Please Collect Yr US$25,0 M

Rain today. Slow, steady rain, the sort that's gone missing most of the summer. Also oddly cool for August, but certainly there's more heat to come.

Is it just me -- it couldn't be -- or is everyone receiving a sudden upsurge in Nigerian email scams? Maybe not literally from Nigeria anymore, but I think that's a fitting generic term. The kind that should have been laughed off the Internet years ago. I've been getting one or two a day for the last week or so, after none for I don't know how long.

Most of them are the same formula: Semiliterate query from someone eager to access $X million or £X million, please help. That is, send along your banking info, and we'll do the rest. I don't look at them all, but there have been a few contemporary twists. I think one of them claimed to be from a Syrian refugee.

There Be Dragons Online

I slew a dragon and built a fire today. The former figuratively. The latter literally. The dragon was some malware that infested our laptop, the sort that informs you rudely that your machine has such-and-such worm and demands you fix the problem via the only thing it lets you do -- go to a web site where the fix is "sold." All you have to do is hand over that string of numbers on one of your plastic cards.

Bastards. Somewhere in the world are bastards who create this kind of thing. But through a variety of maneuvers I won't bore anyone with, I obtained a download that offed the malware dragon. Not quite hand-to-hand combat with a fire-breathing lizard, but satisfying all the same when it actually worked.

As for the fire, I built the season's first in the back yard. But there were limitations. I didn't have that much charcoal left over from last year, so mostly I burned large sticks. Nice for burning, but a little uneven for cooking meat. Still, it was satisfying to get the thing going.

Then it rained. I covered the grill, so the meat continued to cook. The rain was brief but heavy, more of a cloudburst really. The black metal hissed as the raindrops hit it and smoke billowed out of the side.

I can't let the day pass without mentioning the flight of Freedom 7, which was 50 years ago today. I see that Google ignored it, which rankles a little. Last month's anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight was duly noted with a doodle, but poor Alan Shepard, the first American in space -- and, we should note, the second human being -- got none. He also happened to be the only one of the Original Seven astronauts to make it to the Moon, where he famously swatted some golf balls, though Wally Schirra was aboard Apollo 7 and of course Gus Grissom died in an Apollo capsule.

This is a dramatization of Shepard's flight from the fine series From the Earth to the Moon, a section of episode 1 that happens to be about half as long as the actual flight. Also, some footage of Shepard hitting those golf balls, which was in early 1971. And just to show that there's information about everything online, this is a page that takes up the question of whether he left behind two or three balls on the lunar surface.

Letter From Lagos

Got a bit of e-mail the other day from someone claiming to have an office in the UK. A Nigerian e-mail scam! (Which could be from anywhere, really.) How quaint. Haven't gotten one of those in years. I thought those were old hat by now -- who hasn't heard of them?

The text is long-winded and semiliterate, including the following (all sic): "Your unclaimed money from the British authority, you have already started the legal processing of the claim, But we discover that the above law firm and other individual only collecting your money to divert the payment to there self some time ago. We also discover that was why you have not received your payment, because we are not sure to release this payment to them,because the affidavit of claim state your name,and the account information present to us to transfer the money to,was not in your name, that was why i was directed to contact you..."

I guess this classic con is still a game of high volume, low response. Even if you get only one pigeon from the thousands of e-mails you sent without much effort or expense, that's still a profitably crooked day's work.

Hootch Heist, Interrupted

Big snow promised by excited weathermen over the weekend. But all we got was a medium snow, easily plowed and shoveled aside so that life could go on in the arctic blast that followed (10° F. or so this morning). Still, it was the first cover-everything snow of the season, so it was pretty to look at for a while.

Been a while since I've seen a good perp walk. The Hanover Park Police obliged me on Friday at a discount grocery store I frequent. As I entered the store, two employees were talking near the entrance. This is more or less what they said, though I've added a little corroborative detail.

-- Did you hear that Jose tackled the guy trying to steal liquor?

-- Yeah. And that he twisted his ankle while doing it.

-- I don't think that's going to bother him. Jose wants to be a badass.

I didn't see the badass grocery-store worker Jose that I knew of, but as I was checking out, two young men, both handcuffed, were walked from behind a door saying EMPLOYEES ONLY and out the exit by at least three cops. Neither of the lads looked over 20 and neither of them worse for being tackled. Jose needs to work on his technique. Still, he prevented the night of free drinking that they'd planned.

State-of-the-Art Bogus Money

I gave a clerk a $20 bill for a purchase recently and he took out his special counterfeit-detecting pen and marked the bill. The marking came out yellow, meaning the bill is genuine US Bureau of Printing and Engraving work, the kind you want to have in your wallet. Like most people, I've seen clerks do this, but never has asked about it before. The store was empty besides us, so I figured I could take up a little of his time with a question.

