Email Spam, Hoax, Chain Letters and Stuff

Yet another scam, asking for money:


FROM THE DESK OF ABU JOSEPH
BILL AND EXCHANGE MANAGER
BANK OF AFRICA.
OUAGADOUGOU,BURKINA FASO.

TOP SECRET
Dear Friend

I am ABU JOSEPH the bill and exchange manager at the foreign remittance
department of BANK OF AFRICA.

I got your contact from the internet ,while seaching for an honest and trust
worthy person, who will assist me to implement this transfer.

l discovered the sum of Twenty Two million and five hundred thousand United
States Dollars (USD22.5M) belonging to a deceased customer of this bank. The
fund has been lying in a suspence account without anybody coming to put
claim over the money since the account owner late Mr Salla khatif from
Lebanese , who was involved in the December 25th 2003 Benin plane crash.
Here is the air crash website on cnn =
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/12/26/benin.crash/index.html

The said fund is now ready for transfer to a foriegn account whose owner
will be portrayed as the beneficiary and next of kin to the deceased
customer of the bank.

Since we got information about his death, we have been expecting his next if
kin to come over and claim his money because we cannot release it unless
somebody applies for it as next of kin or relation to the deceased as
indicated in our banking guidlines and laws but unfortunately we learnt that
all his supposed next of kin or relation died alongside with him at the
plane crash leaving nobody behind for the claim.

It is therefore upon this discovery that I decided to make this business
proposal to you and release the money to you as the next of kin or relation
to the deceased for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is
coming for it and I don't want this money to go into the bank treasury as
unclaimed bill.

The banking law and guidline here stipulates that if such money remained
unclaimed after five years, the money will be transfered into the bank
treasury as unclaimed fund. The request of foreigner as next of kin in this
business is occassioned by the fact that the customer was a foreigner and a
Burkinabe cannot stand as next of kin to a foreigner.

I therefore soliciting for your assistance to come forward as the next of
kin.

I have agreed that 40% of this money will be for you as the beneficiary in
respect of the provision of your Account and services rendered, 55% would be
for me while 5% will be for expencses incured during the cause of thIS
transaction If the money is transferred to your Account from
BANK OF AFRICA, I and my family in this transaction will proceed immediately
to your country for our own share of the money.

I expect you to keep this business strictly confidential and secret as you
may wish to know that
I am Bank official.

Be rest assured that this business is 100% risk free on both side and every
arrangement to transfer this money to the Account you are going to provide
have been concluded provided we maintain the confidentiality and
secreceirity involved. Contact me on my email address I am looking forward
for your prompt response.

Yours faithfully,

ABU JOSEPH

I just found out something: I prefer to read from the web brower then reading using Words. So I decided to copy this chuck of words and read it here instead.

The Turn of the Tide

Not long ago I came to one of those bleak periods that many of us encounter from time to time, a sudden drastic dip in the graph of living when everything goes stale and flat, energy wanes, and enthusiasm dies. The effect on my work was frightening. Every morning I would clench my teeth and mutter: “Today life will take on some of its old meaning. You’ve got to break through this thing. You’ve got to!”

