Peeking into the rock

Here's the text of an email I got this morning:

United Nations Joint Programme.
Division for the Promotion of basic Education
Sector UNESCO 7, place de Fontenoy,
F-75352 Paris 07 SP,France.
Fax: +33 1 45 68 56 26/27
www.unesco.org

Qualification numbers (154/4456/011).

It is obvious that this notification will come to you as a surprise, 
Please find time to read it carefully as we congratulate you following our official 
publication of results
of an exclusive list of 47,000,000 e-mail addresses of individual
and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer ballot 
search from the internet as part of our international information technology 
enhancement programme.
No tickets were sold and Applications were also made by national governments 
or international non-governmental organizations,maintaining formal consultative 
relations with 
UNESCO in your country.
This was held on 28th of November 2010 in United kingdom.
A Draft of  500,000,00(Five Hundred Thousand Great British Pounds) will be 
issued in your name. For Validation Purpose ,
Please Forward The Following Information as Listed Below to our Information 
and Payment bureau Officer.

Required Info
Full Names:.
Residential address:.
Tel(Mobile):.
Nationality/Country:.
Age/Sex:.
Occupation/Position:

SEND DETAILS FOR VALIDATION TO: une scogran toffic@   aol.  com
Dr Mariana Patru on:  or call Tel: +4470-3598-1682

Best Regards,
Isabelle Le Fournis,
(Press Relations Section UNESCO©

----------

Words fail.

Working on the synopsis for Afterwar requested by my writing group. Easier than other synopses because I know what they want to see in it, and why. But since they want it soo they can understand the kind of complicated time line and judge for themselves whether they think the book would do better with a different chapter order, it has to be very very complete and it takes a long time.

We went to Gray Whale ranch with the nice fellow's brother. No mushrooms to speak of, the ground was dry, and the moss was dried up. This is the new pattern for the central coast: a dedent opener, and then nothing much until January. Plays havoc with the bolete and chanterelle seasons. But we've gathered a lot of shrooms already.

You know that new kind of spam where the subject field has the sender's name (as in "tristan said:" or "Re:Harry")? I just got one from a Tristan Conklin in Australia, with the subject header "Fwd: re: Conklin" which meant that I had to look at it, because there was an offchance that it could be about Uncle Groff. No.

I've been getting a lot of spam that purports to tell me something alarming about my house -- foreclosure, or tax problems (not convincing as I have no mortgage! and I pay my taxes automagically!), or my job (which I don't have) -- the boss has been fired, or the place has shut down. The address and name in the subject header are only correct a third of the time, and anyway if you get fifteen of these in a day you're bound to be suspicious, right?

I've also started to get spam that comes from "Impeach the President today." Notice "from." Why do spam people think anybody's going to open something that has exhortations in the "from" field? even if we agree with the exhortations? Exhortations belong in the subject header, or better yet, the body of the email.

I use Open Webmail, which gives you a list, containing date, sender, and subject fields. When you mouse over the sender field you get the email address that the piece purports to come from. And since even the most clever spam -- of which there is very little -- tends to use "bizrate@stockwatcher.com" or "agwporncw@opportunityknocks.com" types of email addresses, you almost never have to open anything. When you do open an email, it's open on the webmail server and not your own computer. But still, why would anybody ever open anything that's clearly not authentic?

Lastly, I got something eerie: something in my spam folder from "story:aftermath." I had to do a doubletake, because rejection/acceptance emails often have "story:x" in the subject header. And the novel I keep thinking I'm almost finished with is almost called "aftermath." So sleepyhead here has to mouse over the "from" field to see what email address pops up.