 |
| "Africa The Land of Hope and Promise For Negro People's of the World" (detail) by Bisa Butler |
Thursday was Google calendar scams — at least three, maybe four. The first alerted me that I was scheduled to answer a subpoena. I knew this was nonsense, and knew not to click on anything, so copied the law group supposedly involved and checked. A common phishing scam, designed to get you to react and serve up information. Deleted that, along with the subsequent notice of various illusionary depositions and hearings, bearing official-sounding gibberish: "Settlement Release Update — Review and Confirmation for Final Execution."
Around 9 p.m. my attention was caught — how could it not? — by the title of one of my books. "You Were Never in Chicago." in the subject line. I got one sentence into it. "I almost didn't write this email" but by the second, "I wanted to approach you differently because authors receive enough messages from marketers who begin with praise and quickly move toward a package, payment link, or call" realized it was another AI book marketing come-on.
I wrote about such ploys last March. Still, I quickly scrolled through it. Fourteen hundred words. If AI is going to become our overlords, they're going to have to learn the value of brevity. There was nothing I'd note here, until I got to the end:
PPS – I'll leave this entirely with you. If it resonates, say the word. If not, no hard feelings. Either way, keep sharing your curious, insightful, and deeply human voice with your readers. We need more voices like yours."Promise Willie"? Promise Willie! Is that a great name or what? Can't you see him? Waking up in his cinderblock home in Abuja or Manila. Catching a bright yellow danfo minibus or a colorful tuk-tuk to the sprawling call center he works in. Maybe grabbing a quick akara and pap from a street vendor for breakfast on the way in? Firing up his 30-year-old Dell and seeing who he can rip off today?
Warmly,
Promise Willie
Book Marketing Strategist
Honestly, I considered responding "By God, yes, let's do it!" just to have further interaction with Promise Willie. He could be a character in a novel.
But alas, that would probably be as unfulfilling as whatever sham marketing he was offering. I moved on, not even bothering to delete the email.
Honestly, the junkier social media becomes — Facebook, Instagram, Gmail — the easier it is to ignore. They're doing us all a favor.
Sits right next to Preshus Jiboney. Maybe they've got a thing going on.
ReplyDeletegood info
ReplyDeletePromise Willie could have been a been a character in an Elmore Leonard novel.
ReplyDeleteJoke's on me- I saw the title of today's piece and thought it might be about Willie Wilson. His "gas give-aways" have become quite expensive!
ReplyDelete(I love the print of the birds being freed from their cages, btw)
Also by Bisa Butler.
DeleteCreated by Bisa Butler makes it even better! I studied the image for a minute - couldn't figure out if it was a tapestry or a print. Now I'm wondering if it's a print of a tapestry she made.
DeleteWallpaper, actually, using designs from fabrics she uses for her quilts, part of the Art Institute show of her work in 2021.
Delete"... thought it might be about Willie Wilson." Right there with you, Jill. Especially after Neil's buddy Eric Zorn led off his "Picayune Sentinel" 2 days ago with a chunk describing a spat between Richard Boykin and Maria Pappas, Wilson came immediately to mind. "Promise Willie" could be some kind of campaign slogan for the perennially-petrol-providing mayoral candidate!
DeleteBTW, Zorn concluded that piece by noting that "Boykin going public with the spat seems likely only to draw attention to the fact that Wilson doesn’t write his own material." Earlier he had noted that "Boykin is Wilson’s ghostwriter for all things, including for Wilson’s regular 'Chicago Tribune' columns."
https://ericzorn.substack.com/i/211051564/part-one-former-cook-county-commissioner-richard-boykin-files-a-complaint-with-the-cook-county-inspector-general-accusing-treasurer-maria-pappas-of-intimidation-and-official-misconduct-over-her-profane-texts-to-him
As for today's EGD imagery, we really enjoyed that Bisa Butler show at the Art Institute, FWIW.
It's obvious I missed out greatly by not visiting the Art Institute in 2021 to see the B. Butler exhibition. I searched her website and a couple of sales sites but never found the 'freedom from cages' (my words) design.
DeleteAs an amateur seamstress ( my claim to fame is providing cloth face masks to a large # of anxious relatives and friends in the early days of COVID, before the public was allowed to purchase N95 masks) , I confess I'm in awe of Bisa Butler's quilted pieces. I was in Paducah, KY to see a total solar eclipse in 2024, and visited their quilt museum. It is beyond wonderful. I vowed to complete the quilt I started in the early 1970s after seeing the exhibit. (I haven't finished).
But as to Willie Wilson! We can certainly influence local culture and insist on referring to him as 'Promise Willie' . I know that's how I will think of him forevermore. I sort of like him, actually. Yet at the same time, I'm so very glad Jim Oberweis has moved on to Florida.
I was going to ask for a show of hands, but Jill A. beat me to the question: How many people saw this morning's title and thought it was going to be about Willie Wilson?
ReplyDeleteMy take on this is that Promise Willie could very well be his real name. Travel the world enough and you will encounter all kinds of names, in countries where they may be more common than you think.
For some years I was receiving much the same scam emails from an endless parade of suckers whose addresses all traced back to what I assume was an Internet café in the Benin city of Cotonou. The script was always the same, where I was supposed to send a payment to cover expenses relating to the umpty-bazillion dollars coming to me, so I would skip to the bottom, where I would find the name of the mope who had rented the script and mailing list that day. If I acted quickly, before the reply address was nuked, I could sometimes get a reply out of them, though they never wanted to talk about how much money they had spent to buy in, or whether anyone on that mailing list had sent them a payment. (They did not seem to understand that everyone in the café had the same mailing list being used over and over.)
Their names sounded genuinely African (for lack of a better description; no offense intended) and not the usual bad imitation of what they thought were American names ("My name is Barrister Henry Robert"...). It's been a few years now since I last heard from the Cotonou café, so I suppose they're now exploring new opportunities in the AI world.
My apologies for the Anonymous tag in my Cotonou posting above; I just cleaned up this machine and forgot to reset my posting ID.
DeleteMy hand is up.
DeleteAuthor David Sedaris grew up in the Carolinas, and during junior high he had a crush on a Black girl in his class. He wrote a hilarious short story about her, and he changed her name to Delicia. Seeing the name Promise made me think that story. It's a hoot. Funny and sad at the same time. When he ran into her years later, she barely remembered him.
ReplyDelete