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Scammer targets people who've been ripped off already

Here's a nice little variant on the traditional 419 scam letter that showed up in my inbox this morning: THIS IS TO OFFICIALLY INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED AMONG THE 40 LUCKY VICTIM OF SCAMMED TO BE COMPENSATED WITH $500,000.00.FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS,THIS WAS CONCLUDED BY THE SENATE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA,SENATOR wALLIS KELLY WITH DELEGATE FROM THE UNITED NATION AND WORLD BANK AT THE AFRICAN UNION SUMMIT WHICH TOOK PLACE IN ADDIS ABABA IN (ETHIOPIA) AIMED AT REDEEMING THE COUNTRY'S IMAGE AND ALSO TO TRY TO PUT ANEND TO THE INCESSANT SCAM REPORTS BY FOREIGNER ESPECIALLY FROM USA AND AROUND THE GLOBE.YOU HAVE BEEN LISTED AND APPROVED FOR THIS PAYMENT AS ONE OF THE SCAMMED VICTIMS TO BE PAID THIS AMOUNT. In David W. Maurer's classic 1940 book The Big Con (the basis for the movie The Sting), he describes how con-men would put their victims on the hook again and again, fleecing them, then convincing them to go home and borrow or steal everything their could from their friends in order to get their original money back. Like a desperate gambler doubling down, the poor marks would get deeper and deeper, and at every stage, it got easier for the grifter to con them again. So here's the modern variant of it -- fleecing people who've been burned by scammers. Previously: Enron was a real, non-metaphorical Big Con - Boing Boing Stock-bubble as Big Con - Boing Boing Fun book: The Modern Con Man -- How to Get Something for Nothing ... How con-men make their faces look trustworthy - Boing Boing Nigerian Letter scammer convinced to carve replica Commodore 64 ... Hank Paulson's bailout 419 letter - Boing Boing Were McCain Supporters 419-scammed by Nigerian "African Press ... 419 scammers tricked into re-creating Dead Parrot Sketch - Boing Boing NPR "Xeni Tech": Scambaiters and Monty Python, 419-style - Boing Boing Dutch court locks up 419 scammers - Boing Boing 419 victim shoots Nigerian diplomat - Boing Boing Dick Cheney's 419 letter - Boing Boing Nigerian Letter scammer convinced to carve replica Commodore 64 ......

