"Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman."

You know those e-mails from West Africa everyone gets? They all say something like, “So and so died and they had a ton of money but they have no family. Boo hoo. So if you just give us your bank info we’ll forward a trillion bucks into your account.”

Then they misspell a bunch of words, forget their punctuation and capitalization and we‘re supposed to think that some layers or big businesses doesn‘t use spell check. Well, apparently, there are some people who actually believe those letters. This guy
spent about $320,000 and still thinks that “"There was never any attempt by them to defraud me…"”

Whoa. Poor guy, but whoa. I don’t think he deserved to lose that much, but… whoa, you IDIOT.

About a year ago a good friend of mine was trying to sell her lap top. I don’t remember what site she used but she posted a few ads about it online. One of the first responses she got was from a Nigerian man. He was willing to pay more than twice what she wanted for the lap top.

And yes, this is the time where we started joking about counterfeit money and scams.

The catch was that he couldn’t just send her the money in American cash because in Africa it would take a few weeks to get his money changed into American currency, and he wanted the lap top now. He was even willing to pay the crazy price to get it sent to him in just a day or two. So, he was going to send my friend a large sum of money in Nigerian currency and have her change it into American, keep what she needed, and send the lap top, and the rest of the American cash, quite a sizable amount, back to him.

Now my friend, in all her intelligent glory, said, “this guy is either crazy to trust me with all this money, or it’s fake… I don’t care”. Of course it didn’t work out. Convinced that she was going to get caught, sent to some high security prison and made into some scary woman’s bitch and we’d have to bake her a cake with a file in it, her friends talked her out of her life of counterfeit crime. She contacted the local police and told them about the man so they were the ones who received the fake money, and my poor friend had to sell her lap top to some lady in West Virginia for a reasonable price.


The Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

The best you ask? I vote Sean Thomas and his win in 2000 for Kissing England.

"It is time, time ... Now. Yes. She is so small and compact and yet she has all the necessary features ... Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman. She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa ... Aiwa"