Yesterday I was browsing with my ad blocker turned off, when I saw one of those annoying epilepsy-inducing blinking ads
This is not a joke! You are the 965,467,695th visitor to this website! Congratulations! Click here for your prize!
With 2 Windows-XP style buttons on the bottom: “Cancel”, and “Claim”. Surprisingly clicking “Cancel” doesn’t do anything – I would’ve thought it would open up whatever stupid “Give us your email address and we will f’ing spam you (no we won’t, promise, trust us, we’re an honest bunch of toilet scum!)!” website, but it didn’t.
It used to be that you’d be the millionth visitor. That got old, so you’d be the 10 to the power of whatever minus or plus 1th visitor. But no, this time you were the [some random number like above]th visitor.
And I especially like the first sentence; “This is not a joke!”. I suppose it’s enough to fool another x percent of gullible people, who would otherwise not be fooled because they realize it is a joke… ‘Wait, you’re being serious? OK then!’.”.
I suppose the next step on this evolution of scum is a banner ad that says “This is a joke! You are not the millionth visitor. You are just some number. You are not going to win anything other than lots of spam! Click here if you want some spam!”.. I’d fall for that.
I wasn’t going to blog about this stupid banner ad, but then today reading about the adventures of toilet scum president in Iraq, I realize in the next couple of days there’s going to be an American soldier who’s going to win another prize…
This is not a joke! You are the 4000th US soldier to be killed in Iraq! Congratulations! Your prize: just like everybody else before you, a free ticket out of this hellhole!* And… 15 minutes of fame on CNN!**
* in a flag-draped coffin.
** posthumously.
