I got this email from a scammer, in response to a classified ad for a car. You can see that his questions are more sophisticated than the others:However, the signs of scamming is there, such as "the item", and signing "Donald" while his name in the email is "greg mcdonald".

From: greg mcdonald <gregmcautos@yahoo.com>Subject: [title of car ad from craigslist]HELLO, MAY I KNOW IF THE ITEM YOU ADVERTISED ON THE NETIS STILL AVAILABLE FOR SALE, MY CUSTOMER IS INTERESTED INBUYING IT , HE IS PRICING IT $950 ,LET ME KNOW IF ITS STILL FORSALE, WITH THE BOTTOM PRICE .ASAP.WHEN WAS IT DRIVEN LAST?ARE YOU FIRST OWNER?Donald 

The NetworkWorld community web site has converted from Movable Type to Drupal.Their feedback page uses the feedback module, and their sitemap page uses the sitemenu module, both of which I have written. Thanks to Bert Boerland for posting about this, and yes, there is no excuse for a large site disabling clean URLs.

Timothy Olufemi Akanni was a Nigerian electoral official, being the director of Finance and Supplies from 1996 to 2005. He was also a Pentecostal church pastor. He died in a plane crash in 22 October 2006. He was eulogised as a selfless and patriotic Nigerian.

What was to be revealed later was that Akanni had another secret wife, and has amassed $55 million dollars illegally.

The matter was discovered when his two widows started squabbling about the spoils.

A corrupt official, or hypocrite pastor is nothing new.

What is amazing is that this looks like a plot from a typical email fraud from Nigeria. Imagine reading this:

I recently listed a car for sale on craigslist and other local classified ad services.This is one reply I got, which is clearly an attempt at scamming:

From: Dave Smith <goldenwum12@yahoo.com>Subject: [The title of the classified ad for the car]Hello,I just viewed your car posting on craigslist and i have interest on it i will like to know the present condition and two more pictures of the car before i proceed with the transaction.Thanks

Problem is, the scammer is not very smart. I did not posted pictures to begin with, so there are no more pictures.

Job ads are sometimes made in a humorous tone to attract "cool" candidates.Here are two recent examples from Advomatic, a Drupal shop.

• Drupal Ninjas needed to work in Drupal Dojo.
• Drupal Samurai needed for killing evil bugs.

What happens if the samurais and ninjas are at each other's throats with swords and stuff continuing their everlasting feud?Cool wording ... 

Suhaila is on the Honour Roll, for acheiving above 80% consistently for four consecutive semesters.Well done again Suhaila, and keep it up.

Here is a quick overview of notable encounters between humans and wildlife in Canada for 2006.

Bear

In July, A man canoeing in Northern Ontario killed a bear with a knife when it attacked his dog.

Bison

In August, a North West Territories community is suffering from bully bison.

Cougar

Later in August, a boy was attacked by a cougar on Vancouver Island. The boy's father kicked the cougar and saved his son, who suffered only a deep wound in the scalp.

Homaidan al-Turki, 37, is a Saudi student in Denver Colorado. He recently was on trial in Denver Colorado for keeping an Indonesian servant at home paid below minimum wage, as well as sexually assaulting her. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison, but later the charges were dropped.

Basic Muslim behaviors?

The press is reporting the news in a way that implies that al-Turki describes these acts as "traditional Islamic behaviors". This has been picked up by blogs as such, and used as an attack on Muslims and Islam.

For example, one blog says:

From the meaningless numbers are fun to talk about department ...merlinofchaos (Earl Miles) committed the 40,000 change to the Drupal CVS repository. Note that these are not all the commits to Drupal, since commit #1 by Dries is only dated Aug 20, 2004. So, this number is when a new issue tracking/commit cross referencing system was in effect.

Mohamed Taha Mohamed Ahmed, the editor in chief of the Sudanese Al-Wifaq newspaper was sadly kidnapped and beheaded.

Last year, Taha was charged with insulting religion. Despite calls for his execution and extensive demonstrations, the charges were dropped.

The charges stemmed from an article that was reprinted by Taha that questioned the ancestry of Prophet Muhammad.

Many news media stated that Taha merely reprinted material from books by the famed 14th century Egyptian historian and prolific author, al-Maqrizi المقريزي. For example, the BBC, BBC Arabic, ABC Australia, and Asharq al-Awsat (in Arabic, with one user comment correcting the Maqrizi). It was also picked up at face value by academics, such as Howard Friedman who says: