This popular image was predated almost by 100 years by the 1922 edition below, found at Shorpy:
Washington, D.C., circa 1922. “Boy and dog.” Feel free to construct your own narrative. Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.
Dogs are like that.
Here’s one of the best ones I’ve ever known.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Grammar is like the pirate’s code. As Captain Barbossa said, “The Code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.”
Living grammarians and prescriptivists and editors just had an apoplectic fit; the dead ones are now spinning in their graves with such vigor that if you could hook up an armature to each one, you could power New York City for free.
As a career linguist, I have the right to say that, but note that saying so doesn’t make me right. It’s just my opinion. Spend enough time studying various models of language and you come away with the feeling that some things *”just not allowed are” unless *”Yoda you happen to be.” No, there’s a place for everything and everything must be in its place. On the other hand, spend enough time studying historical linguistics and the mechanism of language change, or watch the transformation of Vulgar Latin into the family of Romance Languages, and you learn something else: usage trumps Strunk and White every time.
Now, having had a traditional preparatory education, I struggled through multiple years of Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition, learned to execrate Reed-Kellogg diagrams, and spent most of my time drawing things like this in my notebook:
And, I learned how to use English properly. A couple of language and linguistics degrees later, I still support the need for correct grammar as a means of facilitating communication and avoiding chaos, and while I cringe just as forcefully as the next person when seeing a grocer’s apostrophe or a confusing of “lose” and “loose,” I am much less committed to the concept that everything has to be just so, best beloved.
Linguistic patterns are pretty well established by the time we become adults, and it takes a powerful force to make us change our way of speaking or writing, or at the very least, a conscious effort – but the former is difficult to come by, and the latter implies awareness of that which is correct and that which is incorrect, and the prices and benefits of making certain linguistic choices.
I don’t, like, you know, change how I talk or write with, you know, like, every new fad. *gag* That said, there’s one little bit of popular speech that I have latched on to as a very useful and concise way of expressing a much more complicated concept, and that’s the use of a noun as the object of the subordinating conjunction because, where typically one expects an entire clause.
Because Japan.
The picture and sentence (it is a sentence, despite the lack of anything remotely resembling a subject, verb, or predicate) suffice to convey a significant amount of information in a very compact manner. To translate this into traditional grammar, one would have to say something like:
“This picture of people bathing in a giant pool of wine is very unusual, but since the picture is taken in Japan, where many things are so different that foreigners have no hope of understanding the rhyme or reason behind certain cultural phenomena, everything is just as it should be, and you should not expect anything else.”
In a previous post about escalators, you will find this picture:
I could have just as easily captioned it “Because America,” the meaning being “You will only find escalators being used to reach a fitness center in America because people are so fat and lazy that they miss the entire concept and holy hqiz isn’t that ironic.”
Just how long this particular linguistic quirk will last remains to be seen. I have no illusions that it will be mainstreamed (that verb didn’t exist 20 years ago, by the way), but the whole point is that you never know what’s going to become popular or accepted down the road. In the meantime it’s swell, and I’ll probably use it until people start looking at me as though I had grown a third eye.
Because usage.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
PS: Atlantic has a similar article which is worth reading as well. Because corroboration.
When I was little, my mother used to sing bits and snatches of songs to me that she remembered from her own childhood. One that always stuck in my mind was “The Czar of the Tenderloin,” which she told me she often heard sung by her uncle, Leo Marshall.
Leo Marshall, center in rear, with his wife Lucile Rogers Marshall (right front) and her siblings Frances, William, and Victor, December 1970
Years later, at the 80th birthday party of my grandmother Frances, (Leo’s sister-in-law), he sang it for the assembled family one last time. It was two years before his death, and the rendition was hesitant and shaky, but all the more lovely for his still being able to remember as much as he did.
As I grew older, I often wondered about the origins of the song, and if there were any more of it than the little bits Mother sang.
And then came the Internet, the modern-day Areopagus (Acts 17:21). As the body of the world’s knowledge is slowly but surely gathered and preserved online, not everything happens at once. For years I searched and scraped the web, but always came up poor… until today.
Notice the nightstick on the cover.
The Lyrics
America has a President and England has a Queen,
While Germany’s great Emperor sits ruling all serene,
The Indians have their medicine man, Bavaria a king,
But none of these high diplomats are quite the proper thing.
