So have you heard about the new Nigerian e-mail phishing scam? (And how about those resourceful Nigerians? They could make a fortune in the U.S. with an MBA and a small business loan if they ever decided to go legit.) The latest variation dispenses with the ol’ desperate-widow-of-a-fabulously-wealthy-deposed-Nigerian-dictator-ploy and goes straight for the jugular: your e-mail address book. Take a look at the following letter – which hijacked rubes send to all their soon-to-be-former friends – and tell me I couldn’t make a bundle as an editorial consultant to these guys.

Subject: EMERGENCY!!!

HELLO
HOW ARE YOU DOING? I WANT YOU TO KEEP THIS CONFIDENTIAL BETWEEN BOTH OF US, I KNOW THAT I CAN PUT MY TRUST IN YOU ON THIS. PLEASE DO NOT LET ME DOWN. RIGHT NOW I AM IN AFRICA, NIGERIA. I CAME HERE ON A TRIP TO SEE A FRIEND AND WHEN I GOT HERE I LOST MY WALLET CONTAINING THE ADRESS OF MY FRIEND AND HIS CONTACT PHONE NUMBER, ALONG WITH MY ATM CARD AND OTHER VALUABLES.
SO RIGHT NOW I DO NOT EVEN HAVE ANY MONEY ON ME . I AM STAYING IN A HOTEL NOW , AND THE MANAGER IS ALREADY RANTING OVER HIS MONEY AND AS TIME GOES BY THE BILLS ARE INCREASING.
I WOULD WANT YOU TO LOAN ME $2000. I PROMISE TO PAY YOU BACK AS SOON AS I GET BACK… I WOULD WANT YOU TO HELP SEND THE MONEY VIA WESTERN UNION . GET BACK AT ME ASAP.
HOPE TO READ FROM YOU…
YOUR NAME HERE

As soon as the Nigerians learn how to turn Caps Lock off, we’re all in trouble.

Anyone who knows me reasonably well – and by reasonably well I mean in an eyeball-to-eyeball, meatspace-not-MySpace kind of way, naturally – know that I have a bilateral, Oreo-cookie kind of personality. Not the sort where I’m calm as a Hindu cow one moment and raving hysterically with my eyes rolled back in my head the next. Fortunately for all of us. I mean more in the avocational sense. I mean, I’m a writer by profession, but– for some reason I feel like I need to whisper it – I really, really like science. There, it’s out. Ah, sweet catharsis. To most people, this is something of a paradox, albeit an extremely anticlimactic one. I’ll admit that it often makes me feel a rather like a vinaigrette salad dressing: all oil and water, constantly in need of a good shaking. There are not many benefits to this strange condition, as you might imagine. One of the very few – though I probably won’t be written into Heroes anytime soon – is that I’ve got double the normal capacity for finding extraordinarily boring stuff interesting. A few cases in point:

1. The Crittercam turned 20 last week.

2. Mathematically speaking, chances are better than even that we are all virtual computer simulations being run for kicks by our superintelligent distant ancestors. Personally, I’m okay with it.

3. Next weekend, the Leonid Meteor Shower will either rain interstellar destruction down on us from above (odds: marginal to low) or pass completely unnoticed by 99.99 percent of the earth’s population (odds: bank on it). I will be among the other 0.001 percent freezing their asses off somewhere outdoors in the middle of the night, battling hypothermia and grass stains.

4. The earth’s climate is warming, and we’re the reason. (Have you heard about this?)

5. Carl Sagan is one of my all-time biggest heroes.

6. Fuck being a fireman. I want to be a molecular nanotechnologist when I grow up.

7. Failing that, I want to be a Bishop in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (Blessed be His noodly appendage.)

8. If I had a TiVo, the Science Channel would be all over it. So would Battlestar Galactica.

9. When I was a kid, I played Dungeons & Dragons. A lot. (Okay, not so much evidence of a paradoxically bifurcated personality as of being a friendless loser as a child. But still.)

10. What, you want exactly ten cases in point? Why? Because our mathematical system is predicated on the arbitrary fact that evolution has supplied us with 10 fingers instead of a different number? Would you be expecting 12 bullet points here if things had turned out differently and we had six fingers per hand and our maths were all based on a duodecimal system? Probably. There’s no satisfying you people, is there? (One cool upside of that, of course, is that all the volume knobs would go up to 11.)

One of the most satisfying parts of being on the other side of the world has been unplugging from the 24-hour information machine that saturates every waking moment of daily existence in the U.S. It’s not that Japan is fundamentally any different from the U.S. in this respect, only that my personal circumstances have changed. There are probably just as many superfluous ones and zeroes pumped through the air of every public space here as in the States, maybe even more. Even in out-of-the-way Fukui, you still see huge building-sized plasma displays competing for attention at every major downtown intersection, and vast banks of television screens flicker like the square faces of ghosts at shoppers in the lobbies of grocery stores and supermarkets. But of course they’re all in Japanese. It’s just blinking lights and barking mouths to me. (Incidentally, don’t get me started on the Japanese pop music that liquifies the brain of anyone who steps into a shopping center or supermarket here. Sometimes it’s even playing from speakers along city streets. This is the stuff of nightmares, the sort of result you’d expect if you could somehow combine corn syrup, kittens, vanilla ice cream, rainbows, pop rocks, air raid sirens, Mariah Carey, David Hasselhoff and a dictionary of clichés – or are those last two redundant? Look, you went and got me started anyway, didn’t you?)

Also, I’m no media hating Kill-Your-Televisionist. I’ve worked in the news and entertainment media industry for almost ten years – this is a card-carrying, American-conditioned media consumer here. These days, though, my daily contact with the English-speaking world is limited to my laptop, a wireless broadband signal, and my iPod. It doesn’t make for the most up-to-date skinny on what’s happening back home with Britney, Brangelina, Hillary, Halo III and the cast of Lost, but somehow I’m confident the world is chugging along just fine without me.

This weekend, though, it was pretty much impossible for me to avoid hearing about the Big Local News Story, because it came to me not from a TV set or a celebrity gossip blog but from the people living it. Nova Japan, the biggest private English-teaching company in the country, collapsed on Friday and filed for bankruptcy, putting roughly 7,000 people here out of work, most of them young Americans.

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