Scam-A-Rama Ding Dong

Our oldest daughter, at the tender age of 15, is on the verge of having money. A lot of money.

Or so says a letter she just received today from a man in South Carolina (we're in Maryland).

The letter, which many, many folks have received, is a variation on the old chain letter scheme: send the seven people on a list some money, remove the top person's name, add your name to the bottom of the list, mail to a bunch of people (in this case 200) and wait for the money to roll in.

The letter promised that our daughter, currently making minimum wage as a restaurant hostess, would make $71,000, $250,000 or $800,000. (The letter was a little vague on the exact amount to expect, but in bold, capital letters it said the $800,000 was guaranteed. (It neglected to mention by whom.)

Skeptical? Well, don't be. The letter offered not one, not two, but three proofs:

Oprah Winfrey had tested this idea and it worked.

ABC's 20/20 had tested this idea and it worked.

A retired attorney had tested this idea and it worked. His unsigned letter — no name given — was part of the package.

I wonder just what sort of attorney he was.

For one thing, his punctuation and grammar are, shall we say, a bit creative. (He particularly likes to capitalize words randomly in the middle of sentences.) He also seems to be unaware that chain letters such as this are illegal, and have been for years.

I suspect he's also a little math challenged, since the letter he cites returns of $71,000, $250,000, $800,000 and $2,341,178 for a mere $3 investment. It doesn't take much of a mathematician to realize that, since none of these numbers are divisible by 3, either some folks don't mail $3, some folks can't count, or some folks are running a scam.

What are the odds?

My favorite part of the letter is this:

The attorney tells his client, who brought him the letter originally, that it is "100% legal." Apparently 100% isn't enough, because his client "then asked me to alter it to make it perfectly legal."

What's the difference between "100% legal" and "perfectly legal"? "I asked him to make one small change in the letter."

There are other letters included in the packet, along with helpful instructions, including the comment that stamps are sold at the Post Office. (Gotta spell everything out for some people, I guess.)

Don't know 200 people to whom you can mail this golden opportunity? Not to worry: information on a company that sells mailing lists is in the instructions, along with the company's phone number and the note that it accepts Mastercard and Visa.

So how did this stranger in South Carolina get our daughter's name? If he followed the instructions, he asked the mailing list company for names in this category: Opportunity Seekers.

Our daughter must be one, though I haven't seen her seek too many opportunities beyond attempting to make the track team and soccer team at school.

Sadly, her five-, six- or seven-figure income opportunity doesn't seem like it's going to happen any time soon. But her economic future isn't all bad.

Minimum wage goes up next week.

Silence is Golden

My first wife, for reasons I never understood, was fluent in sign language for the deaf. When we met I thought it was a fairly useless skill, but it turned out I was wrong.

One day we were riding the subway in New York (at the time we both lived in New Jersey, not far from Manhattan) and a group of teenagers got on our train. They were hooting and hollering and making a lot of noise, though not speaking actual words. The reason became quickly obvious: they were deaf.

As they carried on and the people in the car looked at them, they began signing to each other about how stupid and ugly all of us were. They criticized what everyone else in the subway car was wearing, reading, doing, etc. I turned to my wife. "You know what they're saying, don't you?" She nodded.

We continued on, as they finally got around to commenting in sign language about us. We sat silently. Then we arrived at our stop.

As the train doors opened and we stood to walk out, my wife signed to them: "You're right, there are stupid people on this train. Guess who?"

The looks on their faces were priceless.

Sit down, stand up, fight, fight, fight

This past weekend I did a two-day walk to raise money for multiple sclerosis, and this year for the first time (at least in Maryland) the event included both walkers and bicycle riders.

The walkers went 50k, or 31 miles, over two days. The bike riders had a choice of routes, but most went 50-125 miles over two days.

At the awards ceremony after the event, the chapter president had no trouble telling which group was which.

"The walkers," he noted, "are sitting down. The bikers are standing up."

Sore legs or sore ass. It's always something.

Plus ça change...

If you've ever wondered how much times have changed in America, spend a few minutes with the 1925 yearbook from, in this case, Catonsville High School.

I have to admit this is the first time I've ever seen an ad for bloomers. (The "Man O' War Middy," sold with the boast "the sloped sides make it fit." Oh, it's "wholesome looking.") The portable steel garage was advertised with this provocative question: "Why own a car and walk halfway home?" Milk came from tuberculin tested cows. Grocery stores also sold animal feed, Hudson and Essex automobiles were available at excellent prices, and a private sanitarium was the place "for mental and nervous invalids (no alcoholics or drug addicts received)." Automobile insurance covered "you while operating, adjusting or cranking any automobile" (and if you were run over by an automobile as well). The premium? Five dollars a year. And who needed margarine when one could buy butterine?

The second best section of the book is split between the sections titled Noted Personages — students judged to be the Class Hercules, Class Romeo, Queen of the Ivories, Most Versatile (?) and other categories — and what are charmingly termed Class Statistics.