For in gay New York where the gay Bohemians dwell,
There’s a Colony called the Tenderloin, though why I cannot tell,
A certain man controls the place with no regard for coin,
The Czar, the Czar, the Czar of the Tenderloin.
Chorus:
The Czar of the Tenderloin,
With great propriety, seeks notoriety,
But the girls all shun the society
Of the Czar of the Tenderloin.
Each evening through the Tenderloin the Czar will gayly prance,
With whiskers well divided just to give the wind a chance,
His bodyguard behind him scouting for a finish fight,
Arresting everything that’s left because it isn’t right.
Piano legs must now be clothed with care,
And he’s ordered all the trees cut down because their limbs were bare,
He’s going to build a little church which everyone must join,
The Czar, the Czar, the Czar of the Tenderloin.
Chorus
His hobby is arresting shoes whenever they are tight,
He also nabs electric lights when when they go out at night,
The sun came out one morning and he ordered its arrest,
The moon was full, he pulled it in and claimed it was a pest.
One day on the Tenderloin, a maiden changed her mind,
Now the Czar thought that was naughty so the girl was quickly “fined.”
He arrested a cook for beating an egg, now don’t that take the coin,
The Czar, the Czar, the Czar of the Tenderloin.
Chorus
This 1897 song by Bob Cole and Billy Johnson is based on the life and times of Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams, a notoriously corrupt but effective police inspector who ruled over New York’s Tenderloin district with an iron fist and a wooden club. At the end of his career he was reputed to have said that he never clubbed anyone who didn’t deserve it. The name of that part of town, the northwest corner of which is now Times Square, came from William’s statement that “I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force, and now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin,” said because of the lucrative business of protection payments from legitimate and illegitimate businesses alike. Prior to Williams’ reign, the district was known as “Satan’s Circus.” San Francisco also has a Tenderloin district, and the term has come to be synonymous with a seedy, ill-reputed or red-light district of town.
Manhattan’s historical districts, the Tenderloin indicated by a star.
Emile Berliner’s Gramophone 78 rpm record. “The Czar of the Tenderloin,” sung by Will F. Denny. Recorded July 14, 1897
With thanks to Tim Gracyk, you can hear Will F. Denny singing an abridged version of the song at YouTube, but I can still hear Uncle Leo singing it as clearly as though it were yesterday.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
This is not radical feminism, it is the cold, hard, harsh truth – and as long as nothing changes, rape culture, image problems and relationship dysfunction will continue to have a fertile breeding ground. Sexualization and objectification in advertising affects us all, regardless of our gender, age, or body type. Spend 22 minutes listening to this powerful lady speak truth to the advertising world.
Thanks to Paul Taylor of Wapsi Square for pointing this out.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
And anyone else who does this as well, may Karma reward you according to your deeds.
Yarg.
I love spicy food. I guess I developed a taste for it when my mother took me to this little hole in the wall restaurant in New York named Xochitl which I have mentioned elsewhere. Their hot sauce was served in little ceramic pots, and one learned to use it most sparingly. But like certain other things in life, once the barn door has been opened and the horses are out, there’s no going back.
My cabinet is full of various types of hot sauces; a dear friend presented me with 6 different flavors last Christmas, and along with the ever-present Tabasco™ and Tapatio™ and Frank’s Original™, there are around a dozen other varieties either above the stove or in storage.
Yes, I like hot things.
But there’s a difference between pleasing heat and liquid pain, as I discovered in a few instances – in my experience, Blair’s After Death™ sauce has very little flavor, and mostly heat, even though it comes in at a paltry 50,000 Scoville units. I say paltry, because there are sauces out there that rate much, much higher – but I only used it in a couple of preparations, and in very small doses, and things still came out hotter than I care for. I cannot imagine the effect of adding even one crystal of pure Capsaicin (rated 16 million Scovilles) to any food.
“The strength of Blair’s hottest product, “Blair’s 16 Million Reserve”, is 16 million Scoville units (Tabasco™, in comparison, is 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units). It contains only capsaicin crystals, and is the hottest possible capsaicin-based sauce. Only 999 bottles of “Blair’s 16 Million Reserve” were produced, each one signed and numbered by the firm’s founder, and have all been sold. This reserve was certified by the Guinness book of World Records as the hottest product available.” (Wikipedia)
You can find bottles for sale around the net for around $400.00 if you’re insane enough to want some, or as a collector’s item.
