Check out this Nigerian scam involving rental of my house in Salt Lake City. The details are impressive! A paleontologist, no less! And family photos!

Hello
Many thanks to your prompt response and brief details on this unit. am indeed a potential tenant and serious about renting this unit. Having discovered lots of Dinosaurs fossil such as Dinosaurs Megalosaurus ,Oviraptor, Pinacosaurus, Saurornithoides, Velociraptor, plesiosaur, Ichthyosaurus etc. Am coming to state to Trade those fossils with some US Museums.
In view of my work schedule, i would want us to finalize basic arrangements. I’m and i am currently working with Netherlands Fossil hunters Imperial Dinosaur Fossil Research Amsterdam, Netherlands. I will be in the states for the next one year with my wife and five year old daughter and during my stay i will be Trading dinosaur fossils with Some USA Museums and Research with some America Paleontologist on fossils hunting and field work. Am willing to offer you 1month rent + the security deposit and utilities if any to secure this unit prior to my arrival to state, and on my arrival, i’ll pay for the 11months fees in Cash. My Trustee in the states will be the one to handle the Move in fee, and we will instruct him to send you the check for this as soon as you give us the go ahead to make payment to you. Due to the limited time that we have before our arrival, we are making arrangements with a furniture company there in state to supply the home with some
befitting furnitures.

We can start the lease at your earliest convenient time and we will be effecting a one year lease although, we will be arriving on 25th of may 2009,. You can prepare the lease in me and my wife name “Prof. Williams Smith & Mrs Florence Smith.
Once again, thank for the measurements and the price that you sent to me, it will indeed be of great help to determine the Seize of Furnitures that my furnitures company will supply to the unit… As regards my furniture, am planning on having them delivered to the house before our arrival so that we can settle in comfortably, you can understand that transporting furnitures across Atlantic is not easy, so we are making arrangement with the furniture company there in State to deliver the furnitures before our arrival after the rent and security deposit has been fully paid to you by my Trustee. I want to seek your indulgence and favor. Can we rely on you to take delivery of those furnitures for us when they are delivered? We will instruct the furniture company to contact you to schedule a delivery date and time that will be convenient for you to receive those furnitures for us. As you will be handling the delivery of those furnitures for us,we may ask
our Trustee to include the costs of our furnitures with the rent and deposit to be sent to you so that you can help us to make the payment when it is delivered. We will really appreciate if you can do this for us and promise to compensate you adequately for your time and effort s on our arrival in your place. Please let me know if this will be okay with you so that i can instruct our Trustee to go ahead with the payment.
Let us know how to move ahead as we intend to complete this deal before we move in by 25th of may 2009, we will let you know the exact date as soon as we get a booking on a flight to the states. I want a less risk, fair,transparent and a hitch free transaction so i attached the pictures of my family so that you can have an ideal of who you are dealing with.
If you require any specific information, pls let me know or you can call me on my cell phone, please dial as presented for international calls . {+447024017688 or +2348024388720} Forward the lease agreement/application form to Review it ahead of time. I would eventually have it signed physically when i arrive. In my opinion, appending signatories should be done properly and at best physically. Please, send me a picture view of the living room and bed rooms only if that will not take time to do. This is an international situation and am not sure how you can run my employment and Credit check background, there’s no way we can go about this until i arrive to state, hope you understand my concern.
With this arrangement, my Trustee in the states,will be effecting your payment deposit to you. I believe we can work together and ensure every arrangements that we shall both execute in line with my taking up the tenancy should be done accordingly to ensure we have a proper understanding..
For Payment, Get back with the below details
1- Name to be written on the certified American check
2- Mailing address , No p.o.box
3- Phone Number
4- City
5- Zip Code
6- State
Thank you for your understanding and co-operation.
Professor Williams Smith.
Netherlands .
Fossil Hunter {Paleontologist}.
Tel: +447024017688 or +2348024388720

just found this buried in my docs folder, from October 2004. don’t recall writing it, but it must be about California:

Spider webs stretch over green branches
supple limbed caressed by gray
At the hill’s feet splays the paddock
moist and willing
ready to be furrowed
by clumsy steps
from plodding hooves
It is morning
It is midday
It is dusk
And I will stare at your inviting skin
until I can see no more
struck dumb by its careless beauty
Then leave, somehow unsatisfied
And weeks from now
and for years to come
will remember with longing
and a vague sense of emptiness
the moments you were all I could see
but could never fully grasp.

