No one can help Sgt. Jimenez.

What the fish? I thought I'd posted this ages ago. Anyhou, here it is.

As it turns out, Staff Sgt. Jiminez Alex Ramon is a real person. Of the delta company, 4th battalion, 31st regiment, 2nd brigade combat team, 10th mountain division of light infantry. Hailing from Lawrence, Massachusetts, he was really in Iraq.

And then he went missing on May 12, 2007, during an ambush on the 4th Battalion somewhere in South Baghdad. His body was found earlier this year (a few months ago, the news reports seem to have conflicting dates, so I cannot say for certain when,) and returned home.

So I wonder why the good fellow who sent me that e-mail used this particular name. Maybe he started using it while the soldier was still missing, maybe? To attract even greater curiosity? Or was there an implicit assumption that it would be unlikely in the extreme for me to know anything about the real seargent? I'm very much aware that I might be over-thinking it, but I've never stopped for that reason alone.

Anyhou.

The tracking software on my blog told me something rather interesting last week. Someone from the town of Wetter, Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany visited my page by searching for "spcjiminez@live.com". Which, as of right now throws up only one result. I'm assuming that if it were someone who had also got the same mail as me, he or she would've left a comment there.

So. Sgt. Jiminez's shade seems to be resting in some nondescript li'l town on the Franco-German border. And in retrospect, has picked up a German influence in the written English grammar that he uses. In German one capitalizes all nouns, irrespective of position in the sentence, something that can potentially explain the ease with which he's capitalized things here and there in the mail.

Lemme know if you have analyses more interesting than my own.

Can you help Sgt. Jimenez?

Here I thought that all the Nigerian princes who wanted to get out of the country with millions of dollars had all managed to do that.

Apparently, some of them had the misfortune of coming to the US, becoming Hispanic, and then getting enlisted in the US army.

One of them was clever enough to get a hold of my e-mail address and contact me.

Dear Friend,

Good day and compliments, i know this letter will definitely come to you as a huge surprise, but I implore you to take the time to go through it carefully as the decision you make will go off a long way to determine my future and continued existence. Please allow me to introduce myself I am Sgt. Jimenez Alex Ramon, a US Marine SPC. Serving in the 3rd Battalion, 25th US Marine Regiment which Patrols the Anbar province, Iraq .

I am desperately in need of assistance and I have summoned up courage to contact you.I am presently in Iraq and I found your contact particulars in an address journal, I am seeking your assistance to evacuate the sum of $12,570,000 (Twelve million Five Hundred and Seventy Thousand US dollars) to the States or any safe country of your choice, as far as I can be assured that it will be safe in your care until I complete my service here. This is no stolen money and there are no dangers involved.

SOURCE OF MONEY:
Some money in various currencies was discovered and concealed in barrels with piles of weapons and ammunition at a location near one of Saddam Hussein’s old Presidential Palaces during a rescue operation and it was agreed by all party present that the money be shared amongst us.

This might appear as an illegal thing to do but I tell you what, No compensation can make up for the risks we have taken with our lives in this hell hole. The above figure was given to me as my share and to conceal this kind of money became a problem for me, so with the help of a German contact working with the UN here (his office enjoys some immunity) I was able to get the package out to a safe location entirely out of trouble spot.

He does not know the real contents of the package as he believes that it belongs to an American who died in an air raid, and before giving up trusted me to hand over the package to his close relative.

I have now found a secured way of getting the package out of Iraq for you to pick up. I do not know for how long I will remain here as I have been lucky to have survived 2 suicide bomb attacks by Pure Divine intervention.

This and other reasons put into consideration have prompted me to reach out for help. If it might be of interest to you then endeavour to contact me and we would work out the necessary formalities but i pray that you are discreet about this mutually benefiting relationship.

Contact me via my private box: (spcjimenez@live.com) so that I can furnish you with more details.




Respectfully,

Sgt. Jimenez Alex Ramon
United States Marine Corps. IRAQ

-----------------------------------------------------------------
本邮件通过35企业邮箱发送

:D

I love the words "Pure Divine intervention". Which could even double for some Jehadi group when translated to Arabic. =) And heh, the random chinese characters at the bottom of the e-mail.

The sender's address is funny as well.
FROM: Sgt.Jiminez@usmc.army.mil spcjiminez@live.com
The account name is the fake e-mail ID. So devilishly simple. And I would've never seen it unless I had asked gmail to "show details".

So, will you help the poor man?

Overused word of the year.

You may not remember this post. Even so. There is a newcomer this year, taking the reins from the likes of pretentious and hypocrisy. Curiously enough, new word serves a function similar to that of pretentious. Both designed to vilify someone with an opinion (or even when that person is stating facts or making rational arguments,) however authoritative, in fact better suited for when the speaker has more authority. Both designed to make us think less of the argument in the process.

And the overused word of the year is...

*drumroll*

Elitist!

A good example of the use of the word comes from here. Sure, Sharon Stone was an idiot for making those remarks, and yes, we ought to put her down for that. But how do we go from her asinine remarks on Chinese bad karma being responsible for the recent earthquakes there to her being elitist?

She is just another useless Hollywood elitist opening her mouth rather than her heart, and that is far too often the case,' wrote a reader called Kevin, on the chinadaily.com.cn forum.

Okay okay, so this is a rediff article. And they insert junk that people post on public forums into their news articles. Maybe then, my basis for claiming that this word is so readily used is not all that sound after all?

How about the Republican congressman John Duncan from Tennessee then, who commented on a study which proved that abstinence-only sex education programmes did not work:

it seems rather elitist that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate

So if you have specialized knowledge in a certain field and choose to tell something to those who don't, you're elitist. Gotcha.

