Author: David Gorsline

Old junk in new bottles

A new variant of Spanish prisoner/Nigerian 419 scam spam showed up today:

Hello,
Good day to you, my name is Bill Jeffers, I am an artist with my wife Susan
Jeffers, and we are the owner of PORTFOLIO ARTWORKS INC I am from London,
United Kingdom with my two kids, four cats, one dog and the love of my life my
wife. It is definitely a full house. I have been doing artwork since i was a
small child.

* * *

…I’ve been
selling my Art and Craft works for over 3 years now and have had my works
featured on trading cards, prints and magazines.
I’m always facing serious difficulties when it comes to PAYMENTS, This is
because most of my customers in AMERICA are always offering to pay me with U.S
POSTAL MONEY ORDERS OR CASHER’S CHEQUE, and it is very difficult for me to cash
U.S POSTAL MONEY ORDERS OR CASHER’S CHEQUE HERE in LONDON.

* * *

I am looking for a reliable commission agent who can help me receive payments
from my esteemed customers that I supply goods to in America.Your tasks are;
1. Receive payment from Customers
2. Cash Payment at your Bank
3. Deduct 7% which will be your percentage/pay on
Payment processed
4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay
to any of the offices you will be contacted to send
payment to.(Payment is to be forwarded either by Money Grame or Western Union
Money Transfer).

It seems to me that if Bill doesn’t want to deal with a pesky CASHER’S CHEQUE, he could make arrangements with American Express. I even think they charge less than 7%.

Flattop

As part of a gradual sprucing up, they’ve installed new tables in the Friendship Heights Booeymonger. In place of the funky butcher block tables with irregular tops that suggested organic molecules or a game of Pac-Man, there are tables with faux-stone laminate tops of various colors and textures and sturdy, rolled black edges. The new tables are very, very rectangular—uniform, characterless 4-tops throughout the place.

Four Mile Run Trail

This afternoon I finished my traversal (on foot) of the short but interesting Four Mile Run Trail. The trail is one of two connections for cyclists looking to get from the Mount Vernon Trail along the Potomac to the Washington & Old Dominion Trail to Purcellville.

The path covers widely variable territory along its 7.5-mile length. The trailhead is in the neighborhood of the East Falls Church Metro station. In this stretch of Arlington, the trail serves to connect several county parks: ball fields and back yards. Although it’s very pleasant here, the trail can be hard to follow, because it intertwines with the W&OD as both trails cross and recross Four Mile Run, a rocky stream at this point—and the signage is inconsistent. Distance markers were once set every half mile, but a couple of them are missing. At points the trail is no wider nor any more level than a hiking trail, and this serves to divert bike traffic to the much busier W&OD.

At about mile 5, there is a complicated diversion onto city streets at Shirlington to take you to the overpass that spans an interchange of I-395 (the Shirley Highway), the multilane transitway that connects the heart of the city to all the suburbs to the south. Beyond that, the trail follows streets around the cozy brick community of Parkfairfax in Alexandria.

The last mile and a half of the trail follows the north shore of the channelized Run, which gradually widens out into an impressive floodplain. Before passing under U.S. Route 1 and Metro’s Blue/Yellow Lines and its connection to the Mount Vernon Trail at the airport, the trail passes a Dominion electrical substation and, perhaps most instructively, an Arlington County wastewater treatment plant. (Fortunately, the plant was nearly odorless on this hot summer day.) The Run, perhaps 50 m across now, entices a few shoreline fishermen, as it empties into the tidal Potomac River.

Nathan and Richard and Bobby

An archive of material on the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case, part of the compendious store of records at Northwestern University’s Chicago Historical Homicide Project. The project began with

…the discovery of the availability of a rich log of more than 11,000 homicides maintained consistently and without interruption by the Chicago Police Department over the course of 60 years, from 1870 to 1930.

No indicating here

Ben Brantley catches us up with what’s going on in London theater:

In a season rich with A-list actors giving bright external life to the shadows of the human mind, it is often—more than anything that is actually done or even said—the thought that counts.

Consider, for example, the supremely articulate silence of Michael Gambon, who never utters a word in Atom Egoyan’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe at the Duke of York’s Theater, a half-hour production that seems to last both a lifetime and a nanosecond.