Joho the Blog
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April 16, 2003
This arrived today: Hello Sir, i got your email address from your website. I am translating an English short story into Chinese, and have to ask a English native two questions in understanding the story. Can you do me a favor? It is about a woman relied on her sense of humor to get her through mastectomy. The context is that the heroine has large breasts and later had one removed. I have two questions: 1. ?Two years after the first mastectomy, I took the preventative measure of having my other breast, followed by breast reconstruction surgery.? —- Does this mean that she has her other breast removed? I think yes. 2. The context is after having only one breast, she bought a prosthesis and she describes how funny her mastectomy bra looks. ? To achieve the most realistic effect, the prosthesis is tucked into a special mastectomy bra. Huge, with wide, ugly straps, meters of hooks and eyes and pockets to stop one?s prosthesis causing a faux pas at parties by falling on the floor, they are hardly built to flatter the ego-or the body. ? Although the bra and its cargo looked ugly without my clothes, once I put on my jumper I looked fantastic. And it certainly beat the pants off the aprons with big breasts that Rob and I had laughed about buying instead. ? —— I can not understand the last sentence? I don?t know what kind of thing she is talking about. Thank you very much for your help and I look forward to your reply. Adele What's the scam? Or am I just too jaded by the 550 spams I'm now getting every day? Posted
by D. Weinberger at April 16, 2003 03:06 PM
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Comments
Being the skeptic that I am (even though I don't get scams similar to this. I just get junk mail offering to enlarge my penis - and I'm a girl!), I looked on snopes.com, and didn't find this listed as an urban legend.
This is quite intriguing. Keep me updated!
Posted by: Hex | April 16, 2003 04:46 PM
You've got to stop taking those drugs David .......
Posted by: Euan | April 16, 2003 05:07 PM
I write computer books (that is books about computer products, not books for computers), and I have occasionally received odd emails from translators at presses that have purchased the foreign rights about idioms and so forth.
But I can't understand why the Chinese translator couldn't ask the original author -- and is writing a random person. Embarassment?
The sentence don't sound salacious, but it's weird they're turning to you, unless you're a secret expert on large breast prosthesis, which I have in fact always suspected you of being.
Posted by: Glenn Fleishman | April 16, 2003 05:49 PM
You have a couple possible options here, depending on whether this was sent to you by someone you know or not.
If so, then evidently they heard a funny story and felt like passing it along. Though you could ask them if they personally know the poor woman.
Equally, you are in the first of a couple messages that will end up with a cyber pan-handling pitch. Got one just the other day talking about someone's hard life, and giving information for making donations. Pity that the story was about the bad luck in Africa, and the donation information seemed to be in Switzerland...
Posted by: Ewan Grantham | April 16, 2003 10:03 PM
Whatever you do - DON'T RESPOND!
A friend of this guy I know got one of these messages about a year ago. He replied and they tracked his IP to his home address. (This is something hackers can do on the Internet. The New York Times had a story about this in the May 14th, 2002 edition.)
A few days after he replied, this guy started to receive packages in the mail. In each package was a large false breast or breasts - sometimes one, sometimes a full pair - all of them DD or greater.
Then the women started showing up.
Chinese women.
Flat-chested chinese women.
With really bad English.
Sometimes as many as four a week would turn up at his house - refusing to leave until they'd been fitted with an appropriate prosthetic.
All most of them knew how to say was: "you boob me?"
It was terrifying. There's nothing the police can do to help. Turns out New Jersey has no law agains soliciting falsies between the hours of eight and midnight.
Of course, his attempts to track down the source of the mammaries have proven fruitless. He's doomed to supply bosoms to Chinese immigrants for the rest of time...
Posted by: Michael O'Connor Clarke | April 17, 2003 12:07 AM
LOL, Michael.
Posted by: dweinberger | April 17, 2003 12:13 AM
This may be the first time that two Euan's (albeit with different spellings) appear in the same comments thread on a blog!
Posted by: Euan | April 17, 2003 04:50 AM
You want to try running a biomedical site. Then you'll know the true meaning of wierd email. My favorite was a poor guy who wanted me to advise him on how best to sell his testicles. He was offering a commission, too.
Posted by: Mark Brownlow | April 17, 2003 07:22 AM
If my memory serves me well, I was going to confiscate your lace. No, wait--that's a Bob Dylan song. Anyway, if my memory serves me well, someone has written a bot that goes from weblog to weblog, writing messages that are subtly absurd. (I've used a Perl module called Text::Travesty which takes a sample of someone's writing and creates a similarly styled but incoherent passage.)
However, they haven't yet written a bot to put Bob Dylan quotes into weblogs.
As far as you know.
I mean, "we" know.
Posted by: adamsj | April 17, 2003 08:17 PM