Scamming the Scammer - Part 3

Read part 1 here.

Read part 2 here.

The back and forth continues…

Thank you for the reply, please i will like you to recalculate of my
order alone and get back to me with the total cost of my order and
don’t worry about the shipping cost because i have my personal
shipping agent in LOUISIANA, USA that will come for the pick up of the
package in your company and i have inform them about this and they
told me the best way to come for the pick up in your store is for you
to email me with the informations needed below,

* Your Company Name and Address ?
* Time the package will be ready for pick up with your convenience
time and date?
* Contact Person for the pickup arrangement ?
* Telephone Number ?
* Weight of the package and how many boxes are they ?

So, please kindly get back to me with this details along with the
total of my order so that i can give you my card details for the
payment now.

Hope to read from you ASAP.

And my response…

Richard -

As I said, I would be so happy to provide you with this information. But first we need your photo so we can add you to our lovely POOPY customers bulletin board! We want to shower your photo with smooch kisses at noon in our customer appreciation ceremony. All praise to the great Hoomba Loomba! Haba-kaboola! Boola-katooby! Hahm-hahm pashtaboola!

Please send your photo, Richard, and I will reply swiftly with every piece of information that you need. We look forward to showering you with baggies of our POOPY and hope that your day is filled with blessings and smooch kisses.

Steve

Scamming the Scammer - Part 2!

Read part 1 of the story here.

Our friendly spammer has replied! Here’s the latest volley of emails.

Thank you for your reply,Here is what i will like to order,

baggie full of POOPY……………………………Qty50pieces

I will like you to get back to me with the total cost and the shipping
cost and here is address for you to the shipping cost via ups or
fedex.and please kindly get back to me if this items is in stock
because i do not want any delay on this.Do this on time so that i can
be able to give you my credit card information and complete my order
for me
Best Regards.
Richard

RICHARD SUPPLIER & CO.
67A Fletcher Street,
Rockingham
WA 6168
Australia.
TEL:+61 849 709382
FAX: +61 253 639802
Email:richard.store01@gmail.com

And my response…

Richard -

We can send you 50 baggies full of POOPY, and are happy to accept your credit card payment. Since you are buying in bulk, I can quote you a discount price of $25 per baggie of POOPY. Your total cost without packaging or shipping will be $1,250.

One other thing. We pride ourselves on being a family business. All of our POOPY customers are family members to us. Each year we throw a big picnic for all of our old and new clients at a forest preserve near our POOPY factory. We’d love for you to attend!

We also have what we call our “Loving Family” board posted here at our office with photos of all of our POOPY customers. Before we can do business with you, we’d like to add your picture to our board. At around noon, we have all of our POOPY employees rush the board and shower the photos with smooches and kisses. We’d love to kiss smooch your photo during our noon ritual!

Please respond with your photo, Richard, in print-resolution. We can then tell our haughty Poop Soldiers to start filling those baggies with crunchy, munchy, chubtastic POOPY!

Sincerely,
Peter Poopy

Playing catch-up…

Don’t Spit the Water was great this weekend… 2 fun shows, 2 big audiences, lots of spitting, lots of laughing, blah blah blah blah etc. etc. It was nice to be a part of the Just For Laughs festival, and hopefully that will pay out dividends somewhere down the line. It was nicer, though, to perform this show again with my friends in front of nice, receptive crowds.

So what next? We’re doing a 4th run of Impress These Apes this September at the ComedySportz theater. We’ve got a really interesting pitch in right now for one of our other projects, and I’m trying to be patient about waiting for a response. For 2010? I’m not really sure. With the premature death of Judge Doody this year, Blewt! has been playing things pretty quietly. The feeling I get is that 2010 will either be super exciting and busy, or it will be a year to sort of focus on more low key personal projects, do some writing, finish unfinished things, do work around the house.

But hey, 2009 is only about half-way done. My projects tend to start and stop on a dime. Four weeks from now I’m sure I’ll be embroiled in something that I haven’t even dreamed up yet.