"What happens if the bill isn't genuine?" I asked.

Instantly he obliged me by taking a small bit of newspaper -- definitely not money -- and marking it with the special pen. The mark came out black instead of yellow. The inky chemistry of that isn't something I can understand, but the results are clear enough.

"One time, I saw a bill with a yellow mark on it already," he said. "I almost let it pass, but we're supposed to mark them ourselves, so I did. It wasn't real. But it looked real and it had the yellow mark on it, so people would think it had already passed. That was clever."

Hey, Big Spender

Front-page news. Such a quaint term. And yet I scanned the front page of the paper edition of the Tribune last week and the headline "Suburban dad -- and embezzler" caught my eye. Suburban dad, that's me. Embezzler, no. Good headline, though. Reels you right in.

The article by Jason Grotto of the newspaper's staff is about one John Orecchio, a local investment banker who has been convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to nine years and change. "[He] spent part of this life as a well-respected banker, husband and devoted father of three young children living in a two-story house with white pillars on a tree-lined Arlington Heights street," the article begins.

You know the subtext: nothing bad should ever happen on a tree-lined street whose houses have white pillars. Shocking crime, dead ahead!

Indeed: "The rest of the time, court records show, he posed as a high-rolling millionaire who drove a Bentley, collected thoroughbred racehorses and traveled on private jets to Las Vegas and tropical islands with his young fiancée, a former dancer whom he met during frequent visits to a Detroit strip club," writes Grotto.

At least he wasn't one of these loonies-on-a-long-fuse who lives an undistinguished middle-class life until one day without warning he massacres his family with a blunt instrument and sets his house on fire (and either kills himself or unhelpfully forgets to). Banker Orecchio merely stole about $24 million from six union pension funds to fuel the expensive side of his double life.

He pleaded guilty, and so didn't have a jury trial, but if I'd sat in judgment of this fellow, I'd have voted to convict for lack of imagination as much as his crooked quest for Mammon. A Bentley? Thoroughbreds? Vegas and "tropical islands"? A stripper "fiancée," for crying out loud? I'll bet anyone reading this could take a pencil and paper and come up with a dozen much more interesting things on which to spend $24 million worth of lucre.

Law & Order: Kristkindlmarkt Chicago

"Whoa! Whoa! WHOA!" I heard that and when I turned around, caught a glimpse of a Chicago cop running by. I'm pretty sure he had said it. A moment before that I'd entered the German Christmas ornament shop at Kristkindlmarkt Chicago in Daley Plaza to take a look at the large selection of pretty, and pretty expensive, ornaments. Someone else in the shop said something about chasing a shoplifter, so I left the shop to do a little rubbernecking. Cops chasing a guy beats piles of German Christmas ornaments any day.

Somehow or other I usually find myself at Kristkindlmarkt Chicago each December. It isn't a cherished personal tradition or anything, and the last thing I bought there might have been in 2001 or '02 or so, when I split a potato pancake with a co-worker. But if I'm around and have the time, I'll stroll past the numerous booths and eye the ornaments and handcrafted whatnots for sale, and take a whiff of the German food. That's what I did today. A lot of people were out in the early afternoon temps of around 50° F. doing the same.

Most of the vendors are from Germany, but such places as Peru, Ecuador, Russia and Evanston, Illinois, are also represented. Prices are high, but so is the quality. If I thought there was no risk of breaking a $5 or $10 Christmas-tree bauble, I might buy a few.

A vendor from St. Petersburg, Russia, offered my favorite oddity this year: Windup dolls that actually aren't windup, and have no batteries. Somehow they move around because of the tension between the two parts of the doll. A sign assured buyers, NO BATTERIES NECESSARY. Some of the dolls looked like Santa Claus, or maybe Father Frost. Perhaps this particular doll was invented during the Soviet era, when batteries weren't predictably available.

The German Christmas ornament shop is more than a booth, it's an enclosed temporary shop larger than any of the booths. By the time I'd emerged from that shop and walked a few steps in the direction of the police action, about four cops had a guy surrounded. By the time I could see what was going on, they'd already put handcuffs on him. He was a nondescript fellow in his 20s and said nothing as one of the cops frisked him with remarkable thoroughness. Maybe the suspect had been through this before and knew that nothing was the best thing to say under the circumstances. I didn't stick around to see them take him away.

He's No D. B. Cooper

I was able to include the following in a story I filed recently: "Only last week, Marcus Schrenker was just an obscure Indiana financial industry businessman up to his eyeballs in legal trouble. Now his 15 minutes of fame have arrived after he allegedly did a variation on the D. B. Cooper maneuver by parachuting out of an airplane in a vain attempt to fake his own death..."