Another time my family took my oldest son out for his birthday, and for an appetizer we ordered something called the “On Death Roll,” which came with a warning on the menu that you had to sign a waiver before ordering it. No waiver was forthcoming, but holy flapping scrith! My younger son and my daughter and I all tried it, and the birthday boy, smarter than we, sat and watched the festivities as we all thought we were going to die. “I didn’t know I was going to get dinner and a show,” said he, roguishly. I have no idea what they added to that tuna roll, but it was accurately advertised. Hqiz!
So the other day when the Goodwoman of the House was frying up some squash and onions, she was rummaging around in the spice cabinet and found this:
“Well,” she thought, “this will add a pleasant bit of spice to the preparation,” thinking it was perhaps akin to Cayenne pepper (30,000 – 50,000 Scovilles). No, dear, it’s pure ground Habanero (100,000 – 350,000 Scovilles). She likes hot stuff too, but the resulting preparation brought tears to both of us. We did eat, and were filled, and the remainder got mixed in to some chili that was waiting to be eaten, which livened it up considerable.
Yup. Goes for other things too. Which reminds me of this story which has been around for a while, but which is too good not to include here:
The Chili Contest
Notes From An Inexperienced Chili Taster Named FRANK, who was visiting Texas: “Recently I was honored to be selected as an outstanding Famous celebrity in Texas, to be a judge at a chili cook off, because no one else wanted to do it. Also the original person called in sick at the last moment, and I happened to be standing there at the judge’s table asking directions to the beer wagon when the call came. I was assured by the other two judges (Native Texans) that the chili wouldn’t be all that spicy, and besides they told me I could have free beer during the tasting, so I accepted. Here are the scorecards from the event:”
Chili # 1: Mike’s Maniac Mobster Monster Chili
JUDGE ONE: A little too heavy on tomato. Amusing kick.
JUDGE TWO: Nice, smooth tomato flavor. Very mild.
FRANK: Holy smokes, what the HELL is this stuff? You could remove dried paint from your driveway with it. Took two beers to put the flames out. Hope that’s the worst one. These hicks are crazy.Chili # 2: Arthur’s Afterburner Chili
JUDGE ONE: Smoky (barbecue?) with a hint of pork. Slight Jalapeno tang.
JUDGE TWO: Exciting BBQ flavor, needs more peppers to be taken seriously.
FRANK: Shit! Keep this away from the children! I’m not sure what I’m supposed to taste besides pain. I had to wave off two people who wanted to give me the Heimlich maneuver. Shoved my way to the front of the beer line.Chili # 3: Fred’s Famous Burn Down the Barn Chili
JUDGE ONE: Excellent firehouse chili! Great kick. Needs more beans.
JUDGE TWO: A beanless chili, a bit salty, good use of red peppers.
FRANK: This has got to be a joke. Call the EPA, I’ve located a uranium spill. My nose feels like I have been snorting Drano. Everyone knows the routine by now and got out of my way so I could make it to the beer wagon. Barmaid pounded me on the back; now my backbone is in the front part of my chest.Chili # 4: Bubba’s Black Magic
JUDGE ONE: Black bean chili with almost no spice. Disappointing.
JUDGE TWO: Hint of lime in the black beans. Good side dish for fish or other mild foods, not much of a chili.
FRANK: I felt something scraping across my tongue, but was unable to taste it. Sally, the barmaid, was standing behind me with fresh refills to save me the run.Chili # 5: Linda’s Legal Lip Remover
JUDGE ONE: Meaty, strong chili. Cayenne peppers freshly ground, adding considerable kick. Very impressive.
JUDGE TWO: Chili using shredded beef; could use more tomato. Must admit the cayenne peppers make a strong statement.
FRANK: My ears are ringing, and I can’t focus my eyes. I farted and four people behind me needed paramedics. The contestant seemed hurt when I told her that her chili had given me brain damage. Sally saved my tongue by pouring beer directly on it. Sort of irritates me that one of the other judges asked me to stop screaming.Chili # 6: Vera’s Very Vegetarian Variety
JUDGE ONE: Thin yet bold vegetarian variety chili. Good balance of spice and peppers.
