fine whine

Well, I knew a little persistence would pay off. Earlier this month I stumbled across an interesting anecdote:

In 1841, England’s greatest daredevil, Samuel Scott, performed stunt acrobatics while hanging by a rope with the noose around his neck from London’s Waterloo Bridge. One day the noose slipped. Scott strangled to death on the bridge while the audience cheered, assuming it was part of the act.

I wanted to know more, and was only intrigued by my inability to find anything about the great Sam Scott on the whole Web. All I found of any note was something about a guy in Philadelphia named Samuel Scott, but his story was revealed to me by the author of Strange Philadelphia, Lou Harry. He found me and wrote:

Saw your posting regarding Samuel Scott and my book Strange Philadelphia.

Scott was a Philadelphian who had a thing for leaping from ships.

Strange Philadelphia is still available from Temple U. press (there are lots of bizarre stories in there). You can also find info about Scott in Ricky Jay's terrific book Learned Men and Fireproof Women.

Be well,

Lou Harry

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I didn't read Lou's message until today.

So I had written about my little mystery, and I was waiting to see what comments rolled in.

The entry and its comments alone did not turn up any conclusive answers, nor did my second mention of the subject (despite its appearance on the low-traffic but high-profile LazyWeb. So I sent out some emails.

The one that mattered went to the kind birds and blokes of the UK's libraries. I stumbled across Ask a librarian and within a day of asking them I had this answer:

Thank you for using Ask A Librarian,

The essentials at least of this story are true. The unfortunate man
died in the manner you describe on January 11th 1841. There seems some
doubt as to the man's nationality. He came to England from the USA,
but claimed to have been born in Deptford (England). A reporter though
was insistent that he was an American, born in Philadelphia. The article
from the Times (see citation below) does not mention a cheering
audience, but it does describe a large crowd (at least 8,000) and how
the poor man was left hanging for several minutes because it was assumed
that he was OK. The detail you have of the cheering audience may well
then be true and is not contradicted in the article.

Source: The Times, Tuesday, Jan 12, 1841; pg. 5; Issue 17565; col E
Please note, this the Times printed in London, England.

Regards,
Ask A Librarian

At last! Closure.

Well, closure of sorts. I am unable to procure a copy of said issue of The Times as their online archives only go all the way back to 1985 and I haven't looked for any microfiche.

I suppose I could book a trip to London someday, but for now I suppose I'm satisfied.

In other news, I am not necessarily smarter than anybody else. After I sent my message to the Page-A-Day folks I received this reply:

DEAR MR. LIETZ: IF THE CALENDAR YOU ARE SPEAKING ABOUT IS TITLED
WELL DUH! , IT IS NOT A WORKMAN CALENDAR. IF IT HAS ANOTHER TITLE,
PLEASE LET ME KNOW AND I WILL SEND IT TO THE AUTHOR.

Boy is my face red. They don't make the calendar, Andrews McMeel does.

D'oh.

Sometime a while ago I stumbled across t-shirt e-tailer Threadless, and at the time I filed it away as a neat idea but the shirts were a bit pricey. I also thought it would be neat to create a design for them, and promptly forgot about ever actually doing that.

Fast forward to today when I discovered that they were having a weekend sale with a decent discount, and as I was in a buying mood at the time, I decided to mull it over for the rest of the day. In the end I bought two shirts, after looking through my closet at my pretty sorry collection of cool t-shirts that I am able to wear more than twice a year.

I'm looking forward to wearing this shirt on casual Fridays. Now that zombies are cool again I should be the epitome of hipness, even without needing to watch reality television.

Speaking of TV, when I browse through photos (on flickr and elsewhere) I find myself drawn to images of broken and destroyed televisions. So this shirt really appealed to me, and I don't have too many brown t-shirts to boot.

So yeah, I splurged, but I can rationalize my purchases because they were on sale for a third off. The sale ended tonight but anybody who wants to buy some (still reasonably-priced) t-shirts would do well to follow this link and I'll get some minor compensation. I'll make it back up to you in karma and goodwill, or perhaps some other small bribe.

I done a baaaad thing.

Originally uploaded by mikelietz.

Here's what a flash of inspiration, an hour of perspiration, a third of a roll of masking tape, some black paint and a white t-shirt can make. I assembled all of the materials last night, and here's what it turned out being.

If you don't know what it is, I'm not telling. Yet.

(Incidently I'm trying out this new-fangled flickr automatic-posting thing. Overall, I'm still not sure what to think of it.)

