Got this scam email this morning from "The Departament of the Treasury."

[Ocelot II]

Scammers should at least try to avoid misspelling the name of the agency they are pretending to be.

[magicarpet]

1. It gives a nice Italian ring to it,...

... with the excessive use of extra vowels for no particular reason at all.

CIAO.

[peppertree]

6. Or Es-panish.

Departament does sound like departamento.

Which can mean either department, or apartment.

Ay - ay, ay

[multigraincracker]

2. Dear IRS, please

keep those funds.

[claudette]

3. 😊

Departament!!!!

[niyad]

4. One of my favourites was an email of some lecture proving that covid was

a hoax. One must take it seriously, because it was being held at the john hopkins university, complete wih the outline of their logo. Funny, they got so annoyed when I pointed this out.

[TheRickles]

7. John was the older brother of Gerard Manley, IIRC. :-)

[elleng]

10. How many siblings did Gerard Manley Hopkins have?

His siblings included: Cyril (1846-1932); Arthur, artist and illustrator (1847-1930); Milicent (1849-1946), who became an Anglican nun; Lionel (1854-1952), a Chinese scholar; Kate (1856-1933); Grace (1857-1945), a musician who encouraged her brother's interests; and Everard (1860-1928), an illustrator.

‘Pied Beauty‘.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim …

A celebration of ‘dappled things’, from the pattern of clouds in the sky to the ‘stipple’ on the skin of trout, ‘Pied Beauty’ is another sonnet – but a very particular kind of sonnet, the ‘curtal sonnet‘. This shortened form of the usual fourteen-line poem was invented by Hopkins and used in ‘Pied Beauty’ as well as several other poems, but this is the best of them.

NOW off to the poetry corner of my bookshelves! THANKS for the memories!

[TheRickles]

11. Thanks for the memories triggered by this poem, which I first read in HS and have loved ever since.

As your post shows, he had a very talented family. And just to be clear, "John Hopkins" was the misspelling of "Johns Hopkins" alluded to in the original post. He wasn't related to Gerard Manley, nor was Lightnin'!

[rurallib]

5. I get one from "Canadian Pharnacy" every day

among the 50+ I get daily.

I sometimes wonder which ones work - the lure of a prize? the offer of gigantic sums of money, the threat to cut off accounts that you don't even have or the other 20 variations of some threat?

[SpamWyzer]

8. A post from tRumpo on

tRumpo's site had the same misspelling of the word "indicted". It was spelled "indicated"...curious.

[soldierant]

9. I generally don't open them

If I think one is possibly there in error, I look to see who it is really from. I don't know whether every email client willl do this, but in Yahoo I can hover my mouse over the sender and it will show the real address. Most of the time it isn't even in the US, but even when it is, it's pretty obvious when it's wildly different from the "From" they choose to display.

[BWdem4life]

12. 24 hours for the IRS to respond?

Sometimes it takes 24 months