- Call me optimistic and forgiving, but I’m actually pretty pumped up by the scam that Nigerian college student Lawal Adekunie Nurudeen worked to bilk an Australian woman out of $47,000 online. You may be asking how I can be happy about a scam in which a woman was fleeced of her life savings by a con artist, so allow me to explain. Pretty much all of us have gotten those spam emails about how a Nigerian prince has come into a massive fortune, except it’s somehow locked up in legal red tape and he needs our $5,000 in order to work through that red tape, after which he’ll split this massive fortune with us. It’s such a common occurrence that it’s one of the running jokes people use when they talk about spam. The very fact that Nurudeen is actually Nigerian and running his scam from Nigeria gives him a few bonus points in my books. Sure, he’s now headed to prison for 19 years in prison for scamming this poor women by pretending to be a widowed white businessman desperately in love with her. And yes, a court in Ikeja in southwest Nigeria ruled that will also have to pay back the 56-year-old woman, selling the two plots of land and the Honda Prelude he bought with her money to do so. For the cynics out there, throwing away a potentially promising future (Nurudeen was an engineering student when he met the woman online in 2007) could seem like a bad play. On the other side of the equation, I suppose you can feel bad for this woman, but at least hear what a pathetic, desperate loser she is before you jump to any conclusions. Chick has admitted that she was looking for a husband online but had been disappointed in the men she had met. Take that as a) a blessing, as you avoid all of the other losers trolling for a mate in cyberspace, and b) evidence of just how pathetic people are who are openly seeking a spouse online. Unfortunately for this woman, Nurudeen was lurking and jumped in to sweep her off her desperate feet. "The convict, who is married with three children, instantly applied and told the victim that she had met Mr. Right," Nigerian authorities said in a statement. For this woman, Mr. Right was apparently a 57-year-old British engineer working with a multinational company in Nigeria whose wife and only child had died in a road accident in Lagos, the former capital of the country. To cap off his deceit, Nurudeen sent a picture of a white man to the victim to prove he was legit, and a false life story plus random picture pulled from Google images was enough for the woman to agree to marry him. After that, Nurudeen began reeling in his prey, working the part of his plan that earned the money. He called the woman pretending to be a doctor, told her that her fiancé had been in an accident and requested money for treatment. Being the stupid, desperate, pathetic loser she is, the woman obliged. After receiving the money, Nurudeen let two weeks pass before calling the woman again, thanking her for her kindness and telling her that he would like to visit her in Australia. Again, this pathetic woman obliged when Nurudeen asked her for airfare, cash for customs clearance and other incidentals. It was shortly thereafter that Nurudeen was caught, although authorities didn’t offer any details as to how that happened. What they did reveal was that prior to his arrest, Nurudeen bilked the woman out of $47,000. Part of me does feel bad for this woman because you don’t want to see anyone duped so heinously, but a bigger part of me feels like she deserved what she got for being so very stupid and so very desperate……
- No, you’re not ridiculous and a total punch line at all, America's Next Top Model. Never mind your borderline-unstable, ditzy and schizophrenic host, Tyra Banks. Forget those bizarre, ridiculous outfits you slam your contestants into. Just brush aside the one person on your judging panel who I can legitimately not tell the sex of, male or female. Oh, and that little dust up in which three people were arrested and at least six others suffered minor injuries at a Saturday afternoon casting call for your show, never mind that either. The fact that your train wreck of a show has made it to Season 13 is equal parts amazing and depressing, but this is a first, even for you. No one is quite sure of the exact cause of the brawl, although multiple witnesses cited a general lack of organization at the tryout, as well as a panic that erupted when someone screamed that a smoking car was about to explode. How that all translates into wannabe models throwing down with one another, I have no idea. Maybe it has something to do with this being the first incarnation of the show to admit women 5-foot-7 and shorter, a fact I find amazing. Short people can have a Napoleon complex, so maybe that’s what happened here. Either that or a bunch of egotistical, self-important, wannabe reality TV stars crammed into a space to small to hold their gigantic egos and the inevitable cattiness broke out. "People were pushing, screaming, yelling at each other," one attention-starved loser/applicant said. “It was chaos.” In the madness, dozens of women were knocked to the ground and nearly trampled, but only two were taken to the hospital with minor injures, while four other injured parties refused medical attention. Those who remained didn’t get what they came for, as police shut down the casting call. Two women and one man were then arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and inciting to riot (no, this is not a good riot for my Riot Watch! feature, we don’t salute losers who riot at reality show auditions). Honestly…..these people got what they deserved; those who were injured, those who were arrested and the rest of the losers who had to go home without being able to audition. Fact is, you make any effort to be a reality show contestant and you deserve whatever sort of pain and suffering you receive……..
