Late in the day yesterday, my mobile phone rang showing a number with a 330 Ohio area code. I thought, “That ringtone sounds like a fart. I need to change it.” A mechanical voice said, “This is Daniel Padilla from Amazon. There has been a fraudulent charge on your account. Your account is compromised. Press …
I have written earlier about online scams. The previous story involved a tripartite scam. Scammer 1 posts a Craigslist ad for a skid steer. They promise to ship it to me, once I give payment to a third-party freight forwarder. The harsh light of common sense shows that the seller and the shipper are the …
Martin Amis says that it is bollocks that truth is stranger than fiction. When – he says – did you last awake from troubled dreams having turned into a human-sized cockroach? I read Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad Love Story shortly after it came out, in 2010. I do not remember anything about it, except …
The names of many twentieth-century authors have morphed into shorthand for certain tropes shared by the educated middle class. You don’t even need to have read the applicable books to throw the names around, because they are more often used as performative speech acts than anything else. Kafka – bureaucracy. Beckett – absurdity. Behan – …
In the novel Dead Souls, Nicolai Gogol tells the story of a shady businessman who operates in pre-revolutionary Russia, before the emancipation of the serfs. At the time, land owners reckoned their wealth in the number of serfs, or “souls”, that they owned. A census was taken every ten years or so, which counted the …
In a perfect world, a mobile home park is a parking lot. The park owns the land; the tenants own their homes. The park maintains the roads and common spaces, and provides access to utilities like water, electricity, waste water removal, and, in certain cases, natural gas. In exchange, the tenants pay what is called …