Michael Billington on what TS Eliot's complex plays did for the theatre

Is there a dramatist currently less fashionable than TS Eliot? The verse-drama revival he so ardently championed bit the dust. His high Anglicanism is now a minority taste. Even the drawing-room settings he used as a spiritual battleground seem redolent of a lost world. The ultimate irony is that Eliot achieved the theatrical breakthrough he sought only with Cats: a musical that, at the last count, had been seen by over 50 million people worldwide; you could call it Old Possum's posthumous revenge. Next week, the Donmar Warehouse in London is bucking the trend with a two-month Eliot festival. It will include a revival of The Family Reunion, readings of Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party, and a performance of Four Quartets complemented by music from Beethoven. Time will tell whether this will be enough to restore Eliot's theatrical fortunes. I wouldn't bet on it: we live in an age of peculiar theatrical narcissism. We expect drama to conform to our own politically correct concerns; with a few shining exceptions, theatres now show a deep incuriosity about the past. Even Shaw has had to battle against decades of neglect. Eliot is a more complex case, and I would readily concede many of the arguments against him. His constant emphasis on contrition and self-denial becomes oppressive. Just as Eliot's religiousness can subside into misanthropy, so his politics can descend into snobbery. And, in attempting to pour both Greek myth and dramatic poetry into an acceptable West End form, he can be said to have sacrificed two babies with the bath water. Even he acknowledged, a propos The Cocktail Party, that "every step in simplification brings me nearer to Frederick Lonsdale", a creator of popular boulevard divertissements. Yet, for all that, I still believe Eliot deserves a second look. I am sorry that the Donmar season hasn't found room for Sweeney Agonistes, Eliot's most daring theatrical experiment. Billed as "fragments of an Aristophanic melodrama", it shows death intruding on a party hosted by two good-time girls. Written in a jazzy, freeform style that, shortly after Eliot's death, was given a brilliant accompanying score by John Dankworth, it anticipates many of the discoveries of postwar drama. In its use of repetition, its orchestration of demotic speech, and its mixture of comedy and menace, it clearly had an influence on Harold Pinter. Moreover, as Kenneth Tynan shrewdly noted, it articulates one of Eliot's key themes: an obsessive guilt often connected with the death of a woman. As Sweeney himself at one point cries: I knew a man once did a girl in. Any man might do a girl in Any man has to, needs to, wants to Once in a lifetime, do a girl in. Sweeney was never completed, but it provides a matrix for Eliot's imaginative development. It also suggests a second reason for looking closely at his stage work. Drama is inevitably a form of self-revelation, and Eliot's plays, in their constant emphasis on the need to expiate past sins, in their portrait of the hollowness of public men, and even in their final acceptance of human love, tell us a lot about the poet himself. All Eliot's heroes are, significantly, harried and haunted by their pasts. It's a rule that applies to Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, Harry in The Family Reunion, pursued by the Furies to his family's ancestral home, and to Lord Claverton in The Elder Statesman who, in his declining years, is confronted by his youthful disregard for human life. Eliot's plays provide an extraordinary self-portrait culminating, towards the end of his life, in an achieved absolution. People often pooh-pooh the biographical approach to art. Michael Hastings was derided for dredging up the story of Eliot's tormented first marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood in his play, Tom and Viv. But, while it is always dangerous to moralise about people's marriages, Hastings' play did some good in demolishing the myth of Eliot's impersonality. His marriage to Haigh-Wood led to emotional disorders on both sides, eventual separation and finally to her commitment to a psychiatric hospital. I'm not suggesting that this provides the clue to all Eliot's work; but it can hardly be an accident that his archetypal protagonist is a man who, whatever his public achievements, is wracked by a sense of guilt only relieved by self-abnegation. In Eliot's plays, sin and suffering are often accompanied by a sprightly comic sense. Everyone harps on the fact that The Cocktail Party ends with the off-stage crucifixion of Celia Coplestone, who has become a Christian missionary, on an African village anthill: an act of willed martyrdom that many people find repugnant. What is ignored is that the play also satirises the small talk of prattling partygoers and reminiscences about unseen figures, in a way that Pinter brilliantly extended in the Hirst-Spooner second act in No Man's Land. I would argue that Eliot's gift for self-revelation and social comedy only fully emerges in his two totally ignored final plays: The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). I would happily sacrifice yet another evening sitting in some chilly church listening to actors worthily intoning Murder in the Cathedral for the odd revival of these two forgotten plays. The Confidential Clerk is a rivetingly bizarre play about parents seeking children and children seeking parents. It is also filled with countless echoes: of Euripides's Ion, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Shaw's Misalliance, and Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. What gives the play extra-curricular fascination, however, is how much it tells us about Eliot. Ultimately this is about the compromises by which people live, and the shadow-like nature of our professional lives. When Sir Claude Mulhammer, a successful financier who yearns to become a potter, talks of "a consuming passion to do something for which one lacks the capacity", one wonders if Eliot is referring to his own desire to become a popular dramatist. But the play is also about the universal search for some transcendent experience: what Mulhammer calls "an agonising ecstasy that makes life bearable". Colby, his presumed son, finds it in religion; Sir Claude, in pottery. When Eliot wrote The Elder Statesman, he had exorcised many of his demons by marrying his second wife, Valerie. Accordingly, he creates a hero, Lord Claverton, who banishes the spectres from his past. Achieving reconciliation with his two children, the hero finally drops all pretences and announces: "I have been brushed by the wing of happiness." Appearing in the same year as A Taste of Honey, and Chicken Soup With Barley, The Elder Statesman looked old-fashioned and enjoyed the shortest West End run of any of Eliot's plays; yet it remains his most human and touching work. All of which begs the real question: is Eliot a dramatic dodo, or does his work still have relevance in a predominantly secular age that has all but eradicated notions of sin, guilt and contrition? I wouldn't bank on a sudden Eliot boom, but I have a hunch that his plays have the capacity to address our search for something beyond mundane materiality. Our goals may be radically different from Eliot's, but poor Tom's not quite cold yet.From Mamet to Monty Python: Two verse-dramatists on what Eliot taught themGlyn Maxwell Eliot gave a speech at Harvard in 1950, in which he reported his experiences in writing and staging his three major plays. He considers what worked, what didn't, and why. There was no sign of the authoritative poet-critic. He was humble, candid, even drily comic.The speech was helpful, and meant to be - it was explicitly addressed to poets who might wish to write plays. Nearly all his concerns were formal: above all, to avoid the "Shakespearean echo" which sank the Romantics as playwrights. He started with what he called the "versification of Everyman" when writing Murder in the Cathedral, then switched to a long flexible line with a wandering caesura for all the others. The principle seemed to be: anything but pentameter. This was fair enough, given the Victorian artefact from which Eliot's poetry dissented - though the five-beat line emerged fit and well in the hands of his contemporary Edward Thomas: it's a more provisional, uncertain line, one that's nearer breath than poetry. I also think Eliot's Sweeney fragments stumbled on a more suggestive and durable form than did The Cocktail Party, and echo down, consciously or not, in everything from Pinter to Mamet to Monty Python.Peter OswaldVerse plays are not eligible for the TS Eliot prize, or any other poetry prize. Yet Eliot believed that poetry and drama were integral to each other: poetry dries up if it forgets its roots in sacred drama; drama becomes a slow-footed follower of the newspapers if it discards poetry. Just as he set out to tie up the cut ends of our culture in The Wasteland, so Eliot threw himself into reuniting poetry and drama. It was daunting. As he put it: "This verse drama is hard. You have to give your life to it." He felt he'd come to it too late.When I started writing verse drama, I felt that Eliot's dramatic enterprise was a heroic failure. What made things difficult was his disinclination for the obvious form - the iambic pentameter. To a modernist this option was locked shut, Pound having said that "the first step was to break the pentameter". But the blank verse form treads such a fine line between formal verse and ordinary speech: in my experience, it is salvation for the poet/playwright. Eliot did start something. Ted Hughes strove with the verse play all his life, culminating in his glorious Alcestis. This year saw the revival of the Canterbury festival, for which Murder in the Cathedral was commissioned; a play by Sebastian Barry was staged in the cathedral. Who knows, Eliot's fusion of poetry and drama may be realised in our lifetime.Glyn Maxwell's play Liberty recently completed a national tour. Peter Oswald's version of Schiller's Mary Stuart opens on Broadway next spring. His play Lisbon opens in the West End at the same time.The TS Eliot festival starts tomorrow and runs till January 17. Details: donmarwarehouse.comTS EliotTheatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Dead Parrot sketch is 1600 years old

It's long been held that the old jokes are the best jokes and Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch is no different.