Evening plans and Nigerian scams

The big decision on my mind right now is whether to see MI3 at the Uptown tonight or stay home and watch the Veronica Mars finale. Sure, my friends are all going to MI3 and it's an awesome theater and I can drink beer tomorrow and I can always just bittorrent Vmars...but the SEASON FINALE!

This New Yorker piece about a man who lost $80,000 (and went to prison for two years) from one of the Nigerian email scams is fascinating. Not so much for the "can you believe he's so stupid" factor, but for the complexity of the stories the Nigerians told the mark. Family relationships, bribing of guards, deals gone wrong -- but somehow it's very soap-opera nature makes it easier to believe. That is how life happens, but putting those webs and shards into a coherent narrative is difficult even for novelists; I can't even imagine doing it with the end goal of receiving actual cash from an actual human. I wonder how much they keep track of any one story. Do they take notes? Brainstorm what will happen next? Make bets on exactly how far they can push the story? Maybe even scribble out ideas on a whiteboard?