It's the first time in all the thousands of articles I've written (counting five-graph shorts) that I ever remember referring to D. B. Cooper. It was a bit of a stretch, comparing Mr. Schrenker's efforts to the one and only D. B. Cooper. About all they had in common was a willingness to parachute out of an airplane in order to disappear. I guess Schrenker expected the plane to crash into the Gulf of Mexico, which might have avoided the embarrassment of having the authorities find empty wreckage. That would pretty much give the whole thing away, and in fact did.

D.B. Cooper, on the other hand, is still on the lam after nearly 40 years, provided he's still alive. Even if he's not, he belongs in the Vanished Without a Trace Hall of Fame, members of which include Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa and Judge Crater. It's certainly one way to be famous, if you do it right. How many other noted pre-WW II aviatrix, crooked '50s labor bosses or minor New York state judges in office nearly 80 years ago immediately come to mind?

(Wiki notes that even the least known of those three -- Judge Crater -- still gets pop-culture references: In the episode of The Sopranos entitled "House Arrest," the doorbell rings at Uncle Junior's house. When Bobby asks who it could be, Junior responds, "Judge Crater. How should I know?" A puzzled Bobby asks, "The one who ordered the house arrest?")

Et Cetera, Et Cetera, Et Cetera

Outside Lafayette, Indiana, I spotted a white pickup with large red letters painted on the side: Jesus Christ is Lord, Not a Swear Word.

Later, during a brief traffic jam, I noticed that a different pickup, ahead of us, had a couple of metal orbs hanging from its towing hitch. Though a little larger than natural size, these orbs strongly resembled human balls. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Not this chap.

At some distance from Louisville, we picked up WNAS, 88.1 FM. Its music selection was all over the place, but mostly good. Turns out it's a high school radio station with more power than most. If the the idea is to teach students about the radio business, such an eclectic format isn't going to cut it. On the other hand, real-world, for-profit radio formats tend to be as bland as slim milk, and running a student radio station that way would be no fun at all.

I saw a White Castle in Nashville. This is wrong. Nashville is south of the invisible White Castle-Krystal line. Nashville is Krystal (makes noise when opened) territory. I can understand Kentucky having both, since it's a border state, but not Tennessee.

The Elliston Place Soda Shop in Nashville is still in business. In fact, it looks very much like it did in the 1980s -- which probably wasn't so different than in the 1940s. When I first took Yuriko to Nashville in late 1992, we had milk shakes there. She remembered that milk shake so fondly that she insisted that we go again this time for more, and I hardly needed persuading. Someday, it will close -- sic transit gloria mundi -- and Nashville will be a poorer place for it.

Nashville's already a poorer place for the demise of Mack's Country Cooking, a meat-and-three (there's a web site for everything, eh?) I visited often, alone and with greasy-spoon companions. But at least the San Antonio Taco Co. survives, serving real South Texas Mexican food. We had lunch there this trip, and it's as good as it was 20+ years ago, which explained the crowds on a summer afternoon in 2008.

Centennial Park in Nashville, besides sporting the world's only full-scale replica of the Parthenon, now has a lovely little garden not far from that edifice. It is dedicated to children who die from domestic violence, with some of their names carved in stone along the brickwalk.

Sparta, Tennessee, advertises itself as the home of Benny Martin. Sounded familiar, but I had to look him up later. The Calfkiller River also runs through Sparta. I had to look that up, too. It's a tributary of the Caney Fork, a tributary of the Cumberland, and I like that name as much as Fawnskin, Calif.

The mosquitoes weren't so bad at the Crosby campground in the Great Smoky Mountains NP. But arachnophobes would have had a hard time at the campground bathrooms, which featured cinderblock walls. Close inspection revealed a good number of orange daddy-long-leg-type spiders hanging out on the walls, doing their silent little dances. Once you noticed them, you couldn't un-notice them. A lot of moths also called the park home, and some number of them wanted to call the inside of our tent home. Ann was alarmed at the prospect.

This is the Appalachian Trail as it reaches Clingman's Dome. An old friend of mine hiked the entire thing 20 years ago this year, a feat I greatly admire.

It rained on us only twice during this trip. Once was while we were touring Mammoth Cave, on June 28. When we emerged, water was pouring through rivulets into the cave entrance, and on the hillsides near the cave. On the Fourth of July, it rained near and in Frankfort, Ky., causing us to opt out of the municipal fireworks show.

This is a creek (crick) in the Smokies. The girls enjoyed it immensely.

This is a waterfall above a crick on Cherokee land, just outside the national park. The girls enjoyed this immensely as well.