- Thanks for making the draft-day decisions of many NFL teams that much easier, P.J. Hill. Teams may have been asking themselves if using a first-day draft pick on Hill was a good idea, given the fact that he’s an overweight, speed-lacking running back who might have trouble breaking long runs and getting to the edge against speedy NFL linebackers and safeties. Some teams may have also had questions about Hill’s character, about whether he’s a good person, a solid citizen and someone who would represent their franchise well in the community. With one boneheaded incident, P.J. Hill answered all of those questions and then some. Early Saturday morning, the former University of Wisconsin Badger was heading home from a night of partying and drinkning in Madison, Wis. and made the indefensible decision to drive while hammered out of his mind. That’s strike one, because clearly NFL teams don’t want guys on their team who rack up DUIs; fans tend not to like that. But this is no ordinary DUI arrest, not by any stretch of the imagination. On his way home from the bar or party where he last was, Hill smashed into a guardrail near a campus-area gas station and just kept going. Police were called to the scene, got a description of the vehicle from witnesses and went looking for it. They found the car at a traffic light in the area, which is when Hill made yet another moronic decision: running from the cops - strike two. Police attempted to stop the vehicle but Hill was off, darting through traffic like he wove his way through Big Ten secondaries the past few years. Of course, he wasn’t drunk (at least I don’t think he was) when trying to elude tacklers on the field. Here, he was extremely drunk, as evidenced by the fact that he crashed his vehicle into a retaining wall. Clearly, P.J. Hill is not a man who values the well-being of inanimate traffic control and road safety devices, because within an hour he crushed two of them - strike three. With his car inoperable and the cops closing in, P.J. Hill faced a tough choice: stop running, face the music and surrender or flee on foot. But by now, you know which choice he made: fleeing on foot. For some odd reason, he felt he could outrun the cops, their cars (unlike his, still operable) and their radios. Flashing that underwhelming speed that NFL scouts had lamented, Hill was chased down from behind by the police not far from his apartment. Maybe he felt that if he could make it to his home base, he could claim sanctuary or something like that, I don’t know. We’ll never know because Hill never made it home, as he was chased down from behind by a cop who apparently has better draft prospects than Hill at this point, given his 1) superior speed and 2) lack of pending DUI charges - strike four. Hill was arrested at gunpoint on suspicion of drunken driving and leading police on a chase. Not exactly the way most guys go about preparing for the NFL draft - well, everyone outside of former Ohio State offensive lineman Alex Boone, who got plastered out in San Diego over the holidays, started jumping on cars, yanking on the chain of a tow truck and fleeing police before trying to hide under a porch. Maybe Hill and Boone have been sharing draft preparation tips? If so, I’d advise all other draft prospects to eschew their workout secrets and stick to the gym and practice field…….
- If there is any justice at all in this world, then insurance giant AIG truly will have to return to the Treasury Department the $165 million it just paid out in executive bonuses. How the company could accept hundreds of billions of dollars to stay afloat and use that money to fund undeserved, unnecessary and wasteful bonuses to executives defies all logic, business sense, responsibility and decency. I sincerely hope that when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner writes a letter to congressional leaders promising to make AIG pay the money back, he can deliver on his promise. "We will impose on AIG a contractual commitment to pay the treasury from the operations of the company the amount of the retention awards just paid," Geithner wrote. "In addition, we will deduct from the $30 billion in assistance an amount equal to the amount of those payments.” Do the math and you see that if Geithner’s threats bear out, they would mean a double payment, essentially a $165 million penalty, assessed to AIG for issuing the bonuses. Some thanks should go out to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who confirmed in a letter to Congress that after receiving federal bailout money, AIG paid 73 employees bonuses of more than $1 million each. This is a messy situation, as plenty of blame is being thrown around to the many responsible parties. Congress is complicit because it passed legislation in regards to the bailout that mandated bailout money be used to pay such bonuses if they were already in the contracts of employees. AIG is obviously to blame for being so idiotic, insensitive, irresponsible and ignorant as to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses when it was failing financially and obviously needed the money for operations first and foremost. Paying bonuses as large as $6.4 million in such a situation is inexcusable and represents the exact sort of financial irresponsibility that has taken the American economy right down the crapper these past few months. There is some solid humor to be found in two senators - Sens. