John Mark’s Antidote

Thank you to wannabe scammer John Mark for providing today’s blog entry:

Good Day!

How are you doing? I just want to apologize for any inconvenience
this email may cause you. My name is John Mark  and i work for numerous farm
animal industry in Maresfield Gardens, United Kingdom as a marketing
consultant. The company i work for is a domestic and farm animal company which
deals with the treatment of all kinds of domestic and farm animals including
horses. Their is an Antidote which is highly needed here in my company and in
so many farm company’s here in United Kingdom.

This Antidote is known as CALVENZA EHV 1.M Injection. CALVENZA EHV 1.M Injection is an antidote which is used for the treatment of farm and domestic animals. CALVENZA EHV 1.M Injection relieves pain caused by swelling and inflammation associated with joint disease and absorbs shock in horses. This Antidote is sold in USA at a costly rate of
$5,750 USD per-carton. Recently,i found out that this Antidote is cheaper in
Malaysia and it is sold at the rate of $1,100 USD per-carton, which is very
cheap than what is been sold in USA and other countries.

The seller of this antidote in Malaysia is a woman known as Mrs. Maisarah J. Mohammed. Mrs Maisarah sells this antidote at the cost of $1,100usd while my company buys at
the rate of $4,950usd which is cheaper to them compared to the price in USA,
because my company don’t know the price of the antidote in Malaysia. Every
further details and contacts will be provided based on your determination in
handling the business.

I should have handled the business myself, but i am suffering from leukemia which cannot permit me to travel. All i need is your reliability in doing this business and in terms of the profit made from the business, 60% goes to you and 40% is mine. Feel free to write me via
jmark2874@gmail.com  for more details.

Take good care and have a nice day.

Regards,

John Mark

 

 

 

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Writers, give your work away for free online!

Roll up, roll up! Put your novels and short stories on Feedbooks, Lulu, Createspace, Smashwords, Wattpad. Don’t charge for them, then others can scrape your content freely like stinking great estuary dredgers. Then Google yourself. Go on, don’t be shy,… you’ll be amazed where your work ends up: Rapidshare, Scribd, Filesflush, Getebooksfree, ebdb.net,… the list is endless. The pirates will love you too. They’ll cut and paste your work and sell it on The Kindle Marketplace, publish it as you, cutting and pasting even your pseudonym in to the vast nefarious money making machine that forms the unregulated realm of cyberspace. But try it yourself and you’ll run into the opaque and somewhat circular regulatory labyrinth regarding income tax on your occasional 50p downloads.

Not satisfied yet? Then set up a blog too, put something up there a couple of times a week so the spammers know you’re still alive and can continue attaching their odious marketing limpets to your work by way of “likes” and comments and “follows”. Yes, Josh, I’m talking about you!

“Hi there click my blog and see how I got rich and handsome and incredibly successful using WordPress blogging.”

Groan.

“No Josh. You are an MLM spammer.”

To be sure, it’s a weird business – one in which a small number of crazy people go about creating genuinely original content for others to exploit and farm and pirate at will. Be under no illusion, dear frustrated, friendless writer, if self publishing online is something that interests you, this will happen to your work. You will be adding your muse’s sincerest outpourings to that vast ocean of words the web savvy tech trawlers crawl for content to make their own vacuous machine generated pap look worth pausing over.

And it can be really annoying.

So why do it?

Well why not? It’s not half so bad as sending your hundred thousand word manuscript off to a publisher, waiting six months in hope and expectation, then getting it back torn and creased and the front cover blobbed with grease from someone’s lunch – but otherwise no real indication it’s been read past the first page. Do this year in year out with every single thing you’ve ever written and you start to get the picture. Need advice on how to narrow the odds a bit? Spend a fortune on those trite and useless “how to get your novel published” books, but in the main just keep going, refuse to admit defeat – five, ten, fifteen years,… or worse drop dead with a pile of work going rotten in your shed, for your unfortunate executors to finally throw away.

Now that’s mad! And worse, it’s pointless. But the alternative,… giving your work away for free online? Really? Well, speaking as an unknown writer of otherwise unmarketable material, I’d probably go mad if I didn’t.

My novel “Between the tides” – the seventh I’ve given away – has been live on Feedbooks now since the end of February. It’s had 1600 downloads. The rate has tapered off somewhat in recent months, and is currently averaging about 4 per day – not massive, but it’s out there, it’s being read and some of those readers have said nice things about it. Oh, it would probably benefit from an editor’s know-how – probably benefit from a proofreading eye other than my own – but if I’d gone down that route, “Between the tides” would still be sitting in the first of many editors’ slush-piles waiting for a long line of underpaid office numpties to stick it in the return envelope, unread.

For me, reaching a bunch of people who seem interested in actually reading your stuff – you know – readers – and reaching them directly – is better than holding out for a few thousand pounds in royalties and never getting your story published in the first place. Nobody will ever know who you are of course – how great, how cool, how handsome, how indisputably “A list” your demeanour, and you will never be invited onto that TV chatshow to pontificate and shamelessly promote yourself . But if that’s the sort of thing that turns you on, you’ve a lot of growing up to do and maybe writing’s not the best course for you anyway.  As for the dead weight of all those webscrapers and pirates and other hangers on,…

Who cares?

