[Oregon's Janella Spears] fell victim to the "Nigerian scam," which is familiar to almost anyone who has ever had an e-mail account.
[...]
When Spears began to doubt the scam, she got letters from the President of Nigeria, FBI Director Mueller, and President Bush. Terrorists could get the money if she did not help, Bush’s letter said. Spears continued to send funds. All the letters were fake, of course.
She wiped out her husband’s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for. — KATU
For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and bank officials, told her to stop, that it was all a scam. She persisted.
Spears said she kept sending money because the scammers kept telling her that the next payment would be the last one, that the big money was inbound. Spears said she became obsessed with getting paid. — KATU
When Best Buy announced its latest sales figures last month, the company reported “an unprecedented drop in consumer buying of items like flat-screen televisions,” said Ori Brafman, a business expert and an author [...] “But when Wal-Mart released its report last week, there was a surprise. Consumers had increased their flat-screen purchases.....
Last month, Terence Lance Buckley, a Manhattan public relations executive, spent $400 at Overstock.com on an electric fireplace, hoping to keep his thermostat off this winter. Mr. Buckley had just moved, and the rent on his new apartment includes electricity but not gas. He now has a beautiful fake fireplace and mantel, but the thing gives off barely enough heat to warm his hands. “Now I’m cranking up the thermostat to stay warm,” he said, “leading me to believe that my brilliant budget plan to save money on heating costs was a waste of $400, money that I could have put towards holiday gifts.”
Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.
“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”
But the researchers could not tell whether unhappy people watch more television or whether being glued to the set is what makes people unhappy. “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you more happy,” Dr. Robinson said.
Overall, the religious vote for Obama did not reflect a massive shift in ideology and priorities among evangelicals but rather muscle-flexing by a coalition of others of faith--including and especially African-American churchgoers and Latinos who tend to be both more religious and more socially conservative than the population at large. The pro-Obama faithful represent a wild diversity of the American religious experience, including mainline Protestants, church-shoppers, the curious, the spiritual but not religious, the heterodox (those who subscribe to several traditions), the intermarried, the community-minded, the intellectually provoked but skeptical, and the traditionalists. Indeed, it includes almost every committed person of faith except those whose church culture insists on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
— Lisa Miller: A Post-Evangelical America?
Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world’s leading suicide location. [...] At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore’s, in 1995. The actual toll is probably considerably higher, swelled by legions of the stealthy, who sneak onto the bridge after the walkway closes at sundown and are carried to sea with the neap tide.
[...]
In centuries past, suicides were buried at night at a crossroads, under piles of stones, or had stakes driven through their hearts to prevent their unquiet spirits from troubling the rest of us. In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes, and suicide is much more common than homicide.
[...]
Dr. Seiden’s study, “Where Are They Now?,” (PDF) published in 1978, followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who were prevented from attempting suicide at the bridge between 1937 and 1971. After, on average, more than twenty-six years, ninety-four per cent of the would-be suicides were either still alive or had died of natural causes. “The findings confirm previous observations that suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented and acute in nature,” Seiden concluded; if you can get a suicidal person through his crisis—Seiden put the high-risk period at ninety days—chances are extremely good that he won’t kill himself later.
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solcita has noted, "candy bar"-style cell phones are notorious for calling 911 when the keypads are left unlocked. You'd think a burglar would lock his cell's keypad while committing a robbery. You'd be wrong. He is armed with statistics showing that a vast majority of investors — including most professional investment managers — should not even bother trying to pick individual stocks. They are just not very good at it, he says. Better to invest in the broad market through index funds with low costs, allowing the shareholders, and not the investment managers, to profit when times are good. [...]
Yet for simple, straightforward reasons, he says that this is a very good time to put money into stocks — not for short-term trades, mind you, but as part of a diversified portfolio that you hold for many years.
His own holdings are invested entirely in Vanguard funds, in what he says is “probably” a 75 percent bond, 25 percent stock allocation — roughly in keeping with his age-based formula.
“I don’t really know the exact allocation,” he said last week in another interview. “I don’t check the portfolio more than once a year. It had been 70-30 bond to stock, but the stock market has been so bad lately, and the bond market has been pretty good, so the markets have rebalanced the portfolio for me. Of course, like any investor over the last year, I wish the portfolio had been even more conservative, but so it goes.”
An unidentified vehicle, possibly a truck, hit and knocked loose a 30-foot-long segment of concrete rail, sending it over the edge of the ramp, said Seattle city transportation spokesman Rick Sheridan. There were no injuries and apparently no damage to vehicles parked on the street under the ramp, Sheridan said.
"Fortunately no people were struck or vehicles...so it was fortuitous that it landed in that location," Sheridan said of the rail segment. "Whoever was driving the vehicle was very lucky he didn't harm himself or others." The errant vehicle had not been located as of early Monday afternoon. Police "are treating (the incident) as a hit-and-run," Sheridan said.
— Seattle P-I, emphasis mine
In the primary election, we endorsed "anybody but Brad Owen," noting the incumbent lieutenant governor's ridiculous crusade against high-school potheads and his membership in a crappy-ass rock band. We described one of his challengers, Republican Marcia McCraw, as an "empty bag of chips."
In response, McCraw sent us several dozen bags of chips.
We had no choice. We convened an emergency SECB meeting, passed the talking stick around, dug into the chips, and reflected on our previous endorsement. We noted that McCraw is the kind of Republican who not only wants to legalize pot, but sends bags of chips to potheads. She's also pro-choice, and she served on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council. In other words, she's very nearly a Democrat—which is more than you can say for Brad Owen.
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timeasmymeasure