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa - spearheading a plan to impose a hefty tax on retention bonuses paid to executives of companies that received federal bailout money or in which the United States has an equity interest. Why so funny? Because as I said, if Congress had made sure at the outset of the bailout talk to mandate that no bailout money could be used for anything but operations and paying debts, this mess could have been avoided. So nice thoughts by the chairman and top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, respectively, subjecting all retention bonuses to a 35 percent excise tax for excessive compensation to be paid by the company and an additional 35 percent tax to be paid by the individual, but too little too late. Spare me the rhetoric and stop pretending that you weren’t as guilty as anyone in this situation. No one is buying your innocence or white knight status, Congress. At this point, we don’t need any more hypocrisy or false bravado. What we do need is to punish these companies for their ass-hatted, selfish ways and make sure that this sort of behavior is never allowed to take place ever again………
- Was that so difficult, Lost? A good episode without excluding multiple crucial characters has been a rarity this season, so tonight’s episode was pretty solid overall. First, we learned what exactly happened - sort of - with the crash of Ajira Airlines Flight 316. Frank Lapidus and his co-pilot were discussing the irony of Hurley being a passenger on their plane, flying over the same area where Oceanic 815 crashed, when the turbulence and blinding white time-travel flash engulfed the plane. The next thing we saw after the flash was the plane - sans Hurley, Kate and Jack - spinning out of control just above the island, engines dying and a crash imminent. Lapidus manages to pull the plane out of its nosedive long enough to spot a long strip of bare ground that he can use as a runway, bringing the plane down but finding there isn’t enough room to stop the plane. “Prepare for impact!,” he screams as the plane crashes into the forest, impaling his co-pilot on a tree that comes through the windshield. In the aftermath of the crash, Lapidus tries to keep everyone calm as they pile out of the plane and onto the beach. He asks Sun where Jack, Kate and Hurley are, but she doest know and Ben Linus doesn’t either, saying only, “They’re gone.” The ironic next scene shows Sun on the beach, glancing at her husband Jin’s wedding ring as the other crash survivors scurry about, trying to figure out what’s going on and what to do next, a déjà vu moment from the pilot episode of the show when Sun was in a very similar situation. As Lapidus tries to rally the survivors and get them to build a fire and camp while waiting to be rescued, Ben sneaks off into the jungle and Sun follows him. He doubles back behind her, then confronts her as to why she’s following him. Ben then explain that they are currently not on the main island, but rather on the secondary island the Others used back in the future, the same island Sawyer was taken to and shown the main island from a cliff a couple seasons ago. He’s going back to the main island to get supplies and support from the dwelling where “his people” live. Sun is welcome to come, Ben tells her, and she agrees to go despite Lapidus’ pleadings not to go because Ben isn’t trustworthy. Sun explains she must trust Ben, but once he reveals his plan to take a boat from the beach across the water to a dock on the main island, Sun knocks him out with a paddle from the boat and reveals that she never really trusted him. Instead, Sun and Lapidus row to the other side, where they find the barracks formerly used by both the Dharma Initiative and the Others, but which are now deserted. As they land at the dock, the trees and bushes nearby rustle and shake, just like the trees in the forest on the island do when the Black Smoke Monster is in the vicinity. Sun and Frank venture on, with Sun saying it was probably just an animal. The barracks are empty, no lights are on and Frank tells Sun that she probably won't be finding Jin here. Just then, a light goes on and out of one of the houses steps none other than Christian Shephard, father of Jack and Claire and a man who appears to be everywhere on the island even though he’s supposed to be dead. Already, he’s been in the cabin of Jacob, the mysterious, unseen leader of the Others, in the cave with John Locke when Locke left the island via the mysterious turning wheel and in numerous other places in the jungle. Christian summons Frank and Sun inside, where he shows them a photograph of Dharma recruits to the island from 1977, showing Hurley, Kate and Jack with the rest of the recruits. Then, Christian informs Sun, “You’ve got a long journey ahead of you.” Of course, that journey is back to 1977, where the rest of the Oceanic 6 somehow ended up after disappearing from Ajira 316, even as Sun stayed in 2007. Two weeks ago, we saw Sawyer/LaFleur (as he’s known to his Dharma peeps) summed out to the north valley on the island by Jin, who had located Hurley, Kate and Jack. After an emotional reunion, Sawyer tells the trio that they need to stay put until he can figure out a story to explain their presence on the island. As for Jin….let’s just say he has other things on his mind. When he hears Jack say that Sun was also on the flight, he rushes off to the Flame station to check with