JUDGE TWO: The best yet. Aggressive use of peppers, onions, and garlic. Superb.
FRANK: My intestines are now a straight pipe filled with gaseous flames. Noone seems inclined to stand behind me except Sally.Chili # 7: Susan’s Screaming Sensation Chili
JUDGE ONE: A mediocre chili with too much reliance on canned peppers.
JUDGE TWO: Very Ho Hum, tastes as if the chef threw in canned chili peppers at the last moment. I should note that I am worried about Judge Number 3. He appears to be in a bit of distress.
FRANK: You could put a grenade in my mouth and pull the pin, and I wouldn’t feel it. I’ve lost the sight in one eye, and the world sounds like it is made of rushing water. My clothes are covered with chili which slid unnoticed out of my mouth at some point. Thank God! At autopsy they’ll know what killed me. Have decided to stop breathing, too painful, not getting any oxygen anyway.Chili # 8: Helen’s Mount Saint Chili
JUDGE ONE: A perfect ending, this is a nice blend chili, safe for all, not too bold but spicy enough to declare its existence.
JUDGE TWO: This final entry is a good, balanced chili, neither mild nor hot. Sorry to see that most of it was lost when Judge Number 3 fell and pulled the chili pot on top of himself.
FRANK: ——- (Editor’s note: Judge #3 was unable to report)
All this talk about hot sauce is having an interesting effect, that I’ve never been able to explain – I recorded it back in 2009 over at my Livejournal:
The last two times I’ve prepared spicy foods, though, I’ve had a very unusual experience – the flush to the face begins as soon as I’ve opened the bottle of hot sauce – and haven’t even eaten it yet. The first time it happened, I thought “imagining things.” But it happened again today… as I was liberally lacing my burritos with Tabasco, I started getting the burning and vascular dilation that I always experience with certain peppers – very much like a Niacin flush, if you’ve ever experienced that. And, what’s even stranger, I’m experiencing a repeat as I type this, half an hour after lunch. Just thinking about it was sufficient to recall the phyiological response.
Now tha’s just weird. Maybe if I salivate enough, I can get my doorbell to ring.
And it’s happening right now. Stranger than fiction.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Washington, D.C., circa 1921. “People’s Drug Store, Seventh & K, night.” With a lurid display of “trusses and rubber goods.” National Photo Co.
Pharma Noir, Found at Shorpy
I recall that trusses and other things were big sellers in pharmacies in the 50s and 60s when I was growing up in New York. What’s with that? Were more people suffering from herniæ back then, or was it the fad of the times, like all the weight-loss nostrums are today? Interesting at any rate. Oh, and the Dr. Scholl’s corn pads and things, too.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Shared with me by my colleague Miguel Ring around 15 years ago. Time to let it re-surface.
Latkes: A pancake‑like structure not to be confused with anything the House of Pancakes would put out. In a latka, the oil is in the pancake. It is made with potatoes, onions, eggs and matzo meal. Latkas can be eaten with apple sauce but NEVER with maple syrup. There is a rumor that in the time of the Maccabees they lit a latka by mistake and it burned for eight days. What is certain is you will have heartburn for the same amount of time.
Matzoh: The Egyptians’ revenge for leaving slavery. It consists of a simple mix of flour and water ‑ no eggs or flavor at all. When made well, it could actually taste like cardboard. Its redeeming value is that it does fill you up and stays with you for a long time. However, it is recommended that you eat a few prunes soon after.
Kasha Varnishkes: One of the little‑known delicacies which is even more difficult to pronounce than to cook. It has nothing to do with Varnish, but is basically a mixture of buckwheat and bow‑tie macaroni (noodles). Why a bow‑tie? Many sages discussed this and agreed that some Jewish mother decided that “You can’t come to the table without a tie” or, God forbid “An elbow on my table?”
Blintzes: Not to be confused with the German war machine. Can you imagine the N.J. Post 1939 headlines: “Germans drop tons of cheese and blueberry blintzes over Poland ‑ shortage of sour cream expected.”
Kishka: You know from Haggis? Well, this ain’t it . In the old days they would take an intestine and stuff it. Today we use parchment paper or plastic. And what do you stuff it with? Carrots, celery, onions, flour, and spices. But the trick is not to cook it alone but to add it to the cholent (see below) and let it cook for 24 hours until there is no chance whatsoever that there is any nutritional value left.