What’s that you say? Who is this guy? Well, my name isn’t really Michael Graeme and I write stories, for the people who read them. And to the people who have read Between the Tides and all my other stories, as always, I say thank you.

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How to make money without liking bloggers!

All bloggers like to get “liked” and we can’t help wondering what it is about the “liker” that caused them to “like” us. So, we click the links and see what those “likers” are up to. It’s part of the fun of blogging and I’m sure you’ve made many stimulating contacts this way – souls treading a similar path, and others who are not. But an increasing number of likers seem to be missing the point, mainly because they don’t read our blogs before “liking” them. I know this because I once posted a blank page by accident, and five people liked it within seconds. If we then follow these curious links back to their owners we discover a new breed of bloggers whose blogs have only one category, its raison d’etre being to share with us the secret of how we can all make a lucrative and easy living “online” – just by clicking a few links – and presumably by randomly liking other people’s blogs to attract “business”. You just have to send some money first. These poor souls are not bloggers of course, they are the victims of Multi-Layered-Marketing scams, whose promised millions in earnings, and retirements to the sun depend on getting others to sign up. So the victims sell out their friends and relations first, then wonder who else to target with their vacuous nonsense.

Anyone who has read my work will know how ironic I find this kind of thing. I am not a materialist. I work for a living, write for pleasure and view our consumer society with a troubled heart. So if you’ve not already fallen victim, listen to your uncle Michael – because clearly someone’s got to say this to you. There’s no such thing as easy money, and you can’t make a lucrative living by basically doing nothing.

In the pre-internet era we’d see adverts assuring us that we could do just that – “ring this number for details”. Nowadays it would be a premium hotline and the only person making money would be the one with the cynical “dog-eat dog” wit who’d set it all up. The jobs – if they existed at all – involved putting things in envelopes by the gazillion and mailing them off to people who didn’t want them – or some other bottom of the foodchain task related to marketing other dodgy, dog-eat-dog schemes.

Nowadays most of this nefarious stuff has moved online. Spamblasters try to filter it out, but it’s a relentlessly ingenious scourge that keeps finding new ways of breaking through. So dear professional “liker”, you’ll forgive me if I smile and urge you to pull out before the awful truth dawns. I’d also like to put my tongue in my cheek here and share with you the real secret to worldly success:

1) Get up in the morning. Do as well as you can at school. Go to college if you’re able, then university. Get yourself a graduate level job, preferably doing something you enjoy, because it’s less painful that way. You’ll work at least eight hours a day, possibly longer. Show the bosses you’re willing and dynamic. Smile. Maintain a positive attitude at all times, even those times you think the place sucks. Make no enemies, even those people you believe to be incompetent. Always say yes to opportunities for extra training and when a better paid job comes along, take it – same rules apply. Do all this and you’ll rise over time to a level that suits your own ambition or ability.

Or:

2) Get up in the morning, do as well as you can at school. If that doesn’t lead to college, don’t worry – we’re not all blessed with academic ability, so skip that bit and get an ordinary kind of job any way and anywhere you can – preferably something you think you’ll like doing. You’ll work at least eight hours a day, possibly longer. Show the boss(es) you’re willing and dynamic. Maintain a positive attitude at all times – even when you think the place sucks. Make no enemies,  even those people you believe to be incompetent.  Always say yes to opportunities for extra training. When a better paid job comes along, take it – same rules apply. It’ll take longer than option one – no disguising that – but you can still rise over time to a level that suits your own ambition or ability.

Or:

3) Get up in the morning etc. At some point get an idea for a service or a product or a need, and start your own business. You’ll need a bank loan. Hard route this – and you’ll certainly be working more than eight hours a day while you build it up. There’ll be sleepless nights too, and periods of self doubt, and maybe the bank will pull the plug on the whole thing, but with a bit of luck and lot of grit you’ll win through and maybe even find yourself an employer of people following routes one and two. Of the three this route has the greatest potential to transform you into a self made millionaire, but it won’t be overnight and there’ll be times you wished you chosen routes one or two.

What? Don’t fancy any of these? Want your easy money now? Then go ahead, start “liking” us bloggers – and see how far it gets you.

Of course in all of this we’re talking about “worldly” success.

Real success in life is something else.

And I’m still working on it.

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Leaving Linkedin, terminating Twitter, and getting my two hours of pornography?

I’m not sure why I signed up to Linkedin. As far as I can tell it’s a professional networking tool and probably very good, but since Michael Graeme is a nom de plume and doesn’t exist in real life it seemed a bit pointless, but I suppose I thought it might drive a few more readers my way, so I handed over my email address. Not much happened until recently.