But the barren days went by, and the paralysis grew worse. The time came when I knew I had to have help. The man I turned to was a doctor. Not a psychiatrist, just a doctor. He was older than I, and under his surface gruffness lay great wisdom and compassion. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” I told him miserably, “but I just seem to have come to a dead end. Can you help me?” “I don’t know,” he said slowly. He made a tent of his fingers and gazed at me thoughtfully for a long while. Then, abruptly, he asked, “Where were you happiest as a child?” “As a child?” I echoed. “Why, at the beach, I suppose. We had a summer cottage there. We all loved it.” He looked out the window and watched the October leaves sifting down. “Are you capable of following instructions for a single day?” “I think so,” I said, ready to try anything. “All right. Here’s what I want you to do.” He told me to drive to the beach alone the following morning, arriving not later than nine o’clock. I could take some lunch; but I was not to read, write, listen to the radio, or talk to anyone. “In addition,” he said, “I’ll give you a prescription to be taken every three hours.” He then tore off four prescription blanks, wrote a few words on each, folded them, numbered them, and handed them to me. “Take these at nine, twelve, three, and six.” “Are you serious?” I asked. He gave a short bark of laughter. “You won’t think I’m joking when you get my bill!” The next morning, with little faith, I drove to the beach. It was lonely, all right. A northeaster was blowing; the sea looked gray and angry. I sat in the car, the whole day stretching emptily before me. Then I took out the first of the folded slips of paper. On it was written: LISTEN CAREFULLY. I stared at the two words. “Why,” I thought, “the man must be mad.” He had ruled out music and newscasts and human conversation. What else was there? I raised my head and I did listen. There were no sounds but the steady roar of the sea, the creaking cry of a gull, the drone of some aircraft high overhead. All these sounds were familiar. I got out of the car. A gust of wind slammed the door with a sudden clap of sound. “Am I supposed to listen carefully to things like that?” I asked myself. I climbed a dune and looked out over the deserted beach. Here, the sea bellowed so loudly that all other sounds were lost. And yet, I thought suddenly, there must be sounds beneath sounds—the soft rasp of drifting sand, the tiny wind whisperings in
the dune grasses—if the listener got close enough to hear them. On an impulse I ducked down and, feeling fairly ridiculous, thrust my head into a clump of sea oats. Here, I made a discovery: If you listen intently, there is a fractional moment in which everything seems to pause, wait. In that instant of stillness, the racing thoughts halt. For a moment, when you truly listen for something outside yourself, you have to silence the clamorous voices within. The mind rests. I went back to the car and slid behind the wheel. LISTEN CAREFULLY. As I listened again to the deep growl of the sea, I found myself thinking about the whitefanged fury of its storms. I thought of the lessons it had taught us as children. A certain amount of patience: You can’t hurry the tides. A great deal of respect: The sea does not suffer fools gladly. An awareness of the vast and mysterious interdependence of things: wind and tide and current, calm and squall and hurricane, all combining to determine the paths of the birds above and the fish below. And the cleanness of it all, with every beach swept twice a day by the great broom of the sea. Sitting there, I realized I was thinking of things bigger than myself—and there was relief in that. Even so, the morning passed slowly. The habit of hurling myself at a problem was so strong that I felt lost without it. Once, when I was wistfully eyeing the car radio, a phrase from Carlyle jumped into my head: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.” By noon, the wind had polished the clouds out of the sky, and the sea had merry sparkle. I unfolded the second “prescription.” And again I sat there, half amused and half exasperated. Three words this time: TRY REACHING BACK. Back to what? To the past, obviously. But why, when all my worries concerned the present or the future? I left the car and started tramping reflectively along the dunes. The doctor had sent me to the beach because it was a place of happy memories.Maybe that was what I was supposed to reach for: the wealth of happiness that lay half-forgotten behind me. I decided to experiment: to work on these vague impressions as a painter would, retouching the colors, strengthening the outlines. I would choose specific incidents and recapture as many details as possible. I would visualize people complete with dress and gestures. I would listen (carefully) for the exact sound of their voices, the echo of their laughter. The tide was going out now, but there was still