Stuffed Animals, Nigerian Scammers, and Pyramid Schemes

So I've been meaning to update. I took some photos of things I've made of felt, so probably tomorrow I'll post them up as I have a late class.

The above picture is of Chris covered by our entire collection of stuffed animals. The collection has expanded somewhat now since the picture was taken about a year ago, to include 5 of the same border collie which we call the the Arfbuckle Scammers because everytime we go to the mall, they try to get us to buy another one of them. We've even mixed up all their names.....Thelonius, Plato, Archimedes, Sophocles, and who knows who the 5th one is. hahaha. I need to seriously make them little nametags.

So anyhow...I've almost been swindled into joining what appears to be a total scam, Dubli. It's a reverse-auction website that, for a site that claims to be the next big thing in ecommerce actually doesn't have much of any product I would buy. Or many others would, for that reason. Besides snobs who like to have ugly-ass louis vuitton handbags.

OK to be entirely honest, I wasn't buying it. A friend of my mom's told my mom about it, and she being completely computer illiterate, promptly gave me the woman's number . and I, being the good daughter that I am (hah!) called the woman the next night. Mostly because I KNOW my mom would just pester me about it in a couple days time. she called me especially to tell me about it....which is a red flag for "this is too good to be true" cause obviously she got over-excited.

From there, to be nice, I wound up watching a webinar (how clever...a web seminar! haha...oh joy....) for over an hour. well actually, I was reading Dubli scam information while listening top the webinar and periodically checking to see the powerpoint, which, for something meant to be professional, often had misspellings and other grammatical errors. To think, today's episode of Jerry Springer was called, "1 hour of your life you'll never get back", but at least that provided some entertainment value.

I'd like to recall a humourous story about my parents, when we were still in AZ. I noticed one day that they were smiling alot and were being a bit secretive. They called me outside onto the porch to have a talk (oh great...is this about my weight again?). That's when my dad let me know that, apparently, we were in line for a HUGE windfall. He told me not to tell anybody. Well, come to find out, the windfall was nothing but a faxed Nigerian scam, claiming that my dad knew someone who died in China and wanted to pass his riches down to us. When I asked my dad who this person in China that died could be, he didn't really have an answer... LOL. MAN, were THEY disappointed when I told them that they were totally getting duped.

It kind of makes me angry that there are people out there scamming others who aren't familiar with technology enough to have an email account continously spammed by Chippendales newsletters and Nigerian scams (they get creative sometimes, don't they?). My mother's first and only contact with a computer was when I installed a slots game her friend bought for her, and she spent more time trying to move the cursor 1 inch than actually playing. and serious, what is the point of computer slots when there's no chance of coins falling out of your monitor and into your lap??


Which leads me to the question...