Three very disparate events in the last 24 hours have left me reeling, each in different directions.

Sun: Yesterday at 10:30 in the morning, in Carson City, NV, I had arguably the greatest impact I’ll ever have, on anything, in my life, the birth of my two daughters Maren and Juniper notwithstanding. After several months of work through Black Rock Solar, we were able to convince the Nevada Public Utility Commission to vote unanimously to approve dumping 6.5 megawatts of solar power rebates back into the pool. Worth $26 million on their face, and worth half again that for the federal incentives they can trigger, it will result in vast oceans of solar power being built that otherwise wouldn’t have been. Clear enough. Good for the world, etc etc etc.

Shooter: Today, 9am. On arriving at work, got a call from Andie letting me know that Caleb “Shooter” Shaber, long a nemesis of sorts, had killed himself. Caleb is the closest thing to an enemy I’ve ever had. His slashing critiques of things I’ve done, like the work with Burners Without Borders and the Green Man theme of Burning Man drove me absolutely to the edge. The archive of those arguments on Tribe.net could fill volumes. I’d spent countless hours talking to him about issues, patiently explaining things, butting heads, living sometimes in actual fear of him and his arroused anger. In time, the talking got somewhere, and in recent months I’d a good rapport with him. But as soon as the walls were down in our disputes about those topics, I never took the time to go the next step and be curious enough, and courageous enough, to drill down into him as a person. He was a passionate, driven, principled person, like me I suppose, but I didn’t go that next step. I didn’t have time in my life for a crazy person, who cared as deeply as I did about many of the same things, but with an unhinged ferocity that I feared would overwhelm me. And so I shut him out. And last night, as the person who was with him described it, in a moment the lights went out in his face, he fumbled for a weapon and shotguns shells, and took his own life.

Susan: Tonight, like tens of millions around the world this week, I watched Susan Boyle stun an audience in Glasgow with her singing. The surprise of course comes from seeing such a dowdy, nominally unattractive dowager do something “worthwhile,” as though those unattractive are incapable of having something of worth to contribute. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY I’ve watched twice, and the few seconds after she starts singing are something I’ll always treasure.

How these things fit together is a bit hard to see. Let me take a stab at it. I suppose it’s this: I spent most of my time, most of my waking hours, immersed in the pursuit of things external to dealing one on one with people, specifically things “that matter,” that imply a sense of social value. And in so doing, give myself a sense of purpose and worth that serves to obviate and mask the challenges I have dealing with people one on one. Empathy is difficult for me. It’s as though by not letting people in with all their warts and flaws and contradictions, I can somehow maintain the self delusion that the surface is what matters and thus, by implication, that since what I “do” “matters”, I matter. And it extends even to my corporal self; growing up knowing that I was handsome to many has served as a barricade to those that aren’t. I set myself apart somehow through that, as if something I had absolutely nothing to do with made me somehow better. And I knew and know when I’m doing it, and haven’t broken myself of it yet.

And now, in the space of a day and a bit, I’m confronted first hand with the fallacy of all that; the thing I did that “matters so much” really, when it comes down to the level of actual real people in a visceral, blood and bones kind of sense, doesn’t matter a lick. So there’s more solar, so what? Who did I talk to yesterday that was the happier for it?

In December of last year I spent five days with friends from college, including my friend Mark. I’d not invited him to my wedding–it had been years since we’d even spoken, and I sort of thought the friendship had drifted off as they so often do. But seeing several of our mutual friends at the wedding, my friend Preston’s wife decided to surprise him by bringing five close male friends of his-including Mark-together to surprise him in Key West for his 40th Birthday. Mark let me know how let down he’d been, that even though we weren’t in touch our friendship still meant a great deal to him. And in so doing, I realized, to me. But he moved on and past it and got back in the moment as he does so well. And during that weekend I noticed him talking to all sorts of people, just making conversation, being truly interested. Turns out he’d made a new years resolution to speak to every single person he met long enough to learn at least one new thing from them. In so doing, he’d learned that every single person had something to teach him, and that humility and curiosity grew throughout the year, until when I saw him he was genuinely interested in everyone he met, regardless of who they were or their standing. It shouldn’t surprise that Mark is an exceptionally well do to, very successful business man.

