Saturday, June 10, 2006

Dogly Thoughts

Hat tip to my friend Tom B.

The Philosophy of Dogs

The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue.

— Anonymous

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Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.

— Ann Landers

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.

— Will Rogers

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There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.

— Ben Williams

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A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.

— Josh Billings

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The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

— Andy Rooney

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We give dogs time we can spare, space we can spare and love we can spare. And in return, dogs give us their all. It’s the best deal man has ever made.

— M. Acklam

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Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.

— Sigmund Freud

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I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.

— Rita Rudner

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A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.

— Robert Benchley

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Anybody who doesn’t know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.

— Franklin P. Jones

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If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

— James Thurber

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If your dog is fat, you aren’t getting enough exercise.

— Unknown

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My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to $3.00 a can. That’s almost $21.00 in dog money.

— Joe Weinstein

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Ever consider what our dogs must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul — chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on earth!

— Anne Tyler

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Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

— Robert A. Heinlein

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If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

— Mark Twain

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You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, 'Wow, you’re right! I never would’ve thought of that!'

— Dave Barry

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Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.

— Roger Caras

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If you think dogs can’t count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then give him only two of them.

— Phil Pastoret

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My goal in life is to be as good of a person my dog already thinks I am.

— Unknown

Loterie Nationale

Most of the time, spam emails just tick me off. My email address is public enough that it has been discovered by just about every purveyor of ripped email addresses, and as a consequence I get hundreds of these damned things every day. I use Thunderbird as my email client, and its built-in junk mail filters do a bang-up job — but still, a few get through every day. This morning I found this gem in my inbox, having escaped Thunderbird’s junk filters:

NOTIFICATION FROM THE LOTERIE NATIONALE

We are delighted to notify you of the result of the LOTERIE NATIONALE quarterly award program. In accordance with the world lottery ordnance, you authorized as an official lottery prize winner to immediately file in for your claims upon receipt of this mail.

This is an online promotional program organized by LOTERIE NATIONALE. A total number of various individual email addresses and companies alike were entered for the Free Lotto Automatic Subscription Ticket Game. Details were submitted by international email service providers/marketing companies including public service providers strictly for this exercise. No ticket was sold.

Bear in mind that prizes will strictly be remitted to winners that officially file in for their claims within the given time frame. To begin your claim process, you are advised to immediately contact our program coordinator with the details below.

MRS. JANET DAAL.

Global Consult

Tel: +31 [redacted]

Email: [redacted]@excite.it

Note that all winnings must be claimed within 10 working days from the date of this notification; any unclaimed prize will be returned to the treasury of the organizing firm as unclaimed prize.

(NB) You are to file in for the claim of Two Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars ($2,500,000.00) under category “A”. Here are your winning details:

Batch Number: LN-DN0TR764

Ticket Number: LN-TW09XV51

Ref Number: LN-883M09

Lucky Number: 554-20-501

Serial Number: LN/ERS

Congratulations once more and thank you for being part of our quarterly promotional program.

Yours truly,

KARL SCHOLTEN

The first thing that caught my eye — and what stopped me from deleting it immediately, as I usually would — was the phrase “world lottery ordnance”. Now I’m sure they really meant “world lottery ordinance", but the spelling they actually used raises all sorts of humorous questions. How, exactly, do you turn a “world lottery” into some kind of heavy weapon? Hmmmm… Perhaps you print a bazillion lottery tickets, pack them into a nice aerodynamic casing, and then drop them on some terrorist’s head? Hah!

The second paragraph is typical of these spams: a pathetic attempt to make a plausible case for why I should have been randomly selected to win $2.5M, in a way that benefits no company or government. And of course there’s the line calculated to build a sense of urgency: I have only 10 days to take action, or I’ll lose all this money!

You gotta love all the official sounding details, too. Not only do I get a ticket number, but also a batch number, a serial number, a reference number, and even a lucky number. Wow! This must be for real, with all that specific information on it!

I redacted the (Italian) email address and (Dutch) phone number, because I don’t want to be responsible for anyone actually contacting this scammer. I’m not sure what would happen if you did contact them, but most likely it would involve getting your bank or credit information — I can’t imagine what else they’d be after.

It never ceases to amaze me that such unsophisticated spams actually work — but they must, or nobody would go to the trouble of sending them off.

"World lottery ordnance”. Heh.