1 The Disney album with Mickey Mouse and a big pocket watch on the cover that had a great Donald Duck song on it and one by The Crickets and they sounded like real crickets

2 The Jungle Book record that had the Louis Prima “That Darn Cat” on the second side, for some reason.

3 The original Sesame Street soundtrack on 8 track

4 Winnie The Pooh’s Birthday Party Album

5 Englebert Humperdinck – A Man Without Love

6 Frank Sinatra The Main Event Live At Madison Square Garden

7 Star Wars soundtrack

8 Space 1999 soundtrack

9 Silent Movie soundtrack

10 The George Burns album where he sings “I’ll Get By With A LIttle Help From My Friends”

11 Doctor Demento’s Demented Momentos

12 Three Dog Night’s Greatest Hits

13 Neil Diamond – The Jazz Singer

14 K-Tel Collection – Goofy Greats

15 Asia – Asia

The messages are usually attributed to some judge’s son or widow or someone attempting to divert their relative’s funds out of the country and very willing to give you a piece of the action. These e-mails are so impersonal, haphazard worms being flung out to unknown fish, they hardly make you feel special in that way a con should. It is clear that these are not professional criminals who have studied their mark.

According to Snopes, though, the scams are hugely successful and, in 1997, United States citizens lost $100 million dollars to these con artists.

Which brings me to my new friend, “Macathy Dennis.”

I put my car up for sale on Cars.com and received an inquiry from a gentleman named Macathy Dennis. He wanted to confirm the car’s price for a client of his who, he claimed, planned to send some “International Shipping Agent” to come pick the car up. His closing words “Looking forward to your response soonest” seemed particularly Nigerian to me.

I was feeling whimsical, so I replied with the details he wanted. Sure enough, Macathy Dennis was overjoyed that “said items are still for sale” and got right down to business: “i want you to know one thing that the Mode of payment is going to be Certified Cashier’s Checks that will be drawn from an American. So there will be no problem in Cashing the Check. Also i want you to know that you will be receiving a Cashier’s Check of $5,000 that will sent to you one of my Client over there in the USA who is owing me this amount.”

Macathy Dennis expected me to cash the check immediately at “the Cashing Store,” pass the funds (less the price of my car) to his unnamed “Personal Assistant,” wait for the shipping company to show up for the car, and provide him with all my contact info — strangely no credit card numbers, bank account info, or Social Security numbers, but I imagined one of those was coming later. He also threw in an additional $100 “for the little stress you will be going through in the transaction.”

No one can ever claim that Macathy Dennis does not care about the people he does business with.

At first there was some irate back and forth about the details of that hundred dollar bonus — I was quite clear that I wanted to make sure he wasn’t trying to be shifty with the numbers — and this frustrated the poor man to such a degree that he certainly didn’t need me to dash off an e-mail informing him that his client was in danger of losing out on the car if the issue of compensation was not addressed. I expected him to sweat for his mark.

I heard back from a very frantic Macathy Dennis, responding in all capital letters: “I WILL LIKE TO KNOW IF YOU WANT TO CONTINUE WITH THE TRANSACTION AND IF YOU ARE WILLING TO CONTINUE.”

I did the only thing I could do, given the situation — I asked Macathy Dennis if he could send the funds to my fictitious representative, Mr. Gerhard Hogan.

Not surprisingly, Macathy Dennis was now overjoyed that I had chomped his hook again and rambled on again about “full details which the payment will be made out” and signed off with “hope to read from you shortly.” It was almost heartbreaking, and I hated myself for responding that Mr. Hogan had received a counter offer from the fictitious Mr. Kingsley Azuka and the money needed to be dispatched immediately to Mr. Hogan of Fooferall Road in Williamstown, Mass.

Until then, I had not seen Macathy Dennis quite so worked up. “I think i’ll not be so happy if i could not express my plan to you on this transaction,” he barked at me, adding that “i want you to tell Mr Hogan to cancel any offer from any other buyer and concentrate on me so as for this transaction to be a perfect and successful transaction with trust.”

I could almost feel the veins popping in the poor man’s head when he again asked for Mr Hogan’s contact information — apparently he had forgotten the office on Fooferall Road.

“Mr. Hogan operates out of a mobile van of no fixed address,” I informed him.

I heard nothing — Macathy Dennis had disappeared off the face of the earth. In order to save the deal, I sent a message that Mr. Hogan wanted to personally hand over the car: “Is it possible that you or your personal assistant can meet Mr. Hogan in Times Square in New York City at your convenience? Mr. Hogan asks me to inform you that he will be the portly man wearing the yellow goulashes.”

My friend never addressed a Times Square meeting, but, expert swindler that he is, has tried to switch the grift to the portly Mr. Hogan, trying to get HIS phone number before brushing me aside with “So have a nice day and stay blessed.”

But I wouldn’t have it. I told Macathy Dennis that Mr. Hogan intended to bypass the international shipper and bring it over himself. As it turns out, Macathy Dennis likes that idea and wants both our phone numbers now because the transaction has reached a point where it demands a telephone conversation to sort the whole mess out.

I replied that Mr. Hogan is ready with the car and really needs to know which port to deliver it to. “And don’t forget,” I added, “yellow goulashes.”

In the newspaper, you can check out my article on the band Califone and their really great indie, experimental film “All My Friends Are Funeral Singers,” as well as an article about children’s illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger. There’s also a review of the Lost epilogue “New Man in Charge” and the new album by Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr.

My article on the wonderful Stanford Graphic Novel Project is in Publishers Weekly now.

A couple more Very Vicky stories have hit our Facebook page – “Bogged Down” and “The Rise and Fall of Banana Daiquiri.” The latter features a lot of jokes riffing on some of my favorite ’80s music, specifically Bananarama, Malcom McLaren, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

Also, the website for Jana’s new book with Julie Aigner-Clark, You Are The Best Medicine, is up. You can also like it on Facebook!

