ADVENTURES IN SCAM BAITING PART VI:

HOW CAN WE BE LOVERS IF WE CAN'T BE FRIENDS?

(OR: Love in the Time of COVID-19)

Just a quick one to give us all a few laughs while we wait out the Apocalypse.

This is a guy who contacted me on Instagram yesterday. The thing about this one was that it took me a while to notice that he was claiming to be a celebrity. I guess I wasn't really paying attention, I just accepted his message request and started right in quoting some Kate Bush lyrics at him. 

Heh. I love that crazy ass song.

He's got a lot of chutzpah to call me out on a fake photo. How does he know I'm not Kate Bush?

Okay, below you can see the moment where I realized he was pretending to be Michael Bolton. The '90s balladeer, obviously. Not the character from Office Space.

An aside: I assumed that his bogus Instagram would be set to "Private" like 99% of these scam accounts are, so I was surprised when I checked and saw that the dude actually made an effort to swipe some pics from MB's official social media, like this one of homeboy wearing a scarf and enjoying a matcha. Poor Michael. I bet he had no idea that this very photo would one day be used by some random mouth-breather to try and dupe some unsuspecting soft rock aficionados.   

So once I realized who the dude was claiming to be, I decided to hop on that pony and ride it into the dirt.

Okay I should provide some backstory on my OJ Simpson comment above. Paula Barbieri (C-list model/actress and OJ Simpson's paramour during the time of the infamous murders) wrote a book called The Other Woman: My Years With OJ Simpson. I tracked down a copy around the time of that OJ miniseries--I wrote about the show here BTW--(jeez, was that really four years ago?) and it was a tawdry but enjoyable read. Some of the random stuff from the book I remember is that Paula was with OJ in the early/mid-90s and while he wasn't physically abusive, he was given to throwing tantrums and acting like a petulant asshole if he didn't get his way (big surprise there). He also either cheated on her a lot or she suspected that he did, I can't recall which. OJ was also buddies with a certain pseudo-billionaire hanger-on by the name of Donald Trump, and there was a anecdote where Paula was with OJ at a golf tournament somewhere and Dumpcake creepily put the moves on her as soon as OJ turned his back. Paula told OJ about it later and instead of actually doing something constructive with his psychotic roid rage, OJ just sort of shrugged it off like, "yeah well, that's just Donald being Donald." Ugh. Wastes of oxygen, the both of them.

An image from the book: 

Paula stands between a future murderer

and a future fascist cult leader.

Anyhoo the relevant bit here is that after a lot of on-and-offing with their relationship, Paula finally decided she'd had enough and, during the weekend of the murders, she told OJ sayonara and flew to Las Vegas for a rendezvous with Michael Bolton, as she had recently appeared in one of his music videos and had been digging his chili ever since. The song is called "Completely" by the way, and hoo boy, is this a giant gooey hunk of Velveeta right here.

Sorry, but why does he always sound so constipated? Dude, senna leaf tea. Natural and effective. Just sayin'.

So Paula's in Vegas all set to ride Michael's Bolt-on when news of the murders hits the airwaves, and in a fit of guilt she decides to return (oh gurl NO!) to stand by OJ, a misguided decision I'm sure she still regrets even though her relationship with him went down the toilet for good as soon as his trial was over.

And that brings us up to speed.     

Come on, I don't really think Paula and MB's hookup--whether attempted or successful--had anything to do with OJ killing his ex-wife. I was just being facetious.

As above: I assume "Telegram" (?) is some sort of messaging app currently popular in the scamming community, but I've never heard of it.

So below: The dude kept me hanging for a while and I was itching to just block, report, and forget about him, so this is how I ended it.

It turns out that Michael Bolton is a man of many talents; while doing a search on his name I discovered that he wrote a children's book in 1997. It's available on Amazon, and the description makes the story sound suspiciously similar to that of Siddhartha Guatama:

"An award-winning singer and songwriter pens his first children's title in this charming story of a king's son who, disgusted with the greed that power can bring, leaves his father to travel the kingdom as a commoner."

I want a framed poster of this to hang up in my guest room. 

Seriously. It's awesome.

It has mostly favorable reviews, too. Back in 2012 an Amazon user named Gail rated it five stars and wrote: "I got this for my granddaughter. Michael Bolton did a great job with this story and she loves reading it."

Really does sound like the perfect book to read to a youngster while you wait out the End of Days, doesn't it? And the good news is, you can get a used copy for under 10 bucks! Go for it.