Dear Respectful One

Okay, so I've moved house but the interweb has yet to follow, so updates will continue to be at best sporadic until technology catches up with my new life in the Southside suburbs.

In the meantime, my recent love affair with Africa, of which I hope to blog about real soon, has taken a dent this morning when I received the following 419-Scam mail.

I am, apparently, a 'respectful one' (shows that Mary Mark, some sort of African hermaphrodite perhaps?, doesn't really know me).

I'm also still a bit bamboozled by the verb 'eructed'. Can anyone cast any light on this word, or is it merely some portmanteau nonsense forged in the illiterate minds of the netscammers of old Abidjan town?

Just when you start getting a degree of positivity and hope about the dark continent, along come the scumbags of West Africa to remind you of why the place continues to be a disaster area in the first place.

"From mary mark"
Subject:	Dear Respectful one,
To:	mm_mary46@yahoo.ca

Dear Respectful one,

I am totally convinced to write you in reference of the transfer of ( 4.5 U S$ )to your account for onward investment (industries) in your country. Though we have not met before but I strongly believe that one has to confiding in someone to succeed sometimes in life. There is this amount of Four Million, five hundred thousand U.S dollars ($4.500, 000.00) which my late Father (LateMr.T.Williams Mark) deposited for me in a private finance and storage firm here in Abidjan before he was assassinated by some unknown hoodlums in on going political
war here .

Because of recent political/civil war eructed here, I decided to invest this money in your country or anywhere safe enough outside Africa for security and political reasons.

I want you to help me to transfer this fund to your country for investment purposes on the followings below:

1). Telecommunication.
2). Automobile manufacturing.
3). Five star hotel.

If you can be of assistance to us, we will be pleased to offer to you the 20% Of this total fund (indicated above).

Further details will be made known to you on confirmation of your interest to assist me . Your urgent reply will be highly appreciated.

Thanking you and God bless.
Mary Mark."

God bless you too, Mary Mark. Now go shove your scam up your hole. I'm tempted to scambait you, but really couldn't be arsed.

Out of Africa

I'm still alive. The leopards and lions and hippos and crazies didn't get me, so I'll be back blogging shortly, by the start of next week at the latest.

Photos and commentary to follow

Hope you're all enjoying the rain!

(Sorry for being evil, but it's hard to resist.)

Takin' a break

Everyone's gotta take a break sometime.

I'll be back by the end of the month, hopefully with a new look for the site.

Be good, y'all.

The boom keeps getting boomer!

As if the ongoing housing market collapse wasn't enough, now the government have the following little problem of rising unemployment to contend with.

Most concerning is the fact that these jobs are being lost in the services sector, the area we were supposed to excel in after abandoning our manufacturing base and most of our agriculture to elsewhere.

There is now a sizeable segment within Fianna Fail who appear to be unhappy at the prospect of having to clean up the economic mess they themselves created. For them, the smarter move would have been to lose the last election, and then cast Fine Gael and Labour as a bust coalition once again.

Thanks to the hubris of Bertie and his unshakeable desire for a third term, they're now stuck with having to deal with falling house prices and rising unemployment, while trying to keep the three mutually unintelligible aspects of their coalition - the Greens, the PDs and the FF genepool independents - all happy.

It's gonna end in tears.

But for Bertie, sure he can just hand the poisoned chalice over to the anointed successor and vanish, a la Tonee B-liar, off towards a happy twilight on the international statesman equivalent of the chicken and chips circuit.

Rumour is he fancies the Euro-presidency. Nice work if you can get it. So for Bert, the boom just keeps on getting boomer, just as long as he can keep nasty Justice Mahon away from his financial details.

For the rest of us, falling house prices, significant unemployment, inflation and economic difficulties lie ahead.

You couldn't make it up

Straight from the 'fact is stranger than fiction' winter collection, we bring you prestige couturier Louis Vuitton's latest supermodel - Mikhail Gorbachev.

Yes, the former Soviet Union supremo, the head of the Communist bloc, is now modelling for a French fashion house.

God bless Champagne Socialism, eh?

On a separate note, moving house is a total pain in the hole.