thunder in the surf. So I chose to go back 20 years to the last fishing trip I made with my younger brother. (He died in the Pacific during World War II and was buried in the Philippines.) I found that if I closed my eyes and really tried, I could see him with amazing vividness, even the humor and eagerness in his eyes that far-off morning. In fact, I could see it all: the ivory scimitar of beach where we were fishing; the eastern sky smeared with sunrise; the great rollers creaming in, stately and slow. I could feel the backwash swirl warm around my knees, see the sudden arc of my brother’s rod as he struck a fish, hear his exultant yell. Piece by piece I rebuilt it, clear and unchanged under the transparent varnish of time. Then it was gone. I sat up slowly. TRY REACHING BACK. Happy people were usually assured, confident people. If, then, you deliberately reached back and touched happiness, might there not be released little flashes of power, tiny sources of strength? This second period of the day went more quickly. As the sun began its long slant down the sky, my mind ranged eagerly through the past, reliving some episodes, uncovering others that had been completely forgotten. For example, when I was
around 13 and my brother 10, Father had promised to take us to the circus. But at lunch there was a phone call: Some urgent business required his attention downtown. We braced ourselves for disappointment. Then we heard him say, “No, I won’t be down. It’ll have to wait.” When he came back to the table, Mother smiled. “The circus keeps coming back, you know.” “I know,” said Father. “But childhood doesn’t.” Across all the years I remembered this and knew from the sudden glow of warmth that no kindness is ever wasted or ever completely lost. By three o’clock, the tide was out and the sound of the waves was only a rhythmic whisper, like a giant breathing. I stayed in my sandy nest, feeling relaxed and content—and a little complacent. The doctor’s prescriptions, I thought, were easy to take. But I was not prepared for the next one. This time, the three words were not a gentle suggestion. They sounded more like a command. REEXAMINE YOUR MOTIVES. My first reaction was purely defensive. “There’s nothing wrong with my motives,” I said to myself. “I want to be successful—who doesn’t? I want to have a certain amount of recognition—but so does everybody. I want more security than I’ve got— and why not?” “Maybe,” said a small voice somewhere inside my head, “those motives aren’t good enough. Maybe that’s the reason the wheels have stopped going around.” I picked up a handful of sand and let it stream between my fingers. In the past, whenever my work went well, there had always been something spontaneous about it, something uncontrived, something free. Lately, it had been calculated, competent— and dead. Why? Because I had been looking past the job itself to the rewards I hoped it would bring. The work had ceased to be an end in itself, it had been merely a means to make money, pay bills. The sense of giving something, of helping people, of making a contribution, had been lost in a frantic clutch at security. In a flash of certainty, I saw that if one’s motives are wrong, nothing can be right. It makes no difference whether you are a mailman, a hairdresser, an Insurance salesman, a housewife—whatever. As long as you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yourself, you do it less well. This is a law as inexorable as gravity. For a long time I sat there. Far out on the bar I heard the murmur of the surf change to a hollow roar as the tide turned. Behind me the spears of light were almost horizontal. My time at the beach had almost run out, and I felt a grudging admiration for the doctor and the “prescriptions” he had so casually and cunningly devised. I saw, now, that in them was a therapeutic progression that might well be of value to anyone facing any difficulty. LISTEN CAREFULLY: To calm a frantic mind, slow it down, shift the focus from inner problems to outer things. TRY REACHING BACK: Since the human mind can hold but one idea at a time, you blot out present worry when you touch the happiness of the past. REEXAMINE YOUR MOTIVES: This was the hard core of the “treatment,” this challenge to reappraise, to bring one’s motives into alignment with one’s capabilities and conscience. But the mind must be clear and receptive to do this—hence the six hours of quiet that went before. The western sky was a blaze of crimson as I took out the last slip of paper. Six words this time. I walked slowly out on the beach. A few yards below the high water mark, I stopped and read the words again: WRITE YOUR TROUBLES ON THE SAND. I let the paper blow away, reached down and picked up a fragment of shell. Kneeling there under the vault of the sky, I wrote several words on the sand, one above the other. Then I walked away, and I did not look back. I had written my troubles on the sand. And the tide was coming in.