And yet in the same vein they call Sharon Stone elitist. For talking about karma. Did she become a Buddhist monk sometime after making Basic Instinct 2?

It would only be superfluous to chronicle in detail the number of times Obama has been showered with this particular epithet.

Sidebar.
On an entirely unrelated note, has anyone noticed that in almost all instances of the common usage of the word 'usage', there is no alteration in the meaning when it is simply replaced by 'use'?

Meta-blogging.

It's all the craze these days. Meta-blogging and meta-fiction and all other things meta. For the few who may not have heard of it, it is a kind of writing or activity that self-consciously addresses the act itself. Sounds deep, huh? Overused as it is, deep is no longer a word that can be used to describe it.

This once, I'm not going to let it bother me. The path I tread on may oft used, but the journey I make is my own. Or so I want to believe. The way I see it, (and the way many before me have seen it,) people write either because they like to write, or they want their works to be read. More often than not, it's a mixture of both. People may also like the very act of writing, or maybe they like to see their own ideas written down, crystallized in an imperishable form.

(Hmm. Writing about meta-writing would be the third level then. Already I feel cooler.)

Reality is probably absolute, but ever so often, what is forgotten is lost. As if it had never taken place. When we go after things as ephemeral as thoughts, it becomes increasingly harder to define what 'real' is. So, maybe we write so that we remember, so that our future selves do not forget so easily. For one thing, such exercises just might help us stop ourselves from running around in circles, swimming in that same fishbowl, year after year. For another, it might act as a frame of reference, as the Constant. So little seems grounded in our present, so little seems absolute and imperishable that often we have no choice but to look to the past for something more definitive. What is better, I say, than to have your past thoughts etched in virtual memory? What is better than having your future selves come back and exclaim, "Yes! This is how I felt once. These truly were my thoughts."

It is scary, how we live so vicariously through our past. That somehow, things which happened years ago seem more real and more important than that which is happening right now. That somehow, I am more comfortable lamenting Gone are the halcyon days of my youth, when the halcyon days of my life as a young adult might just be passing me by. That somehow, a memory is less sweet if it isn't properly remembered.

It's like taking pictures on a trip. We get so busy trying to capture the world in all its glory that some times we forget to actually enjoy it. We get so busy trying to smile at cameras that we forget to laugh and have a truly good time. Yet somehow, I cannot help but feel a sense of loss when I am unable to properly remember (and somehow quantify) how much fun I had at some point in the past. And then be disgusted with myself for feeling so.

I don't know if you noticed, but I stopped taking refuge in collective pronouns at some point.

It is an injustice though, to think of blogging merely as writing. (I mean no slight on writing by using the word 'merely'.) Blogging is considered by many as an expression, an artform, as social dialogue, blogs acting as windows into people's souls.

Tsk tsk. Never judge anyone by their blog. Blogs aren't spontaneous thoughts, they are well rehearsed and often revised. People are often frank and forthright in their opinions not just because it is right, but because then they can get away with not being frank or completely honest when it suits them. Blogs showcase a very select subset of the author's attributes. That in itself would be fine, no one thing can tell you everything about someone, but here... it is the author who does the selection. Blog readers are informed very much on a need-to-know basis.

Of course, you could choose to build your own picture about the person behind the writing by using only those things which were let slip without notice. Perhaps the picture you form is a little truer. The clever author, though, would allows things to slip out. As if by accident. If you have a blog, you know that much of what I say is true. You've done the same things at some point or the other. I know I have.

I could now go on to sermonize about how deception is integral to human behaviour and reduce you to someone as cynical and disbelieving as myself. As a favour to humanity at large (or the insignificant fraction of it which reads my not-so-humble words,) I will not. It isn't the altruist in me who makes me do this, but simply that I don't believe that it is deception which is the underlying motive. It's closer to role-playing, what most people do with their blogs. People project self-images that aren't just meant to be seen by the public, but by themselves as well. They are most cruel, the differences between someone's self-image and that which is seen by the public, and perhaps this is but an honest attempt to bridge the gap between the two. Lies that reveal the truth and all that. Only, when the veil slips, when the mask shatters, all anyone can think of is deception.

Why do I write? No one reason can ever be enough for anyone to keep writing. Sometimes you want to be read, sometimes you like to write, and sometimes writing takes on a cathartic mantle, making you feel just that little better, just that little cleaner after purging (and not forgetting) those thoughts from your system. And sometimes, you pretend to be doing your future self a favour.

If I am permitted to take off on a tangent, I'll say that all this kind of ties in with my views on allegory in fiction. To me, fiction is the great escape from reality, from problems current and woes real. For any piece of fiction to be a true escape, it should be able to compete with reality, for which it needs to feel, well, real. Now in allegory, by definition, references are made to things and ideas which are outside of the reality that the writing is trying to establish. This act in itself, makes the fiction seem less real. Ergo, an escape that's not-so-great.

True fiction, in my opinion, is that which you enjoy for what it is, that which engulfs you so completely, that you never ask what is going on in the author's mind and how thoughts are being formulated. You don't ask what plot element the author is going to introduce next, but ask instead how the characters are going to react.

True fiction is not just when the characters don't break the fourth wall, but when you forget that a fourth wall even exists, separating them from you.

People

Hypocrisy is probably the most butchered word in the English language.
Pretentious the adjective most readily bandied,
and per se the most misused.

Hippocracy, hypocracy, hippocrisy, hipocrasy. And it has nothing to do with Hippocrates or the practice of medicine! A "hippocrate" is probably a follower of Hippocrates, no more.

People.