Death of the (Reasonably) Intelligent E-mail Scammer.

It's been almost five years since I last took a serious (?) look at online scammers. In those days, I would contact a scammer that had sent an email to one of my accounts. As long time followers of this blog recall, I would answer a scammers email while posing as Lucy Ricardo, or Fred Sanford or Misty Meaner, to name just three of my on line characters.

It has been my experience that the intelligence of these Internet scammers has been over rated. None seemed too terribly bright to me. How someone could be taken in by some of these guys is beyond me.

Now, my opinion of the intelligence on line scammers has fallen even lower - I would not have thought that possible.

Pictured above is a screen shot of a recent phishing scam email I received in one of my Gmail accounts. The scammer wants his victims to believe the email comes from Google, but the email address of the sender is mbay.net - It would obvious to even the most Internet challenged that an email from Google would not come from some placed called mbay.net - an email from Google would come from an address with google.com in the name.

Duh.

Have the scammers become so stupid that they believe their potential victims are complete imbeciles?

This particular scammer - colonel6 - must really be a complete airhead; too stupid, in fact to make goofin' on him enjoyable.

Wuthering Heights

Charlotte Brontë's classic Jane Eyre  is one of those books that we're told we need to read but, somehow, neglect. I corrected that mistake by reading the novel last year.

This month, I wanted to correct another error on my part, by finally getting around to reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. I'm half-way through and I have to say that the novel is not at all like I expected. Frankly, I didn't know what to expect from the novel, but it is certainly creepier than I imagined it would be.

Of course, the novel is a classic and well worth my time, but no doubt about it,  Wuthering Heights. is the strangest novel I've come across in quite a long time.

To me, Kaffka's got nothing on Emily Brontë.

News From Nowhere

As I mentioned in an earlier post, after reading Edward Bellamy's dreadful Utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, I started on a novel written in response to Bellamy, News from Nowhere by William Morris, in 1890.

The complete title is - News From Nowhere or An Epoch of Rest being some chapters from A Utopian Romance.

Like those in Bellamy's novel, the ideas in Morris' work may have been considered revolutionary in the 1890's, but I found both books to be boring in the extreme, condescending and pretentious. The fact that neither book has a interesting plot doesn't help.

By an act of insanity, Morris' novel has managed to make Harold Bloom's  The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Insanity has to be the only reason that such a worthless piece of drivel should make a list of essential reading.

I don't considered myself to be better off having read News From Nowhere. At one time , I would have stopped reading any book as bad as this early on. I promised myself, however, that I would do my best to finish every book I start.

I should get a medal for having finished News From Nowhere.

Changes for the Old Website

For several years, I've owned the domain name dumaguetecity.net. For the first few years, I had the web hosting done by the same company that registers my domain name. However, when company A began charging too much for their web hosting, I changed over to company B for the hosting while keeping the registry with company A.

I recently received an email from company B letting me know that my current billing cycle would end March 15 - the dreadful Ides of March, no less. The price to renew was much more than I was willing to pay to continue having the hosting done by company B.

My original goal with this website was to try and make a few bucks with Affiliate ads and Google ad sense. For a couple of years, this was breaking even. I was getting enough revenue to, at least, pay my web hosting fee. Unfortunately, the web site has not brought in any money in quite a long time.

To make matters worse, my web design capabilities have not kept up with the upsurge in mobile web surfing. I was never able to get the hang of designing a site that was "mobile friendly".

I looked at the situation, and decided to cancel my hosting account with company B at the end of the current billing cycle and use Google's blogger.com (where this blog is located) to host the domain name as a "blog".

It's free....and free is good.

After setting up a new blog called dumaguetecitynet, I was instructed by Google to go to the domain registry site and change the DNS (CNAME) in order to redirect traffic from dumaguetecity.net to the blogger.com address.

Easier said than done.

I went onto company A's website and made the changes as given by Google. I was told changes could take 24 hours. After 36 hours, I began a live chat with a rep from company A. I was told that I'd have to contact company B to make the changes. I was to contact the hosting company not the company that registered the domain name.

After a couple of on line chats with Ron, the tech from company B, I was finally able to get everything up and running.

Now, when you go to dumaguetecity.net, you're led where I want you to go.

Fortunately, the website is now mobile friendly.

Upcoming Website Changes in the Works.

I have had difficulties with my website, www.dumaguetecity.net.

For the most part, I've been trying to design the website myself with my limited knowledge of html. Unfortunately, with the rise of mobile usage and the overall decline of desktop pc surfing, I've haven't done such a good job keeping up. Google has let me know in uncertain terms that the website is not mobile friendly.

It will be three years in March since I last renewed my account with a web hosting company and the agreement expires on March 15. I've decided that rather than renew the account, I will cancel my business relationship with Webhostingpad and use Google's blogspot site to host dumaguetecity.net from now on. I've been using a different company to keep my domain name registered. I'll continue to use that 2nd company.

Using the blogspot site with their themes, I'll be able to have the website both mobile and pc friendly, although I'll need to made a few adjustments on how I manage the pages. That will take some thought.

