The stuff that goes through your mind when you’ve finished the work you woke up at 3 a.m. to start because you foolishly took a six-hour “30 minute nap” at 9 p.m.:
I was one of the victims of the Gawker hack. Kids, here’s a suggested best practice: “Don’t use the same user name and password across all the sites you visit, particularly if the user name is your email address. Also, your dentist knows when you’re lying about how often you floss.”
(An aside: is victim too strong a word? I feel like that’s a word that true crime victims sort of own, that I shouldn’t use; in fact, I typically refer to crime or disease victims as “survivors,” out of respect … in this case, “survivor of the Gawker hack, where the living will envy the dead” seemed a little excessive.)
Anyway, on Tuesday, I was apparently kind enough to make a tremendous offer to every one of my friends, colleagues, frenemies, enemies, clients, former clients, potential clients, colleagues, ex-colleagues, neighbors, ex-neighbors, relatives and ex-relatives, related to electronics and laptops:
Hi , what is up ?
Christmas is drawing near , have you got any idea about the gifts ?
What about a good electric product …the laptop I get is really
high quality and it arrives me so quickly . Hope you can get what you
want on the site , too .
Most people recognized it as a scam and were kind enough to alert me to it, and again, I apologize to — well, pretty much everyone who has ever gotten an email from me before, because you got this too. That said, the number of emails I got back thinking this was legit (“Is this real?” “Yes, I am selling laptops on the side now, but decided not to use any of my marketing savvy, and instead used a writer for whom English is a fifth language. You should totally click through”) just reaffirms my conviction that if spam artists simply invested a few bucks for good copywriters, their hit rate would increase dramatically.
Other items of whimsy:
The other day, Gawker posted its list of “most annoying Christmas songs” (thanks for sharing, @healyjane) … and the author, Brian Moylan, shares my dislike for the shockingly-offensive chestnut “Baby It’s Cold Outside”:
Another entry in the “creepy lyrics” category is this song that is basically about date rape. A man is convincing a woman that she should stay at his house to cuddle and canoodle, but she really wants to leave. He doesn’t think no means no and is basically saying, “I won’t lend you a coat so your choice is to stay here and let me paw at you or try to get home and freeze.” By the time she sings, “Say, what’s in this drink?” we want to scream, “It’s a roofie!” and call the police.
However, I heard a version the other morning — June Carter Cash’s 1949 recording, with Homer and Jethro — that took this troubling song to another level, intimating that if she’d just stick around, they’d have some sort of hillbilly threesome. Then I found this video that took that song to yet another level — a 1969 performance from “The Johnny Cash Show”– by adding a visual. (Note: the 1949 version has some excellent guitar work; if only they sold an instrumental version, or perhaps put their talents to work on a better song.)
What exactly where Homer and Jethro planning to do should their plan work? Shudder.
- I think I only have another year or so of being able to pull the “I have Santa on speed dial” threat with my six year-old. I’m amazed it’s worked this long.
- Parents, one of the most important skills you can teach your young children (other than being kind and thoughtful, and maybe some sort of recession-proof trade, like masonry) is how to wrap gifts. I never learned the correct way to do it, and have been having to either pay people to do it, or apologize as I hand the recipient their gift.
