clippings/hay before 8. Whew. UPS still has no idea what happened to my package.

There’s a great lawnmower conspiracy going on. I’m sure that’s it. There’s no other excuse possible. As I mentioned before, my (expensive) Simplicity Zero-turn lawnmower died just before the Forth of July. Since they disenfranchised the dealer near me, online was my most practical opportunity for parts. I ordered them from a place that has been acceptable in the past – not wow, like Zappos, but still … – and gotten me what I needed fairly expeditiously. Except this time every chain in the process screwed up. They did not have the parts in stock and had to back order them. They did not tell me this. Since I was in-mowing-cado, to coin a phrase, and hadn’t done more than start mowing when it died, that pushed out the time I had to wait for parts. If I’d have known this, I’d probably have gone to some other place, even the dealer in Clarksville, to get them. I’d asked them to ship the parts as fast as they offered. Their site was less specific than I’d have liked. Shipping options were: 1 to 6 days and 7 to 10 days. That’s all the indicated, period. So I picked 1-6 and hoped they’d be open on the 3rd (a Friday) or, since I ordered the parts early in the morning of the 2nd,, that they shipped that Thursday before they left work. Alas, not to be.

However, I didn’t find anything out until I called to say “It’s been six days. Where are my parts?” At that point, they told me that UPS picked up my parts the day before – they’d been backordered – and I ought to get them in about six (more) days. I should have gotten the shipping notice the day before. I didn’t. That’s why I called. So Brown had it. Well, you can track that package’s progress day by day. I love that. It cuts down on the disappointment because you can see exactly where it is day by day. I saw it leave Minnesota and head south. Finally, it was on the delivery van, headed home to papa. Yee Haa! So I waited for the call letting me know that it had arrived, starting about 10 in the morning. Nada, zero, zip. I took off early from work just in case so I could install everything and start mowing – we had people coming over on Saturday morning.

We were busy getting ready for the company and didn’t want to cook, so we went to a local restaurant, El Molcajete, for dinner. So guess who is two booths away from us. Yep,  the UPS driver was in there meeting his wife or girlfriend (who worked for the enemy, the USPS). Since they’re supposed to work delivering until 7 and it was just 6:30, I was sure he’d taken a break to meet the blond and would be at the house before too long.

Nope. It seems that the conspirators moved my package onto the largest delivery van UPS owns, and it had crashed into a canyon that was too deep to reach – or something. They have no idea where in hell the package actually is. It was on the truck the last time they saw it. Maybe it was kidnapped (grassnapped? partnapped? I dunno which is correct.) but if so, the partnappers haven’t got my number and haven’t asked for a ransom. Either that or they sent it UPS.

So last week I decided it was worth the possible extra $20+ if I went ahead and ordered a second set of parts from a second source, the Clarksville dealer. Hopefully they will arrive today. In the mean time I have grass up to my kneecaps and may have to get the neighbor to bail it after I cut.