BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Like you, I get about 2,713 e-mails a day. Most are routine work-related, or Mullings-related; and messages from campaigns or political organizations. I get plenty of spam and I normally ignore them, but one came in yesterday which made me laugh out loud. Here’s how it began: Forgive my indignation if this message comes to you as a surprise and may offend your personality for contacting you without your prior consent and writing through this channel.

Of course it had to do with a box full of money containing “9.7 Million U.S. Dollars” which this guy needed to move out of, in this case, Afghanistan. I was just about to send the guy all the personal information he asked for when I read that the box is in Mazar-e-Sharif “which is a suburb not too far from here in Kabul.”

Mazar-e-Sharif. Been there. It’s about 190 miles from Kabul. That’s like saying Pittsburgh or Philadelphia are suburbs of Washington, DC. It was then that I began to suspect this just might be a scam written by a guy for whom English was not his first language.

Next Topic:
I learned something new in the WashPost sports section yesterday. I knew that the Washington Redskins were the last NFL team to integrate; but I had not known that the lyric in the ‘Skin’s fight song which goes: “Fight for old D.C.” had been changed from, “Fight for old Dixie” to catch up with modern sensitivities.

The team is still named the “Redskins,” though.

Yet Another Topic:
The Guinness Book of World Records has declared an American actor to be the highest-grossing film actor of all time. The name? Samuel L. Jackson. The amount? $7.2 billion. That’s not the amount of money he has been paid, it represents the amount of money the movies in which he has appeared, have grossed.

My favorite is his role as Jules Winnfield in “Pulp Fiction” when he (I think three times) misquotes Ezekiel 25:17: “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon you.”

And then he shoots somebody.

Last Topic:
I have become a Twitter-ista. You can follow me at @richgalen.

Yesterday someone started a hash-tag conversation: #lessexcitingbandnames. Here are some of the better suggestions (Keep in mind I didn’t understand many of the submissions because my musical development ended with the early Eagles):
Pearl Jelly
AB/CD
Blue Chilled Mild Peppers
Mauve Floyd
The Windows
Guns ‘n Lilacs
Def Leotard
Huey Lewis and the Blogs
The Bottles
U-3.1416
The What
Air O’Smith
Metallic …uh
Three-and-a-Quarter-Inch Nails
Creedence Bathwater Revival
Kvetch Against the Machine
Solar, Wind & Geothermal

And mine: The Koleoptera