To my remorse, I realize now I received an email from Caleb within the last week, and never replied. I was too busy to take the time:

Caleb Schaber
to Tom
show details Apr 11 (6 days ago) [Green Park Progress Report (photos).doc]
Tom,

Hope you are well. Thought you might like this. Also, I would like to interview you on solar issues. Will you be around Gerlach any time soon?

SChaber

What’s the point? I suppose it’s the all too familiar cliched one, so extant from its truth: we fail to take the time to care about EVERYONE at our own peril. We loose when we don’t care enough to care, when we prejudge for no reason. And when we do, the greatest achievements, no matter how “important,” don’t matter in the least.

May I learn from this. May I still care enough to try to help, yes. But also may Caleb rest in peace he so long lived without. And may I speak warmly to the next Susan I meet, from a studied intent at first but hopefully over time with genuine ease that comes of practice. Because she, and he, and you, are all that really matters in this world.

a poorly written post, but one which needed writing.

Eileen Hassi of Ritual Roasters has put out the word that American Apparel is attempting to be the first national chain store to open on Valencia Street in the Mission.  I don’t think we need to discuss what a bad idea that is, do we?

What we do need to do is mobilize, and the easiest way to start is by popping off an email to the public official in charge. That can sometimes seem intimidating, but it needn’t be. In fact, here’s a sample email you can cut/paste/send that will help do your part. Just change the name, maybe add a sentence in your own words, and you’re done!

From:       price_tom@hotmail.com
Subject:     Subject: 988 Valencia - Case No. 2008.0720C
Date:     January 22, 2009 11:27:27 AM PST
To:       pilar.lavalley@sfgov.org

M. Pilar LaValley
Preservation Technical Specialist/Planner
City & County of San Francisco Planning Department
1650 Mission Street, Suite 400
San Francisco, CA 94103

January 22, 2009

Dear Planner LaValley,

My name is Tom Price, I am a resident of San Francisco and live in the Potrero Hill neighborhood. Along with my family, I often visit the Mission, and enjoy the many distinct stores and businesses there. Valencia Street is a uniquely San Francisco institution, a hold out against the cookie cutter chain stores that litter other cities across our country.  A place like this needs to be celebrated and protected.

Please register my opposition to the proposed American Apparel store on Valencia Street.  There is a place for chain stores, but it is not on Valencia Street. Please also keep me informed of any public meetings, hearings, or comment periods regarding this issue.

Thank you,

Tom Price

Crowdsourcing support of independant retailers, FTW!

There’s a tradition in this young country of ours to overly venerate anything that’s been around long enough to reflect on how long it’s been around. Consider, if you will, the entire VH1 network, which seems to exist solely to remind people about the golden old days of….the 1980s.

Still, there are some insitutions of note, having actually been around for a generation or more, and two of them were on my mind this morning.

The New Yorker, in their current issue, is celebrating the Village Voice, the tempestuous, opionated paper of the meat and mindspace of Greenich Village in Manhattan.

But as I sat reading it this morning, I knew ( thanks to @themediaisdying on Twitter. the new new thing, vs. the arguably dying print form of media ) that Nat Hantoff had been let go from the paper. He’s been their since 1958, surely long enough to be an sort of institution in his own right, especially by American terms.
And in the shower later, I wondered–with so many media outlets falling apart, who will be left? And will, in ten years, some mediocre rag that by dint of luck rather than substance managed to escape the scythe ripping though the printed media outlets theses days, be something that we look as being worthy of the same respect as the hundreds of books quietly slipping beneath the waves now?

An apt metaphor, perhaps; after the Titanic, those lost were mourned, surely, and yet those who survived, however meager their lives before or acts after, were held in some regard, the very act of making it to dry land in dark seas a miracle that implied some divine provience.

After days, weeks of unseasonably dry weather, a bit of rain this morning brought up a snap in the air, a tang of freshness, as we walked down to the car. The drive was short, as always, five minutes down the hill and around back, arguing a little over nothing of consequence.

We all came in, greeted the nanny, waited for the coffee to brew, and I went downstairs, and thought: this will all change. Soon.