Have nothing much to blog about maple as there is NO UPDATES!!

Decided to keep a collection of nice spam emails from my mail box here! Check it out!


This is a rather lengthystory but if the concept is applied to the petroleum industry en masse,it just may work.

A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast. When he goes to the grocery store he pays 60 cents a dozen. Since a dozeneggs won't last a week he normally buys two dozens at a time.
One day while buying eggs he notices that the price has risen to 72 cents. The next time he buys groceries, eggs are 76 cents a dozen.

When asked to explain the price of eggs the store owner says, "Theprice has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly".
This store buys 100 dozen eggs a day. He checked around for a betterprice and all the distributors have raised their prices.
The distributors have begun to buy from the huge egg farms. The smallegg farms have been driven out of business. The huge egg farms sell100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors. With no competition, theycan set the price as they see fit. The distributors then have to raisetheir prices to the grocery stores. And on and on and on.

As the man kept buying eggs the price kept going up. He saw the big eggtrucks delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there. He checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling 100,000 dozeneggs to the distributors daily. Nothing had changed but the price of eggs.

Then week before Thanksgiving the price of eggs shot up to $1.00 a dozen.Again he asked the grocery owner why and was told, "Cakes andbaking for the holiday". The huge egg farmers know there willbe a lot of baking going on and more eggs will be used. Hence, the priceof eggs goes up. Expect the same thing at Christmas and other timeswhen family cooking, baking, etc. happen.

This pattern continues until the price of eggs is 2.00 a dozen. The man says, " There must be something we can do about the price ofeggs".

He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide to stopbuying eggs. This didn't work because everyone needed eggs.

Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need. He ate 2 eggsa day. On the way home from work he would stop at the grocery andbuy two eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2 or 3 eggs a day.

The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many eggs inhis cooler. He told the distributor that he didn't need any eggs. Maybe wouldn't need any all week.

The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse. He told thehuge egg farms that he didn't have any room for eggs would
not need any for at least two weeks.

At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs. To relievethe pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor that they could buythe eggs at a lower price.

The distributor said, " I don't have the room for the %$&^*&%eggs even if they were free". The distributor told the grocerystore owner that he would lower the price of the eggs if the store wouldstart buying again.

The grocery store owner said, "I don't have room for more eggs. Thecustomers are only buying 2 or 3 eggs at a time. Now if youwere to drop the price of eggs back down to the original price, thecustomers would start buying by thedozen again".

The distributors sent that proposal to the huge egg farmers but the eggfarmers liked the price they were getting for their eggs but, those chickensjust kept on laying. Finally, the egg farmers lowered the price oftheir eggs. But only a few cents.

The customers still bought 2 or 3 eggs at a time. They said, "whenthe price of eggs gets down to where it was before, we will startbuying by the dozen."

Slowly the price of eggs started dropping. The distributors had toslash their prices to make room for the eggs coming from the egg farmers.

The egg farmers cut their prices because the distributors wouldn't buyat a higher price than they were selling eggs for. Anyway, theyhad full warehouses and wouldn't need eggs for quite a while.

And those chickens kept on laying.

Eventually, the egg farmers cut their prices because they were throwingaway eggs they couldn't sell.

The distributors started buying again because the eggs were priced to wherethe stores could afford to sell them at the lower price.

And the customers starting buying by the dozen again.

Now, transpose this analogy to the gasoline industry.

What if everyone only bought $10.00 worth of gas each time they pulledto the pump? The dealer's tanks would stay semi full all the time. The dealers wouldn't have room for the gas coming from the huge tankfarms. The tank farms wouldn't have room for the gas comingfrom the refining plants. And the refining plants wouldn't have roomfor the oil being off loaded from the huge tankers coming from theoil fiends.

Just $10.00 each time you buy gas. Don't fill it up. You may haveto stop for gas twice a week but, the price should come
down.

Think about it.

As an added note...When I buy $10.00 worth of gas that leaves my tank a little under quarter full. The way prices are jumping around, youcan buy gas for $2.65 a gallon and then the next morning it can be $2.15. If you have your tank full of $2.65 gas you don't have room for the$2.15 gas. You might not understand the economics ofonly buying two eggs at a time but, you can't buy cheaper gas if your tankis full of the high priced stuff.

Also, don't buy anything else at the gas station; don't give them any moreof your hard earned money than what you spend on gas, until the pricescome down..."