Also, there are a couple mysteries imbedded – these days, I think we call them easter eggs and they’re on DVDs, but back then they were little visual and narrative surprises tossed in to reward the eagle-eyed. Which would be me, I would like to remind you, the audience of one for these stories. I’m baffled as to the maze’s claim that Captain Cosmic died inside the maze, because going through my pile of comics, I see no evidence that I ever wrote a Captain Cosmic death story and, somewhere in the crumbling corners of my memory, I seem to recall coming up with the maze thing especially for Mr. America. Also, this comic I reference with the two characters – Struggle – I’ve never heard of it. Or maybe I’m just being air headed.

I also have this to add – apparently Captain Cosmic is the name of a TV show host in the Bay Area in the late ’70s, the exact time I lived an hour out of San Francisco. I have no recollection of this guy based on the description in Wikipedia, but he did play the kind of stuff I liked to watch, though I apparently missed his screenings of Captain Scarlet at an age that I would have most enjoyed them.

Anyhow, we still have a few more issues of Mr. America to go, so no point in dilly dallying – and that includes two #15s.

Oh, and in retrospect, I think “Panth” is a horrible nickname for a superhero.

For instance, last night, I started looking at a hotel reviews on Tripadvisor, the online source for some of the best travel writing on the Web. Admittedly, it is just user reviews of hotels and I was spending the evening discovering the terrible rigors of hotel rooms in New York City that go for under a $100: boogers on walls, crumbs in beds, bed bug bites, and run-ins with “strange tenants.” Nearly every review has “I didn’t see one rat” as a positive, which gives you some idea of the standards they are judging by.

In one hotel, a guy complains about a “transgendered person of color” screaming obscenities in the hallway in the morning. At $45 a night in New York City, I’m amazed that the ranting transsexual was included in the package, usually you would have to pay extra for that.

From there, I have no idea how I ended up staring at the metal band Pincer. You ever do that, wander around online in a fog, make a couple of weird clicks, and find yourself somewhere unintended and surely unsafe? Pincer describes themselves as “Britain’s Newest Metal Mo-Fo’s.” Oh, this is British metal at its best, to be sure, and they have a good review in a “Danish Online Heavy Metal Magazine” to prove it.

“The very essence of this record is awsome guitarplay and a very wellbalanced vocal under strict control” rave the Danish. sounding suspiciously Japanese to me. They describe the music like this: “Imagine a roaring thunder from not far away, the wind blowing and making twigs on the trees outside knocking on the windows, creating the illusion that someone’s forcing their way to you.” Is this what you want out of your music?

Naturally, I find my way back to Tripadvisor and read a little bit about the Morningside Inn and its apparently closet sized rooms. One person said he got locked out of his room and reports that “the matienence woman was able to break in with a credit card.” I don’t know whether to be outraged or impressed. “You would be safer sleeping in a subways station,” the person adds, also suggesting people google the phrase “MorningSide Inn November 7 2003.”

I do exactly that, not knowing what I am going to find. Turns out I find a big, fat nothing, so I shorten the search to the hotel name and find plenty to choose from, most notably the link to PureNudism and its questionable offer to help us “learn about adult, teen, and family nudism though pictures.”

The Web site has all sorts of pictures of nudists frolicking — of course, just the young, hot nudists. None of the old shrivelly nudists with paunches or carbuncles or anything like that. PureNudism has two mottos on this page — “Young or Old, We Bring Nudism To Life” and “We are here to convert you to nudism.”

On the free nudist images page, the site boasts, “If more people were like us in support of the nude recreational activities, most of the problems we face on this planet would be solved.” The most obvious one is the nagging problem of not getting to see enough people naked.

On the same Google list, I notice a link to a Yahoo Travel page on the Morningside Inn that reveals the mystery of the date “November 7 2003″ when THE EXACT SAME POSTER from Tripadvisor pops up on Yahoo. Here, the person adds “I know someone who was stabbed there and a young man brutally murdered in 2003, all because some psycho ex boyfriend was let into the building by some random people.”

I’m a bit confused. First of all, he knew this and he still chose to stay there? Second of all, I would imagine that if you dismiss all the buildings in NYC that murders have taken place in when looking for lodgings, you are probably going to end up sleeping in Jersey.

Down the page, one person proclaims “a man named patrick yelled at me every time I asked for a blanket or a towel, he almost attacked me physicaly one time!” and another mentions “An evil-eyed manager named patrick tryed a few days before the end of my stay to charge me 400$ more than what was the deal. He sayed that if I won’t pay I should eave, after an hour of loud convercesion he did me a ‘discount’ of 150$, so I payed 250$ more.”

Does anyone know where this “Patrick” got his job or did he maybe mysteriously appear at the desk in 2003, barking orders to deny patrons blankets and towels?

Searching for “Morningside Inn” and “Patrick” brings me nothing, but “Morningside Inn” and “murder” leads me to a New York Post page that no longer exists but the Google listing does say this much: “Grenada native, is charged with Mariconi’s murder and the attempted murder of Aragosa … as Mariconi was leaving her dorm-like room at the Morningside Inn on West.”

“Dorm-like”? Ah ha! It’s confirmed, the rooms are tiny!

I had a brief moment where things got a little confusing because a place with the same name in Maryland offers a murder mystery weekend, but a search for “Morningside Inn” and “Mariconi” does the job and takes me to the New York Daily News which confirms the tawdry tale of a murderous ex-boyfriend in the hotel that spared no towels.

Well that’s depressing. To cheer myself up, I do a search for the phrase “Pincer rocks” but find no evidence such a sentiment exists anywhere.

Well, there’s another evening wasted.