Dead Monk Stays That Way.

I've fallen behind on my duties. On January 28th of this year, I was publishing a post on Donald Trump - Benito Mussolini with (Bad) Hair when I should have been publishing an update on Ashutosh Maharaj, whose clinically dead body has been kept in a freezer for two years now.

Of course, the founder and head of the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan (Divine Light Awakening Mission) is still dead (or still in deep meditation, if you prefer) so I guess it's a case of no harm-no foul if I'm a few weeks late in posting my update.

The courts in India have yet to decide what is to be done with Ashutosh Maharaj's remains. At stake is property worth "crores of rupees".

Al Jazeera - "Women should support Sanders not Clinton".

At aljazeera.com, Catherine Rottenberg says, women should support Sanders not Clinton.

Bernie versus The Donald

Looking at the U.S. from the outside, I can see a real and distinct possibility - if not downright probability - that when the dust finally settles after the Presidential primary elections, the two candidates chosen to run for the job of POTUS, will be Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

The American people are unhinged and angry enough to select these two impractical and irrational candidates as the Democrat and Republican combatants.

Both Sanders and Trump. in their own way, will be a continuation of the Obama legacy. Trump, as the ultimate, narcissistic empty suit candidate , and Sanders as the Santa Clausian provider of everything we desire.

The only difference between the two is that Trump appeals to the Right-Wing Lunatic Fringe, while Sanders appeals to the equally insane Left-Wing Kooks.

The Democrat voters seem to be falling head over heels for their only major candidate not headed for Federal penitentiary. The Republicans want to tar and feather those that they perceive as "Establishment".

After years of political divisiveness, the country is as conflicted as it can possibly become. Just how the U.S. will continue to survive the 21st Century is beyond me.

On the bright side - if one can call it that - neither President Trump nor President Sanders will be able to accomplish the changes each one wants to bring about. Nothing productive will come about and the country will continue to be divided.

Hamid Dabashi Endorses Bernie Sanders for POTUS

Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, endorses Bernie Sanders for POTUS in an opinion piece for Al Jazeera.

As much as Dabashi hates Republicans - and believe me he really hates Republicans - his hatred for Hillary Clinton is greater; he writes:

"I would happily vote for Sanders in the primaries and hope he will beat Hillary Clinton and all her Republican cohorts and become the next US president. But even if he does not, there is no snowball chance in hell I would vote for Hillary 'Margaret Thatcher' Clinton, who I,in fact, consider an infinitely more dangerous warmonger than all those hot-air crackpot Republicans put together."

In his view, "Republicans are political non-entities and have no clue how to navigate legislations [sic] through Congress" and believes Hillary and Bill are "master practitioners" at getting both Houses of Congress to do their bidding. The Clintons will "...... will sail through any legislation that will facilitate dropping more bombs on brown and black people around the world and could not care less if their liberal domestic agenda are stonewalled in the Congress".

He adds,"Billions of human beings around the globe have every reason to be scared witless of a vicious imperialist presidency of Hillary Clinton".

I can't argue with Dabashi's views on Clinton, but he's clueless regarding the Republicans. His obvious hatred for Israel and the Republicans' support for our ally has clouded his judgement.

I'm not sure how much Dabashi's endorsement will help the Berninator, but if it pushes Sanders over the top, so much the better.

A Few Thoughts on "The Western Canon".

Yesterday, after I had finished reading Looking Backward: 2000–1887  by Edward Bellamy, I published a post giving my opinion of the novel. I was not impressed with the novel, to say the least.

I want to explain how I came to read the book.

In an earlier post, I explained how I alternated between using my son's Kindle and the FBReader app on my Android when I wanted to read an e book. I'll use the Kindle only when my battery is low on the Android. Opening up the Kindle recently, I discovered an e book which I had forgotten downloading from Project Gutenberg - Mary Noailles Murfree's, "His Unquiet Ghost". In addition to coming upon that particular e book, I found News from Nowhere by William Morris. Doing a little research on Morris' novel, I learned that it was written in response to Bellamy's novel.

So, I began reading Looking Backward: 2000–1887 on the Android and switching to News from Nowhere on the Kindle whenever the phone needed charging.

I've not reached the half way mark on News from Nowhere and I can see it's going to be a grind finishing it. As much as I was unimpressed with Bellamy's novel, I have to say that it's far and away superior to Morris' book. I'm only going to finish reading this boring piece of drivel because I've told myself that I'd finish reading whatever I've started, as a New Year's resolution.

It's bad enough that News from Nowhere is so dreadful, but for reasons that escape me, the book is listed in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.

Maybe I should not have been surprised to find Morris' book on the list. Of course, I haven't come even close to reading everything listed in the Canon, but I've read several of the books listed, and some of the books in Bloom's Canon do not deserve to be there.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey was entertaining, but it's hardly one of the great works of Western civilization. The same could be said of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Does anything by Vonnegut really belong in the Western Canon?

There are several books on Bloom's list which I want to read.....overall it's not a bad list. But, I'll not be just picking something at random from the Western Canon.