Spam is certainly getting stranger. Of course, I still get as many offers to extend my cock with surgery or Viagra as I ever did.But the 419 scams are definitely branching out from the usual Nigerian general seeking someone trustworthy to mind his millions.I mean, I assume this is a 419 scam. In some ways, things would be much sadder if this were in any way genuine:I WANT TO BE YOUR HOUSE GIRL Monday, 11 August, 2008 9:20 PM From: "balissunm@yahoo.com" Add sender to Contacts To:...
This is Robert Mugabe's new house:It cost around $26 million dollars and took five years to build, five years during which Zimbabwe's economy completely fell apart, inflation spiralled up to hundreds of thousands of per cent per year, and thousands of the poorest lost their shanty shack homes in slum clearances ordered by Mugabe.But Robert sleeps well at night:He dines well too. Even though 80% of the population are without work in Zimbabwe, Mugabe's kitchen and chefs ensure that he and his Zanu cronies are well fed:And they can always relax later for cocktails by the pool, and discuss perhaps the pressing matters of the day.Like the election they lost then stole back. Like the tens of thousands of citizens who've fled the country. Like the fact that they'll get away with it because the...
Everyone over a certain age (let's say 30) can recall the harrowing impact of Michael Buerk's first reports of a famine in Ethiopia in 1984.The sheer biblical images of starving black children - their hollow eyes pleading for food to placate their empty, distended bellies, their ribs stretching their thin skins, their limbs shrivelled to mere bones and skin - shocked the West in our relative affluence.What followed was Band Aid, Live Aid, and the growth of global consciousness in relation to the appalling poverty suffered on the African continent.Since then, charities have reported 'donation fatigue' and the diminishing returns of shock footage of African carnage or disaster. Mass rape and child slavery in Darfur barely stirs us now. Burma is flooded, and we can barely bother to put a...
It's hard to know what the correct response is, when you encounter a story as bizarre, shocking and innately tragic as this.To summarise, dozens of 'witchdoctors' in the 'democratic republic' of the Congo have been arrested on suspicion that they have been using 'black magic' to shrink people's penises.According to a report from Reuters correspondents:Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some...
I'm currently in Asia, reading about Africa. It's an interesting compare and contrast.I'm specifically reading Martin Meredith's 'The State of Africa', which chronicles how it all went wrong across Africa in the fifty years since most colonial powers pulled out and the various countries achieved independence.What a sorry litany of kleptocracy, famine, pointless war and endless tribal conflict it all adds up to.The irony is that many of those countries, whatever you care to think of the colonial legacy, were in pretty good financial shape when they were handed over to the indigenous 'Big Men' dictators who assumed control after independence.But after a few decades of nutters like Amin, Mobutu, Bongo and so on, the continent is in worse shape than it ever was.The contrast with Asia is...
Last month, I went to the land where everyone is waiting for one madman to die.It is also one of the most beautiful countries it has ever been my privilege to visit, populated by one of the most friendly peoples in the world.I took Mini-Skinner with me. We went to a beautiful safari lodge where each night, as we sat on the veranda for dinner, literally dozens of elephants came to drink at the watering hole below us. amazingly, there were only two other guests in the lodge.We visited the nearby world heritage site, a spectacular place of awesome natural beauty that was almost deserted. We went to the local craft market, where we were besieged by craft workers, desperate to sell their work at almost any price, including swapping beautifully carved statues for the grubby, sweaty baseball cap...
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...
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 followHope you're all enjoying the rain!(Sorry for being evil, but it's hard to resist.)...
Okay, so Bono's a tool. We know this, especially those of us who live in Dublin. I went to the loo in a nightclub once and when I came back to my seat Bono was sitting on my coat. He didn't even acknowledge me when I pulled it out from under his arse. So he's a tool. I know this.We know he's a hypocrite too. He moved his money to the tax haven of Holland only last year, yet he's always lecturing the rest of us to dig deeper in our pockets for the common good.He's an anti-poverty campaigner with his own investment vehicle. So yes, he's no stranger to contradiction.He's a pompous arse, too. We found that out when he sued his clearly mental former stylist for the return of an old hat.But in fairness to Bono, he could sit in his big house and polish his vintage car collection, as other...
Here I am, in the hills of Northern Spain (in the preposterous republic of Basqueland), in mid-November, and the sun is splitting the trees. Not only that, but today and yesterday it was in the low twenties, centigrade wise.Now, locals inform me that in times past, being in a mountainous region meant getting snowed on at this time of year. Instead, they´re wearing T-shirts to the shops and enjoying their swimming pools.Meanwhile, in huge chunks of Africa, where the delightful combo of AIDS, war and corruption have already made life beyond difficult for most people, global warming is destroying what little arable land was left. Kenya, among others, is losing its farmland and, just as important, the habitats in which wild animals live.And in Ireland, global warming has so far managed to...