Kreplach: It sounds worse than it tastes. There is a rabbinical debate on its origins: One Rabbi claims it began when a fortune cookie fell into his chicken soup. The other claims it started in an Italian restaurant. Either way it can be soft, hard, or soggy and the amount of meat inside depends on whether it is your mother or your mother‑in‑law who cooked it.
Cholent: This combination of noxious gases had been the secret weapon of Jews for centuries. The unique combination of beans, barley, potatoes, and bones or meat is meant to stick to your ribs and anything else it comes into contact with. At a fancy Mexican restaurant (kosher of course) I once heard this comment from a youngster who had just had his first taste of Mexican fried beans: “What! Do they serve leftover cholent here too?!” My wife once tried something unusual for guests: She made cholent burgers for Sunday night supper. The guests never came back.
Cholent
Gefilte Fish: A few years ago, I had problems with my filter in my fish pond and a few of them got rather stuck and mangled. My son (5 years old) looked at them and commented “Is that why we call it ‘GeFiltered Fish’?” Originally, it was a carp stuffed with a minced fish and vegetable mixture. Today it usually comprises of small fish balls eaten with horse radish (“chrain”) [1] which is judged on its relative strength in bringing tears to your eyes at 100 paces.
Bagels: How can we finish without the quintessential Jewish Food, the bagel? Like most foods, there are legends surrounding the bagel although I don’t know any. There have been persistent rumors that the inventors of the bagel were the Norwegians who couldn’t get anyone to buy smoked lox. Think about it: Can you picture yourself eating lox on white bread? Rye? A cracker?? Naaa. They looked for something hard and almost indigestible which could take the spread of cream cheese and which doesn’t take up too much room on the plate. And why the hole? The truth is that many philosophers believe the hole is the essence and the dough is only there for emphasis.
The Old Wolf has spoken, but do you ever write me? No, that’s fine, I’ll just sit here in the kitchen slaving, if you come and find me dead someday it will only be what you deserve…
[1] Linguistic note: the German word for horseradish is “Meerrettich” but in Austria it’s known as “Kren”.
Flashmobs have all sorts of different reasons for taking place, but some of the ones I have seen lately are real movers. I just thought I’d share a few of my favorites, because I feel uplifted any time I watch one of these.
Someday I’d love to participate in one, or at least be around when it happens.
Best visit to Williamsburg, Virginia.
Best coin ever spent. Sabadell, Spain.
Best button ever pushed. It’s an advert, but who cares.
Best visit to a train station ever – Antwerp, Belgium.
Best “What the hqiz just happened” moment – Québec, Canada. The message may be a bit heavy-handed, but it’s valid just the same.
I hope these please you as much as they did me. One of my favorite parts of these are watching the expressions of the audience; you can tell who enjoys life, and who has a bit of baggage they could perhaps stand to shed…
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Edit: It appears that this company later did business as “findyoursearch.com,” which now redirects to “qualitysiteprofessionals.com,” also an SEO outfit. I can’t speak to what this company does, but just be careful.
In March of 2011, I posted this over at my Livejournal. I happened to come across the relevant website again as a result of another search, and finding that the “company” is still in business, I thought it best to put another heads-up out there. More exposure means more forewarned consumers.
———————
Several years ago I had a very unpleasant experience with an outfit called USA SEO Pros while working on increasing exposure for my online business. Subsequently I found a writeup, which I attach below, verbatim – it’s no longer coming up on Google, so I’m not sure who the author is. However, it’s spot-on – just about fact for fact a mirror of my own experience.
I’m posting this because there are still people out there being taken advantage of. If even one person reads this and saves their money, it will have been worth the effort.
Author Unknown1
A friend of mine in the Real Estate business came to me a few months ago to ask for some advice on SEO. I went out to lunch and gave her some pointers, then got back to being busy and simply forgot to ask her how it was going. On Saturday she called me asking if I could help out with her desktop machine, as it had become badly virally infected. While working on that, I asked her how the her site was doing.
“Oh, I hired a company to do that for me” was the reply. Then she turned round and handed me a manila folder with some documents in it. “Here’s what they did for me”.
