The Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Green Tea

Published on Monday 10 April 2006 14:58

If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture.

Back from holiday, comfortably ensconced back at work. And using scotsman.com's wonderful suite of software products, which is not unlike having your soft body parts slammed in a rusty mousetrap (I'm guessing here).

A side effect of being away was that I was unable to attend the Scottish Cup semi-final encounter between Hearts and the poet-warriors of Hibernian Football Club. Despite my best efforts to persuade my loved ones that the best way to savour the Mediterranean was to visit JoJo's English Pub for lunch, I also failed to watch the game on TV. However, fellow fans were good enough to keep me informed by text: "pwn3d" seems an appropriate description. I turned off the phone and returned to, in the words of the Dead Kennedys, "drinking beer in the hot sun". Oh well, always next season… And the next. And the next.

Anyway, back in harness now and straining through spam in my inbox. Once again our top of the range email system has carefully arranged a smorgasbord of penis enlargement, iffy software and dodgy meds. So far, so yada yada yada. One utterly bizarre addition has been green tea spam. I've been offered every kind of product imaginable by spanners across the world, but never warm beverages. I have to admire their ability to target their marketing. There is actually a packet of green tea by my PC. Spooky, huh?

Yes it's good to be back in our cold, miserable, bird flu-smitten little land, at the mercy of psychic spammers and a PC that would be more useful as a parachute.

So thank the Lord that I have encountered two of the funniest links in the history of this column. The first celebrates my very favouritest kind of spammers: 419ers.

The J-Walk Blog presents the magnificent programme for "The 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference". The fictional event promises "an excellent opportunity to meet your distinguished colleagues, learn new marketing techniques, and spend your hard-earned money. Attending this conference demands the highest trust, security and confidentiality between us."

I spat green tea over my PC (something which made it work better) when I read the list of events. I particularly enjoyed the "debate":

Attend a lively debate between Lady Mariam Abacha and Mr. Godwin Oyathelem. Topic: "The effectiveness of using all UPPERCASE characters."

The whole thing is very well observed - adding to the canon of fine humour gleaned from these scams. Even the registration instructions have the right tone:

Register Now!

Registration is via a confidential money transfer.

Send your bank's name, account number, your name, address, telephone number, and fax numbers. Please note again that this transaction is strictly confidential and as such should be kept secret. Be rest assured that this transaction is 100% risk free.

But even this pales into insignificance beside TheDoctorSays.co.uk.

Has Dr Who started ringing you up in the middle of the night? He has me too. This site is an ever growing audio extravaganza of what he has been saying to us all. BT has introduced talking text to and from home phones and for the first three months, they'll be spoken by Tom Baker. You can send a text from a mobile to a landline in the normal way – just enter the landline number as the destination instead.

The real genius of the site is that it does not just feature Tom Baker saying odd things. No, not content with texting odd phrases to a landline and then recording the result, the genius behind the site has been texting entire song lyrics and then setting them to music. At the moment, you can listen to Baker's rendition of five songs, the finest of which has to be How Soon Is Now by The Smiths.

It's almost worth coming back from holiday for.