Scamming the Scammers!

I just received this email:

Hello
I am interested in purchasing some of your products, I will like to know if you can ship directly to Australia , I also want you to know my mode of payment for this order is via Credit Card. Get back to me if you can ship to that destination and also if you accept the payment type I indicated.

Kindly return this email with your price list of your products..
I await your quick response.
Kind Regards.
Richard

I sent him this reply:

Sure, Richard!

We only sell one product: POOPY! You can purchase a baggie full of POOPY for $30. We’d be happy to accept your credit card and ship our POOPY to Australia.

All of my love,
Peter Poopy

I really hope this escalates to the point where I’m shipping out bags of poopy. That way my mama will be so proud.

Can The A-Team sell Don’t Spit the Water tickets?

We ran a modified version of the Don’t Spit the Water commercial all day yesterday on Me-Too during their A-Team marathon… about once an hour for the duration of the marathon. We did this more as a novelty thing than a ticket sales thing, and that’s about all it generated. Traffic to the site bumped a bit, but no tickets were sold yesterday. I suppose A-Team nuts aren’t our target demographic. Ticket sales for our two Just For Laughs performances have not been terrible, but I’m hoping we can play both of these shows for a full house. The shows are this Saturday at 8pm and 10:30pm. We have a lot of old comics coming back… Jared Logan, TJ Miller, Nick Vatterott… plus folks who’ve been with the show since day 1 like Erica Reid and Scot Goodhart. So let’s screw around at The Playground Theater one last time, eh?

Last night I gave a reading as part of Funny Ha-Ha, a comedy reading series put on by Claire Zulkey. It was a very intimidating experience, I think I was the only one reading anything who wasn’t published in some form or another… and as I spoke I veered sharply from what I had written and turned into more of a conversation. I had a great time, got a nice response, and pushed through some pretty serious nervousness to get up and do this. For that, I’m happy. I also stood out in the pouring rain to wait for my train home, and walked through the door soaked to the bone… a typical end to one of my nights. I’ll post the text of what I read sometime soon.

I’ve been away from Izzie a lot in the last week! I spent Saturday out at Cook Brothers helping people set up their televisions for the digital TV transition. Monday night I stayed in the city late for Talkin’ Funny, and last night I was in the city late for Funny Ha-Ha. It will be nice to come home and get some serious playtime in. I’m thinking some dollies, some Fisher Price camper, and maybe some Backyardigans playset if we have time before her bath.

I’ve built a TinyURL killer! Meet http://FartURL.com!

I don’t quite remember the thought process, but at some point yesterday I dreamed up a service identical to TinyURL.com, with one little bonus feature. FartURL.com will shorten your long URLs for posting on Twitter or Facebook, but also gives you a little interstitial toot.

I stayed up pretty late on Wednesday to complete this project. I have so many half-finished projects in the hopper right now, when I had this idea I was determined to see it through. It took about 4 hours to complete, went through several concept changes, but eventually settled on the site you see now.

http://farturl.com

For those of you who aren’t familiar with TinyURL.com, it’s one of several URL shortening services. Nowadays when many web posts take place in character-limited areas like Twitter posts and Facebook status updates, and as URLs grow into character-eating monsters with all of these new-fangled web content management systems, people need ways to shrink URLs into bite-sized links so they can share them across their social networks.

And so FartURL.com enters the fray. Please use it exclusively to shorten your URLs. Together, we can make this thing super viral and turn it into gold! Gold, I say! I’m sure I’ll get a phone call sometime tonight from Google with a buyout offer.

Are you ready for the DTV transition? This weekend all high-powered television stations will be cutting their analog signals, leaving a lot of people without any television. If you’re watching TV on a set with an antenna, be sure to pick up your digital converter box! Visit http://www.wciu.com/dtv.php for more information.

I’ve had two bowls of Lucky Charms this morning!