This is Mingus Mill, just inside the park. In the days when it ground grain, it was powered by water diverted from a nearby crick, and though now an exhibit, the water still flows. The girls found a way to enjoy this immensely too, by standing next to the water trough and putting objects in the water -- leaves, twigs, even small rocks -- and watching them zip away on the fairly fast current.

The Biltmore house has a vast collection of fine art, elegant furniture, and historic artifacts set in an interesting layout among a lot of fascinating detail. My favorite room? The bowling alley in the basement. My favorite item? Napoleon's chess set.

Besides the capitol, there are many other historic structures in Frankfort, Ky. On one block is the home of John Crittenden -- a footnote character in American history. President-elect Zachary Taylor stayed at Crittenden's on his way to his inauguration in 1849. Ever the busy fellow, Taylor stayed at nearby Liberty Hall as well, whose guest list over the years also included James Monroe and Andrew Jackson. The building itself was closed, but there was a lush little garden in the back yard, full of flowers and their bee and butterfly attendants. No other people were around.

In the parking lot of a chain restaurant in Morristown, Tennessee, a stranger asked me for money -- enough to fix her car, she said. A skinny blonde woman in her 30s, she talked with a deep Southern accent at an incongruous high clip, so fast that Yuriko and Lilly both later said she couldn't understand her. In her rapid talk, she packed in a lot: her stranded kids, her broken car, other good Samaritans who had helped some, the incentive check that hadn't arrived. She referred to the Good Lord a few times, and held her pocketbook open in such a way that I could see the words JESUS SAVES clearly. I told her that we carried little cash, at which he suggested that I go with her to an auto parts store to buy the part. "I'm sorry, I can't help you," I said, and I must have sounded unmovable, because she was gone a few seconds later.

Con woman? I'm inclined to think so. If not, she suffered because too many people are con artists. Maybe she really was trying to get her car fixed, but without paying for it. Yuriko suggested that she would later find a man more partial to skinny blondes, and be able to con him. Maybe.

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to stop at Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. It would have been another Daniel Boone site to see. But we did pass through the Cumberland Gap Tunnel, nearly a mile long. Now that's a tunnel. It's also an example of a big public works project of the 1990s, which will probably not be remembered as a heyday of such projects.

Finally, we brought home a souvenir fly swatter from the Bluegrass Inn, Frankfort, Ky., because it says the name of the motel on it, along with "Complements of..." The motel was decent enough, though a little tired, and I like the fly swatter. But is a fly swatter really the best item to associate with your motel? Just wondering.

Phishers of Men

Phishing e-mails aren’t the novelty they used to be, and it seems that I don’t get any of the “there’s X million dollars in some bank account in Tinpot Africa, let’s share it!” variety any more. These days, I get the “verify your information or we’ll close your account” variety, and that’s not too interesting. I don’t even bother looking a most of them.

Still, there’s the game of trying to guess just how native the writer’s English is. This came the other day, from somewhere near, but not quite within, the realm of English.

Dear user.

We want to inform you than you must verify your account parity to given email.
Please click on this reference: [followed by an unusually long web site address]
Otherwise we stop temporarily service of your account.
Thank you for using our bank.

“Account parity” is an interesting turn of phrase. Just as interesting, the message purported to be from a bank that I’ve never done business with, unless you count interviewing a handful of its executives for my former magazines.

Some years ago, I saw Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, by Gary Kinder, on the shelf at a bookstore, and I spent a few minutes thumbing through it. You have to like a title like that. Looked good, but I rarely buy new hardbacks. I’m glad someone does, but the publishing industry has jacked up the price of new books at several times the rate of inflation in recent decades, and I object.

More recently, I saw a paperback version on a remainder table, $4. Perfect. I bought it, and it joined my books—joined the unread titles among the many I have. (I’ve never counted, but I probably have read the majority of the hundreds of books I own, maybe at a 6-to-4 or 7-to-3 ratio.)

This week I stared in earnest on Ship of Gold, which is really two stories. First, the wreck of the steamer S.S. Central America in a hurricane off the Carolina coast in September 1857, taking hundreds of people and tons of gold to the bottom. Second, the salvage effort in the 1980s, and how that was possible in 8,000 feet of water.

I started in thinking the first story would be the really good one. It is good: background on the gold rush in California, the struggle of a mighty ship against the elements, doom and survival, all with an Antebellum setting. But I’m impressed by the story of the salvage, too, which focuses on the marine engineer, one Tommy Thompson, responsible for inventing a lot of the equipment necessary to take artifacts from so deep. Fascinating so far, and I haven’t even got to the part in which the salvage is actually accomplished.