You might think statistics involves numbers. Well, not in 1925. The class statistics included: tallest boy, tallest girl, best boy athlete, best girl athlete, and shortest boy and girl.

Then come the categories that would never fly today: most thrilling Latin type (Herbert Rice, who hardly sounds Latin), most obliging girl (one can only imagine), biggest tease (ditto, though won by a boy that year), most backward in coming forward (different from quietest, most studious, most unobtrusive or meekest), and the list goes on. Elizabeth Rodgers had the most attractive dimples, though Cora Appler beat her out for prettiest eyes. Lula Cook was the class milliner — I'll wait while you look it up — and Albrecht Stude (great name for a band) was the most argumentative.

The best part, though, is the jokes and riddles. Even the names of the people speaking are great:

Miss K: Billy, give your oral composition.

Absent-minded Billy: I left it home.

Pedagogue: What would be the first thing you would do if you spilled acid on yourself?

Victim: Yell.

Some of the jokes require bits of knowledge that I never acquired in school — the composition of Glauber's Salts, for example, and the meaning of slang expressions such as "chewing the rag" (it means to ponder or meditate) — but one still has meaning today:

How to avoid falling hair: get out of the way.

New relationship, stat

More than once, I've found humor in a place you'd probably least expect it: the hospital emergency room.

Once when I was waiting my turn for a doctor (I had a broken finger, not so serious), a man was rushed in by an ambulance crew. It didn't take a medical expert to spot the problem. He had a hatchet in his head.

Surprisingly, he was both conscious and coherent. As they rushed him into an operating room, he was yelling about how his girlfriend had been the one to hit him in the head with a hatchet. His threat, yelled to everyone within earshot but clearly meant only for his absent girlfriend, was this: "the relationship is over, bitch!"

I guess so.

Lessons Learned

When I was a kid, probably 7 or 8, my parents tried to teach me a lesson every parent has to teach at one point: behaving in the car.

In their case, I think the lesson wasn't the one they were expecting.

I had, apparently, been acting up or fussing about something. Whatever it was, my father said something like, "If you don't stop, I'm going to make you get out of the car."

I didn't, and he did.

Where we were was a commercial part of town — not a highway, exactly, but sort of a highway — with stores on either side. It was night time. My guess is the plan was to make me get out of the car, drive a short distance away, then come back and get me. I guess I was supposed to be so scared that I'd actually been left that I'd never misbehave in the car again.

Unfortunately, no one had given me the script, and I didn't play my part.

I can't remember what store my parents dropped me off in front of, but I remember vividly the one that was a couple of doors down: it sold boats and boating supplies. It looked interesting, so I walked over there.

Meanwhile, my parents drove off a little ways, turned around, and came back to hear the tearful apologies from their thoroughly chastened son.

Except I wasn't there. Nor was I in the store where they'd dropped me off. Or the one next to it.

When they finally found me, after half an hour of frantic searching, they had forgotten the lesson they were trying to teach. (I'm sure my lack of contrition and puzzlement at their frantic faces was part of the problem.)

The lesson I learned? Parents get really angry and upset when you look at boats.

I have yet to teach that lesson to my own children.

The Bama

I haven't heard all of the legendary disk jockeys in America, but I've heard most of them: the great New York record spinners of the 1960s, on both the rock stations and the black stations. The 50s legends (though some only on recordings), such as Alan Freed and Wolfman Jack. Tom Wilson from L.A. The AM giants, including Murray the K and Cousin Brucie. The wild and profane, the demented and the scholarly.

The best ever, as far as I'm concerned, was occasionally rough, often unpolished, and as much a philosopher (albeit homespun) as a disk jockey.

That, of course, would be Jerry Washington, whose Blues Hour (actually three hours) on Washington's WPFW-FM was the only place to be from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday.

Nicknamed The Bama (the term is a derogatory one denoting someone who is a country bumpkin, a hayseed, a yokel, which Washington most assuredly was not), Washington would break every rule of polished radio announcing: pauses for thought, repeating himself occasionally, correcting himself, sometimes long after the fact. But he combined a deep, deep knowledge and understanding of the blues with a sometimes ironic, sometimes hilarious, sometimes jaw-droppingly wise stream of philosophical observations, mostly about the relationships between men and women. Mostly about all of the things that can go wrong in those relationships, all of the things that can be misunderstood, all of the ways words and actions can be misinterpreted.

Like many Pacifica radio stations, WPFW was always hurting for money, its combination of jazz and left-leaning, Afro-centric talk and politics less than viable commercially. One year, feeling flush, I donated enough during the annual fund drive to qualify for the gifts of a Bama coffee mug and a cassette of some of his thoughts.

The coffee mug arrived within a couple of weeks. The cassette, despite several phone calls, was apparently never sent by the station's volunteer workers. I eventually gave up trying.

But about once a week or so I have my morning coffee in my Bama mug. It always tastes a little funky that day.