Imbecile Watch

It was a bad day for the "Next Blog»" link. If you're reading the Blogspot version of this weblog, you'll notice it, up at the top of the page. It's part of the default Blogger user interface - most Blogspot pages have them. I was curious about what other sorts of things people were using their free weblogs to write about, so I clicked it. And immediately found myself in what looked like and amateur pornographer's diary. It turned out that the alleged "blog" was basically one giant (and pretty explicit) ad for AdultFriendFinder. If you wander through Blogspot pages at random (not that I'm recommending this), you come across quite a number of them, actually. Having burned my monitor (it just couldn't be disinfected enough), I resolved to stay FAR away from the "Next Blog»" link in the future...

My question about this is a simple one: Who actually falls for that? Who, after randomly finding themselves on a page called Dogsex-Stories, Free-Scat or Rape-Porn sees an amateurish picture of some topless woman and thinks: "Hey! I can sign up for a website where I can meet this woman, and she'll have sex with me!" It's like the 419 scam e-mails that I still get every couple months or so. Is there ANYONE able to read who hasn't heard about these things yet? Granted, they don't use the Nigeria angle any more - the last one I got claimed that it was from a Hong Kong banker who was trying to move money for an millionaire Iraqi tribal chieftain who'd been killed by insurgents. (At least they keep up with the times...) I know that this sort of thing is cheap, and you really only need a very few suckers to turn a profit. But is there really ANYONE out there dim enough to fall for one of these?

(This is where I get myself into trouble. I'm going to wind up with a comment from a dear friend of mine, telling me that they were just scammed, and here I am making fun of the poor people of are taken in. I suspect that I'm going to have to respond: "You're a good friend, and I love you like a sibling - but you're a complete and total imbecile for having fallen for that, and given that you're intelligent enough to have graduated the 4th grade, you should know better.")

Maybe I shouldn't be, but I'm still amazed when anyone actually falls for anything like this...