Monday, August 29, 2005

Beware the bogus booksellers...

Today my mum received a letter of about 6 pages from a society calling themselves the Nuova Tech Society. It was sent via first class mail and was full enough of weird shit to make me get online and check them out.

Nuova Tech is part of Neo-Tech Publishing and is suspiciously closely related to Novus Tek, NeoTech, NuovoTech and other similar sounding 'societies'. Basically it's a way to sell incredibly overpriced books which are full of crap. It looks to be a kind of quasi-religious society, that craps on about today's economical, moral and political 'anticivilization' or something.

In the 6 page letter, my mum was told that she had 'several rare traits' when analyse by people from an 'exclusive association, a secret society' and she could become part of the society to learn all its secrets and lead a fairytale life, basically. All she has to do is to send the form back for some 'free' information, but it must be done by a certain date, otherwise she would be too far into 'phase two'.

Let me say, what utter twaddle. Having gone online like any sensible person, I have found the following:

If you are silly enough to send away for the free information, you get a very slim booklet, which basically has the same content as the letter, but in cheap pamphlet form. You also get an order form for the book of supposed 'secrets', which will cost $138. Yes that's right, not so free after all. You are then apparently sent more letters advertising further books which all cost a bomb if you decide to go ahead.

The website for all this (but which obviously doesn't tell you what I just told you) is www.nuovatech.com and the lady in charge goes by the trade name of Barbie Diamond, and it's based in Las Vegas, so if alarm bells aren't going off already, THEY SHOULD BE!!!!

So yeah. That's all there in case you do actually receive a letter. Apparently my mum's one of only seven in the world to receive such a letter, but I somehow doubt it. I'm sure there are more than seven gullible people in America's deep South alone, never mind Australia.

-R

Sunday, August 28, 2005

I'm still alive...

Sorry for not updating for so long. No, I did not commit suicide after coming back because of my post-holiday depression, so apologies for getting your hopes up. I've just been kind of busy with getting back into the swing of real life and trying to catch up a week and a bit of uni. Last week things have been a lot more settled, but now our internet's stuffed, so I'm doing this on my dad's laptop on dial-up. Dial-up I tell you! We have cable upstairs and a 17" screen, and I'm sitting down here at a 15" laptop surfing at the phenomenal speed of 49.2 Kbps. Sheesh.

That's also why I haven't put up any more photos, although god knows I've got them here. Even I got bored trying to trawl through all 2000 or so of them! So as soon as we get back online on the proper computer I'll give it a shot.

G has just bought a sexy new mac laptop and has the software to edit our video now, so in the next few months (hey, we have uni here, give us a break) we might be able to put up some mpegs somewhere. in the meantime next weekend is her 21st, which means we really should have gone a couple of months (or years) later. Oh well, there's always next time isn't there?

In the meantime, the new Franz Ferdinand video is already out, and to our absolute joy, G and I can see ourselves in it! I don't know where G is, but in the massed dancing at the end I'm in the upper left corner, in a black bob with a blunt fringe and a black sleeveless top.

So anyway, nothing else in my life has happened since I got back that is worth mentioning, except on the 30th my boyfriend and I will have been going out for two years. And I am now constantly appalled at the price of things around here. I can't afford any makeup from now on. And apparently our trip to Tasmania in january has been cancelled because my sister made the swimming Age championships. bummer.

-R