It was the same with Twitter. I had a brief season of microblogging on there and I enjoyed it. I particularly liked its Haiku-like brevity but I’ve not updated in ages. I wasn’t reaching much of an audience with it either. Perhaps you need to be more of an extrovert  – the kind of person who’s glued to Facebook every spare moment of the day and has a gazillion “friends”, “semi-friends” and “acquaintances”, but I just don’t have the time to construct that kind of virtual reality. (My thanks to Jim and Tina anyway, God bless you). There were other “followers” but they were trying to sell me stuff, which was tiresome, so I had to block them.

It was the same with Linkedin, except I couldn’t find a way of blocking, so I tried to resign but that was weeks ago and I’m still getting their damned nuisance spam. I’d get an email saying someone had posted a message – I had one from Deborah Green this week, (Hi Deborah, you shameless tart) My primary personality does know a Deborah Green(not a shameless tart) and he thought how the hell does Deborah Green know me as Michael Graeme? So I clicked the link out of curiosity and was taken to a website selling Viagra (Thank you Deborah – different Deborah, I hope!).

The Twitter spam was less insulting but equally unwelcome, being of a more pornographic nature – emphasis on the “graphic”. Now, I’m not a prude and according to statistics 40% of men admit to viewing more than 2 hours of pornography a week, but there’s a time and a place, gentlemen, and the breakfast table definitely isn’t it.

Curious, this online sexual stuff! I feel a whole can of worms tipping over. Sex sells of course and I’m sure there’s nothing more to the spam than that, but why do we buy? (not that I do) No,…  restrain yourself Michael;  sex is not your natural territory. You’ll only make yourself look ridiculous.

I went to church last Sunday – stay with me, this is relevant – it was a memorial service for a relative, which basically means a regular service but your recently deceased relative gets a passing mention. The church was in a town some distance away, a progressive Anglican affair, and something of an eye-opener for yours truly, one where the vicar looked more like a bank manager than a vicar, and they were talking about sex. Seriously! The sermon was about sex, and pretty unflinching it was too. They tied it all in with Leviticus (mainly 18:24-30 and 20:10-21, so far as I could make out) It was from the vicar I got the 40% of men and pornography bit, which was a surprise to me – both the statistic and the fact I got it from a vicar.  So that bum steer from Twitter burned up at least two seconds of my two hour limit, and put me on the wrong side of God as well, because those ladies definitely had no clothes on your honour, which was sinful – but I didn’t look, honestly!

Anyway, said the vicar, who looked like a bank manager, pornography is bad. It is devil’s spawn. It’ll make you go blind,  like gambling and strong liquor. Don’t look, don’t click that effing link – no, too late ARGGGG!!! It’s in your history file now, dammit. You’ve probably got a lot of tenacious cookies as well and if you’re really unlucky a severe dose of the cyberclap as well.

Serves you right, you godless sucker!

The thing that really intrigues me though is how smart these spam-bots are. How do they know I’m a man? (viagra, pornography?) Or are you lady Twitters and Linkedinners equally sidetracked by links that take you to the smuttier side of the internet? (Are you equally beguiled by promises of sexual stamina and mythical gratification) No don’t answer that – I’m just over analysing again!

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here – just marvelling, I suppose, over the unexpectedly sexual sermon last Sunday, and the subsequent sexual links from supposely bona fide sources on the internet. On the one hand I get the “thou shalt not”, from the “word of God”, then I get the “salacious temptations” in my inbox. I suppose the thing is it’s all well and good speaking out against Internet pornography, but since you’re never going stem the tide, nor legislate against it, you might as well grow up and be more accepting of it. (yes I’m a liberal in my views). People like sex. It’s natural. But tell them it’s dirty or bad or wrong, and you push it deep into the unconscious, you shove it down into the realm of the gods, you poke it in their eye, and shove up their ass, and you really shouldn’t be doing that because the gods are all powerful, easily offended and can find a million way of coming back at you. In short, demonise sex and you’re creating a ticking daemonic time bomb.

Carl Jung had something to say about porn – in its latter day (dis)guise as Eros – but only in that the way we live and suppress what’s natural in us means that sometimes the gods come through in grossly caricatured form as pathological compulsions. In other words your cute Eros with his arrows gets corrupted into a saucy photograph that would once have been passed around in a brown envelope and which now hides in the supposed privacy of  “special browsers” and the “anonymity” of  proxy servers. We become addicted to images or corrupted metaphors of something that was once a natural facet of our daily, all be it primitive, lives.

I’m definitely over-analysing now – possibly also under the influence of strong liquor – which is a defintite blogging no no.

But I suppose my point is, what’s the point in leaving Linkedin or terminating Twitter? Eros will only find another way of getting through, perhaps even by breaching WordPress’s seemingly impermeable spam proof barriers (I hope not) Anyway, re Linkedin and Twitter, I seem to have talked myself out of it for now.

Two hours of porn? No thanks.  It’s cool, but I’m fifty one, and I have other vices now. Eros, I know you when I see you, so point your pesky arrows somewhere else. Two hours a week? No thanks. I’ve got a novel to finish and there’s sex enough in that for me. Does that sound sad?

Hope not.

Graeme out.

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