I pulled out the first document. It started off with screen-shots of submissions to the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN & Alexa?… ok, not a great start, but I continued through this document… there were submissions to directories. Ok, let’s take a look at those… hmm, never heard of the majority of them, and quite a few aren’t even in English , this looks like a default directory submission from some tool…
Ok, next document. It’s the invoice for $1750, with “no refunds, no cancellations” typed on it. I ask if she has a contract, or even an email outlining their work, the reply was negative. From the sounds of it, she was cold called, and promised the earth, or #1 rankings in G, Y & M for local Real Estate terms, which amounts for the same thing. The salesperson obviously did a good job, because she gave them her credit card details and sat back. Well, she didn’t quite sit back, she kept calling them to see why she wasn’t #1 yet, and their response was “It’s organic, give it a little more time”.
The next document was a copy of the code on the website, but it looked a little strange, so I went to her site and looked at the code. They didn’t match. This was puzzling, had they only given her recommendations and not implemented them? Then I noticed the URL at the top of the page… it was for a different site.
Yes, a different site. So I asked her if she owned that domain? “No, they did that” was the reply. I reviewed the code. The title tag contained her name, and her name alone, none of the keywords that they were going to magically get her to the #1 spot for, just her name. The same was true of the H1 tag. (Note: this new site doesn’t even rank in the top 50 for her name).
Content on the site was terrible, with keywords stuffed, more strong tags than you could shake multiple sticks at, poor look & feel, all on an extremely long home page. The sub-pages were even worse. In order to save time, given that theirs is obviously a volume business, they had scraped content using the title of the page. Yes, this could potentially work for unique terms, but when you sell Real Estate in a place with a name like Sterling, you may want to check the results…
What else did I notice in the code? Well, the most interesting thing was a nice big ad on the page for USA SEO Pro’s, which wasn’t the name of the company that she had hired. Since I can’t imagine that they’d altruistically put a link and an ad on for a competitor, it must be the same company (in fact the testimonials on their website refer to the initials of the company that she hired, so they are the one and same company), but why didn’t they use their own name? A quick search for usaseopros reveals why…
Now, wherever they have a negative listing, such as on the Real Estate Blog, or on Ripoff Report, you can see that they’re actively going into those sites and responding to the criticism. Of course, the responses that show up are from ’satisfied customers’ and ‘proud employees’ both of which, based on my experiences with my friend’s site, are false. Note: This is important. Many disreputable companies follow this practice to try to minimize the impact of negative feedback from dissatisfied companies.
So where does this leave my friend? She paid $1750 with no contract, and no defined deliverables. They ‘did some work’ and ‘delivered some documents’. The site they’ve ‘worked’ on doesn’t belong to her, they can take it down at will, there’s no guarantee that they’ll transfer the domain to her if she asks them to (which is what I’ve asked her to do, despite the fact that it shows not one incoming link, I guess those Lithuanian directories really take time to register). As for their #1 ranking promises, all verbal, nothing in writing. What can she do? Most likely not much, except warn others about her experience, and take this as lessons for the future.
I’ve told her that I’ll give her a hand when I can, and that in the meantime she should read and learn from real SEOs who have experience in the Real Estate market, not scammers.
End of Quoted Article
My own experience was quite similar. These people created about 15 different websites and loaded them with scraped data without editing a single bit of content. As a result, my fine business (selling MSM, or Methyl-Sulfonyl-Methane, a nutritional supplement that provides elemental sulfur) was pointing to sites advertising “MSM: Men who have sex with men”.
What was even more scary – in order to allow them to work on my website, I provided them with my FTP password. As a result, someone at their extremely disreputable organization loaded my site with links to the vilest of pornography, as well as Javascript malware exploits which are still being flagged by AVG in some of my backup files.
The very bottom line was that my $1,500.00 bought me absolutely no increase in business, and interminable headaches getting my website cleaned up.
This all went down before I became educated about the worthlessness of keyword-stuffing and doorway pages in general, but be alert – these people are still out there. They still have an active website. If anyone from this sleazeball outfit calls you, hang up at once – but be extra careful, because like all liars and thieves, they may be hiding their name behind a shell outfit.
Some good advice for avoiding bad SEO companies and what to do instead can be found at Portent.com
The Old Wolf has spoken.
[1] If you out there see this, please leave a comment here, and I’ll give you full attribution.
Playing in the World Game 