Rudzinski, the man who works the station whose primary purpose is surveillance and communication. Meanwhile, Sawyer returns to the barracks and explains the situation to Juliet, who comes up with the idea to sneak Jack, Kate and Hurley’s names onto the passenger list of the submarine coming in later that day to bring the next group of Dharma recruits in. While Juliet wriggles her way into overseeing the list and those coming to the island, Sawyer packs some clothes for his returning friends and returns to the valley. With everyone dressed in era-appropriate swag and on board with their cover story, Sawyer drives them to the barracks and explains that they should just blend in with the rest of the newcomers and when their names are called by those running the registration process, they should go along with whatever they’re asked to do. That works fine for Jack, whose name is indeed called by none other than Dr. Edgar Halliwax, the mysterious doctor from all of the training videos seen in previous seasons at various Dharma stations around the island. He’s going by the name Chang in 1977, but whatever his name, Jack is able to talk his way through the registration process and is given his very own Dharma jumpsuit and job assignment: janitor. Hurley doesn’t have much trouble either, but Kate looks to be in trouble when Phil, one of the more annoying Dharma members and one of those running registration, chats her up and finds out she’s not on the list. At the last moment, Juliet swoops in with her amended list and takes over in checking Kate in. This was an ironic, tense moment because of the obvious problem on the horizon between the two, i.e. both are in love with Sawyer on some level. But for the time being, Jack, Kate and Hurley clear registration and are now official Dharma members, Hurley is less than thrilled for one reason, that being the fact that he remembers the purge that took place in which the Others - led by Ben Linus - slaughtered the Dharma Initiative members. I guess it remains to be seen if the Oceanic 6, Sawyer and Juliet are caught up in that nasty incident. Another major problem develops around the same time over at the Flame, where Jin arrives and has Rudzinski check with every station on the island, finding that none of them saw a plane crash. Jin is about the leave and figure out his next move when an alarm goes off signaling an intruder in Sector 14. Thinking it may be Sun, Jin rushes out into the jungle and instead finds Sayid. Because Rudzinski is right behind him, Jin must pretend that he does not know Sayid to keep his own cover intact. Sayid is taken into custody at the flame, with Sawyer called in by Jin to help diffuse the situation. Sawyer is able to keep Sayid safe by getting him to lie and say he’s a Hostile (what Others were called in 1977), which means that under the terms of the truce between the Dharma Initiative and the Hostiles, he’s protected. A trip to the barracks follows, with Sayid as prisoner. He hops out of the Dharma van and spots his fellow Oceanic 6 members, to which Hurley mumbles, “I guess we found Sayid.” Sayid is then marched down into a holding cell underground, where Sawyer is confident he’s safe for the time being. Later in the day, Sayid is brought a sandwich by an interesting good Samaritan: a young Ben Linus, whom Sayid recognizes, but the recognition obviously doesn’t extend both ways because Ben didn’t meet Sayid until 2004. Back on ground level, sun sets on the barracks and Jack decides it’s a good time to visit Sawyer/LaFleur and talk about their situation. Jack is stunned to find Juliet and Sawyer living together, but after a big hug from Juliet, Jack finds the reception chilly. Juliet leaves the two men alone to talk, with the conversation quickly turning to Sayid. Sawyer explains that he’s managed to keep him safe, but when Jack presses the issue Sawyer fights back. Jack criticizes Sawyer for reading a book and seemingly relaxing at such an important time, Sawyer retorts that he once heard that Winston Churchill once read a book each night, even during wars, because it helped him to think and analyze. The problem with Jack’s leadership before he left the island, Sawyer reasons, was that he just reacted and didn’t think enough. Ironic, because you’d think a well-educated doctor would be the one who thought and analyzed everything and the uneducated con artist would be the one who reacted. Ultimately, Sawyer throws down the gauntlet, saying he’s the leader of their little group now and he’ll be the one doing the planning. He tells Jack to go back to his house and not worry about the situation. In seeing Jack off, Sawyer spots Kate on the porch of her house, a couple of houses over from his own, and the two exchange a rather loaded wave and exchange of glances. That’s where things end, capping a pretty solid episode. Other interesting moments included finding out that the baby born to Amy and Horace, one of the couples leading the Dharma crew, was Ethan, who we know turned out to be one of the more devious and troublesome others for the Oceanic 815 survivors. Also, Amy asked Juliet when she and Sawyer/LaFleur would have a baby of their own and a bummed Juliet (having just learned of Kate’s return), sighs, “When the timing is right,” which it clearly isn’t. Lots to chew on and next week’s episode is allegedly pretty violent and bloody, so tune in for that one…….
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