I don't usually fall in for these so-called memes, but this one caught my eye. The idea is to take a list of the top one hundred movies as rated by imdb users and bold the ones I've seen.

I'll use the list that Kheryn used, though I cannot find a corresponding list on imdb. As mentioned above, I've bolded the ones I've seen. I've even linked to some that I've mentioned this year.

1. The Godfather (1972)
2. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
3. The Godfather: part 2 (1974)
4. LOTR: Return of the King (2003)
5. LOTR: The Two Towers (2002)
6. Schindler's List (2002)
7. Seven Samurai (1954)
8. Casablanca (1942)
9. LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
10. Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
11. Citizen Kane (1941)
12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
13. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
14. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
15. Rear Window (1954)
16. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
17. Pulp Fiction (1994)
18. The Usual Suspects (1995)
19. Memento (2000)
20. North by Northwest (1959)
21. 12 Angry Men (1957)
22. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
23. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
24. Psycho (1960)
25. Amélie (2001)
26. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
27. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
28. Goodfellas (1990)
29. American Beauty (1999)
30. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
31. Vertigo (1958)
32. The Matrix (1999)
33. City of God (2002)
34. To kill a Mockingbird (1962)
35. Once upon a time in the West (1968)
36. Apocalypse Now (1979)
37. The Pianist (2002)
38. The Third Man (1949)
39. Paths of Glory (1957)
40. Taxi Driver (1976)
41. Fight Club (1999)
42. Spirited Away (2001)
43. Some like it hot (1959)
44. Double Indemnity (1944)
45. Das Boot (1981)
46. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
47. Singin' in the rain (1952)
48. Chinatown (1974)
49. L.A. Confidential (1997)
50. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
51. Requiem for a dream (2000)
52. All about Eve (1950)
53. M (1931)
54. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
55. Seven (1995)
56. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
57. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
58. Rashômon (1950)
59. Raging Bull (1980)
60. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
61. Alien (1979)
62. American History X (1998)
63. The Sting (1973)
64. Léon (1994)
65. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
66. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
67. Life is Beautiful (1997)
68. Touch of Evil (1958)
69. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
70. Finding Nemo (2003)
71. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
72. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
73. The Great Escape (1963)
74. Modern Times (1936)
75. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
76. Amadeus (1984)
77. On the Waterfront (1954)
78. Ran (1985)
79. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
80. Annie Hall (1977)
81. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
82. Jaws (1975)
83. The Apartment (1960)
84. Braveheart (1995)
85. High Noon (1952)
86. Aliens (1986)
87. Fargo (1996)
88. Strangers on a Train (1951)
89. The Shining (1980)
90. Metropolis (1927)
91. Blade Runner (1982)
92. The Sixth Sense (1999)
93. City Lights (1931)
94. Donnie Darko (2001)
95. Duck Soup (1933)
96. The Great Dictator (1940)
97. The General (1927)
98. The Seventh Seal (1957)
99. The Princess Bride (1987)
100. Dogville (2003)

So there you have it. I've seen 70% of the greatest movies (as of when this list was compiled). Surprisingly, I've only seen exactly 10% of the worst 100 films.

I keep meaning to come up with a list of ten or so of the movies I most enjoyed watching this year, but I'm still not ready with that. Perhaps tomorrow.

So today I was bouncing between so-called radio.blogs and I stumbled across a catchy track called "Perfect bore" by a band called Extra Extra. Oddly enough, the band doesn't seem to exist outside of a website and this one track that I streamed. As for Allmusic, Django's, Amazon and so forth: nobody's heard of the group. Apparently I have imagined them, or they are just really, really independent. Which is unfortunate, since their music is kinda catchy (though I know it's dangerous to judge based on a single song) and I'd like to find more.

Searching for them reminded me of my quest for more information about the britpop group Space. Talk about a common name. I have two of their albums, Spiders and Tin planet but neither is very recent and I am pretty sure they'd done something lately. As was the case with EE, the usual suspects turned up very little in the way of new music from them. However as I was traipsing around Times Square two weeks ago I bumbled into the massive (well, at least multi-story) Virgin Megastore, in which I discovered Space's Suburban rock 'n' roll in the imports bin. That's odd, I thought, I've never heard of this album, and apparently so had nobody else save for the store. Go figure.

So anybody with any better information about Extra Extra, please feel free to drop me a line. Anybody wanting to listen to them can drop by here and hear it with radio.blog's nifty little flash player, but I can't be sure how long it will stay in the playlist.