In two months time, maybe less, this office will close and we’ll all move. The new one isn’t quite picked out yet,but it doesn’t matter. Six, seven years of intermittent visits to this office, the last two full time, mostly. And for the last year, the ritual of our family coming here together, to meet the on site nanny.  Andie working upstairs, me working downstairs, never more than a few minutes from home, never more than a few minutes from the baby. All that will change.

So too the mix of people. Tough decisions are going to have to be made. A hard rain, as they say, gonna fall. I worry that the people around me, as I have for a while now, lack the vision and courage to see what may be and plan for it, both in good times and now in bad. In our little shop, we’re planning accordingly. Reefing the sails. But those around us blather about things that were best decided long ago, when times were fat. They’re fighting over the spoils of a carcass so long the meat is rotting, and will offer no nourishment.

And so this morning I think about how nice this has been, and how I’ve appreciated and even taken if for granted. And know it’s going to end. As Richard always says, the only constant pal is change. And it’s here.

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Of late it’s becoming more and more clear that our society is facing tremendous challenges, and will require massive reconfiguration.

Some signs are quite dire; read the harbingers of the apocalypse here if you’re feeling especially perky.

Others, quite hopefull, like the work Shai Agassi is making happen re: fasttracking electric cars.

I’ve decided then to start using this space to record this process, and share ideas on how we can all work together to make our lives a little more sustainable, and a lot more comfortable, as the waves of change break over the shores of our fragile economy.

After a year or more of bending anyone who’d listens ear about the incredibly profound carbon-negative energy DIY production work Jim Mason has been up to at the Shipyard, its gratifying to see others taking notice. WorldChanging just did a nice piece, and word is smart (read: money) people are sniffing around.

With good reason. Pay close attention to these words: Open Source. Carbon Negative. Renewable Energy. In one package, now available with free download instructions.

Just in time, too–the New York Times had a front page story this week on how a year’s long multi-billion dollar effort to sequester carbon underground thus making coal ‘clean’ has come a cropper. As in, complete bust. Total failure. We just lost three years and have nothing to show for it.

Meanwhile, in Berkeley, in a junkyard, Jim’s making machines that do this already. And he feeds them garbage. Someone please tell Joshua Davis @ WIRED his next cover story is waiting….

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Just read this single line in National Geographic and boy howdy did it catch my attention, given its sweeping implications, and the source:

“By 2010, according to James Mulva, CEO of ConocoPhillips, nearly 40 percent of the world’s daily oil output will have to come from fields that have not been tapped—or even discovered.”

Whole story available here. 

If you’re not already paying attention to what’s going on with Peak Oil/Energy/Money/Food, you really should be.

Here’s a primer:

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv…eo.html

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn…41.html

www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Bre…html

patrick.net/housing/crash.html

I don’t believe it’s fear mongering, it’s just fact: we’ve all experienced the housing/credit crush, now fuel is spiking and food along with it. And with that is going to come some overdue changes to our individual and collective lifestyles.

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

Oh, and PS, don’t forget about climate change.

AG and I are doing what we can to be able to take care of ourselves and the little one. Last month, we got a biodiesel Mercedes, and yesterday said goodbye to our beloved, but petro burning, Honda. With our downstairs neighbors and landlord, we’re going to become ( we think ) the first people to do a joint tenant/landlord solar installation on our home (we’ll pay the same, but to him to cover the cost, not PG&E). We’re also actively exploring getting a wee chicken coop out back, to go in the garden. And next month, I’ll be volunteering w/my stepfather back home at a community food bank of sorts, and will then be able to buy a year’s supply of dehydrated food on the cheap. ( I was raised Mormon, what can I say).

I know that posting this may brand me a bit paranoid. That’s fine. I grew up in a poor family that raised much of our own food, and got a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction from it. I suspect the reason many people go to BM is to experience, on some level, the visceral joy that comes from providing your own food and shelter–even if ably abetted by Wal-Mart and Costco. So if for no other reason, we’ll keep doing what we’re doing. And knowing many of you to be smart, forward looking people, who might not have had this information all put together like this in one place, well, perhaps it will be of value. Far better to see the storm coming, and close the windows and bring in the laundry, than to be surprised outside when the rain begins to fall…

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