A review of Pepsi Throwback

Tonight I picked up a 20 oz. bottle of Pepsi Throwback from the Jewel up the street.  I knew it was going to be a late night of laundry and Talkin’ Funny prep, so I figured the sugar would do me good.  Also, I find it to be my responsibility to taste all new sugar configurations and report on them to all of you.

Headline: This throwback is a throwaway!  It tasted like Pepsi tastes, only a bit more mellow and less sweet.  Now I’m a Coke guy, normally.  I only drink Pepsi when there’s no Coke to be found.  I’m also a can guy, and can’t stand drinking from plastic bottles.  Plastic bottles of soda are a fat person’s beverage.  Cans of Coke are the drink of the skinny.  Plastic bottles of soda are for the calories, cans of Coke are for the energy.  Or something.  Yet for some reason Pepsi’s advertising drew me to this drink… I knew I had to give it one chance.

Bleh!  It’s like Pepsi thought it was standing too close to Coke, so it took another large leap in the other direction.  The sugar did get me through the night.  In fact, not only did I finish my Talkin’ Funny games and fold all of my laundry, but I also spent a few minutes tapping out this blog entry.  Pepsi Throwback did its job.  But it tastes like artificially sweetened chalk juice.

Hey, I’m going to be on TV.  On June 20th, I’ll be one of the 10 people that walks through Svengoolie’s door to congratulate him for 30 years of being Svengoolie. It’s a very quick walk-on role, but I’m thinking of submitting it to the Chicago Emmys.  I’d advise you to stay home and watch it, but that would mean you couldn’t attend Don’t Spit the Water that night, and I’d much rather you do that.

Here’s a picture from Izzie’s 2nd birthday party.  Look at our little family!

A change of scenery…

In a lame attempt to start writing again, I did everything but write this evening.  But now I have a pretty new site in which I may or may not write.  So there.

If nothing else, this should get my sister’s attention, as my stagnant blog remains the home page on her browser.  Hello, Amy.  I hope you enjoy the new scenery.

Let’s see… Izzie is now two years old.  Photos from her birthday party in April are being uploaded to her Flickr page as we speak.  Don’t Spit the Water is returning to The Playground Theater for a night as part of the TBS Just For Laughs Festival.  Judge Doody never happened, but the concept will be revived sometime in 2010.  Impress These Apes will be at the ComedySportz Theater this September, and we’re accepting audition submissions right now.  Talkin’ Funny has had a string of pretty funny episodes.  We have 4 more episodes before season 6 comes to a close.

It was just over a year ago now that we took Don’t Spit the Water to LA to perform on the Comedy Central Stage and pitch the show for TV.  Still nothing exciting to report, though I will say that the process slowly crawls along.  We have a couple of interesting prospects that we’re working on, and I’m optimistic that something will come of it all by the end of this year.

I’ve been doing a lot of tweeting.  Twittering.  Twerting.  Twoting?  I’ve also been working on this live Puppy Cam.

Tonight was fantastic.  I grilled and watched a baseball game.  And now I’m about to sleep, sleep, sleep.

Good night, hello!

One last thing…

Welp…

Looks like the old blog well done dried up.  I’ll be revamping this site a bit in the coming months, but for now, here are a couple of things I wanted to share…

Don’t Spit the Water returns to The Playground for two shows in one night as part of the TBS Just For Laughs festival!  Tickets are available now… Saturday, June 20th, at 8pm and 10:30pm.  Please buy some tickets and come see the show!!!  This is probably your last chance to see DSTW as a stage show in Chicago.  And we mean it this time!

I’ll be reading a piece as part of the Funny Ha Ha show at the Hideout on June 16th  It’d be great to have a few friendly faces in the audience.  The piece I’m reading will detail the failed launch of Shmoxy.com, the site for videos of people scaring other people by shouting, “shmoxy” at them.

Check back for an all new site some day.  Tra la la.