Lady and the Loonies

June 28, 2012

It has reached my ears that there exists a person called Lady Gaga. I don’t know whether she is a member of the British aristocracy, or “Lady” is her name, like that dog in the movie, but I’m told that she makes her living by donning surprising costumes and singing and dancing. She is coming to sing and dance in Cape Town soon, and I say good luck to her. I shan’t be attending her performance because that sort of thing isn’t what floats my boat; but I’m quite sure that there are plenty of people who will enjoy what she has to offer in the way of entertainment.

Her imminent arrival has also flushed the usual crew of crackpots and lunatics out of their malodorous lairs. They have set up a facebook page called “Christians against Lady Gaga & Beyonce’s SA tours!!” They claim—amongst other things—that Lady Gaga is a satanist and may even be the bride of satan. Here’s a sample of the comments left on the site:–
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6 Comments | Libertarian, Morality, religion | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Widdicombe

A Mountainous Scam

November 11, 2011

Hey, I’ve got this wonderful idea to make a lot of money. It goes like this: I’m going to get people to vote by premium SMS for, oh, anything really. What about for the “prettiest city”, or “most fashionable football strip”? No, let’s make it “the new 7 wonders of the world”. Almost everyone thinks their country contains something pretty wonderful, so lots of people will vote. And we can let them vote as many times as they like, so we get more money. Oh, alright then, we’ll set up a website and let them vote there, too, but we’ll still make money on clickthroughs.

Table Mountain


We could also sell broadcast rights to the final awards ceremony where we’ll hand over the cheesy certificates to the winners, and we can charge the winners to use our logo on their advertising materials. And when the whole thing is over, we start again with a new competition. We could even register ourselves as a non-profit organization to make everything look above board; we don’t make a profit, we just pay ourselves mountainous salaries and investment bankeresque bonuses at the end of the day.
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4 Comments | Scams | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Mark Widdicombe