It's strange searching Google and finding no results at all for something. Moreover it is strange to 'whois' a domain and find that it is available, despite the fact that it resolves to an existing address. I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

Today I found an interesting message in my inbox, with the unassuming subject line "You've won a Microsoft X-Box, (This is not spam)." I was immediately suspicious (but also curious, since it had made it through my filters) so I opened it cautiously. The sender was unfamiliar, and I doubted that I could win a contest I never entered. Click below to see the text of the email and the rest of what I found.

Return-path: <administrator@saprizo.com> Envelope-to: --me-- Delivery-date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 23:53:09 -0800 To: --me-- From: "Saprizo" <administrator@saprizo.com> Message-ID: <2004-lzckqqge.lzckqqge-lzckqqge.ilwsvlpz.mail@saprizo.com> Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 07:52:50 +0000 (GMT) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: 129.105.16.56 X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: administrator@saprizo.com Subject: You've won a Microsoft X-Box, (This is not spam). Content-Type: text/html X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.0 (2004-09-13)rawhide.frogspace.net X-Spam-Status: No, score=4.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_60,DCC_CHECK,HTML_20_30, HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_HEADER_CTYPE_ONLY,MIME_HTML_ONLY, RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,YOU_WON autolearn=disabled version=3.0.0 X-Spam-Level: **** X-SA-Exim-Version: 4.1+cvs (built Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:55:05 -0700) Greetings, Your email address was entered into our Microsoft X-Box promotional competition at http://www.Saprizo.com This is a prize draw, you have actually won a brand new Microsoft X-Box Gaming Console! Your package also includes these top 5 games: - Halo: Combat Evolved - Grand Theft Auto Double Pack - Madden NFL 2004 - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - Tom Clancy's Rainbox Six 3 You are now invited to login to our website and claim your prize that you have won. There are only 3 winners in total this month, out of thousands of emails, so do count yourself lucky! We have provided the following web link for you, it is temporary and expires in 72 hours. If you do not login within this time, your X-Box shall unfortunately be returned to the prize pool. Here is your link! --link removed-- On this page you will need to enter this pass code number to proceed: 204197 This is very important. Do not lose that number! Put in your address, and we will send your X-Box to you. We hope that you will enjoy your new X-Box gaming console. Best Regards, From Microsoft and the Saprizo.com team!

So I tried the link, after removing as much personal information from it as possible. I ended up at saprizo.com, which whois tells me is unregistered.

Hmm, that's odd.

Please note that following these links is quite possibly very stupid. I do not encourage you to do this, though I am providing them anyway.

I ended up here, once I stripped away the frames and changed my email address: http://www.saprizo.com/cgi-bin/server.cgi?registrant=garbage@in.garbage.out&code=a&xm=1

I typed in my special code to get to this: http://www.saprizo.com/cgi-bin/server.cgi?entrycode=204197®istrant=garbage%40in.garbage.out&xm=0&enter=enter

Which still looks legitimate, I suppose. There's an address form, and then these paragraphs:

Due to several people attempting to hack our website to claim free prizes, we now require that you pay for shipping costs as verification that you are an actual winner. We apologize for this inconvenience but it is to make sure that YOU get your X-Box, not someone else!

You will only be charged for the shipping option that you select below. The X-Box itself is of no charge.

People hacking their website? Nearest I can tell it just now sprung into being. I read on and immediately was sure that this is a scam:

Shipping:
Shipping option:	USA: USPS -> $7.50 CANADA: FedEx 2-Day Air -> $12.99 INTL: FedEx International Economy - Rest of World -> $19.50
12-01-04: At this time only debit card transactions are able to be processed, due to technical reasons. We hope to have credit card processing online as soon as possible. Thank you kindly for your patience.
Card Type:	Debit Card
Card Number:
Expiry Date:	[01] Jan [02] Feb [03] Mar [04] Apr [05] May [06] Jun [07] Jul [08] Aug [09] Sep [10] Oct [11] Nov [12] Dec 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
PIN

Don't worry, I stole only their form, not the stuff behind it. They want debit cards and PINs? Oh yeah, like I would hand that information out on an insecure site that seems to be somewhere in, oh, I don't know, Korea somewhere (66.41.135.100). Sign me right up.

So I surfed back around the site, and ended up sending them an email asking if there was any possible way to pay without a debit card. I'll update this if Kento Kawaguchi or one of his colleagues ever reply, but I'm not holding my breath.

I just didn't find anything about the site when I searched Google nor does the domain reveal anything. Please feel free to add comments below or link to better information.