Another Total Wipeout by Amazon

I see someone named "Don Reed" has just suffered a traditional mass wipeout "by Amazon", an awful lot of posts all blown away at the same time. Did anyone catch these posts while they still were present? What were they about?

OT: Ave Atque Vale: Christopher Hitchens

What a month.

[...] Christopher Hitchens, the outspoken author, writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor, died on Thursday from complications related to esophageal cancer. He was 62. Below, some of his opinionated prose. [...]

Christopher Hitchens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OT: Ave Atque Vale: George Whitman, founder of legendary Paris bookshop

(Title courtesy of Maestro Harp, an internal joke of sorts). Born in 1913 in East Orange, N.J, George Whitman, founder of legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co, dies at 98 in Paris.

[...] Though eventually an economic success, attracting book lovers from all over the world and writers such as Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the running joke was that the place rarely actually did what a bookstore is supposed to do: Sell books.

And that was exactly how Whitman wanted it. He used to call Shakespeare & Co. "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookshop," and in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said: "I never had any money, and never needed it. I've been a bum all my life." [...]

Also see American's bookstore in Paris becomes family affair.

Harriet Congratulated on her 26,000 th "Review"

(Courtesy of the awesome poster buck 210):

buck210 says:

This is your 26,000th "review" Hattie, congratulations! 12+ years of averaging just under 6 fake reviews per day, just how do you do it Hattie? I mean, really, you put out 63 reviews just today alone, how is that possible to read that many books in just one day? Oh, and lets not forget about actually writing these "reviews", just to write 63 of them in 24 hours would be quite a task, and you claim to have also read them? But, then again, you've put out over 120 of them in a day before, so, 63 is just a drop in the bucket for you.

The year in review, stats collected from the GTG Institute of Tracking the Antics of Fraud HK:

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185 fraudulent reviews in Jan 2011 5.97 per day 5.97 YTD 5.79 Overall 23678 Reviews to date

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229 fraudulent reviews in Feb 2011 8.18 per day 7.07 YTD 5.81 Overall 23907 Reviews to date

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204 fraudulent reviews in Mar 2011 6.58 per day 6.91 YTD 5.81 Overall 24111 Reviews to date

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306 fraudulent reviews in Apr 2011 10.20 per day 7.73 YTD 5.84 Overall 24417 Reviews to date

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171 fraudulent reviews in May 2011 5.52 per day 7.29 YTD 5.84 Overall 24588 Reviews to date

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219 fraudulent reviews in Jun 2011 7.30 per day 7.29 YTD 5.85 Overall 24807 Reviews to date

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218 fraudulent reviews in Jul 2011 7.03 per day 7.25 YTD 5.86 Overall 25025 Reviews to date

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289 fraudulent reviews in Aug 2011 9.32 per day 7.51 YTD 5.89 Overall 25314 Reviews to date

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230 fraudulent reviews in Sep 2011 7.67 per day 7.53 YTD 5.90 Overall 25544 Reviews to date

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210 fraudulent reviews in Oct 2011 6.77 per day 7.45 YTD 5.90 Overall 25754 Reviews to date

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215 fraudulent reviews in Nov 2011 7.17 per day 7.43 YTD 5.91 Overall 25969 Reviews to date

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67 fraudulent reviews in Dec 2011 11.2 per day 7.51 YTD 5.92 Overall 26036 Reviews to date

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Terrific contribution from buck210, as always. His services to society have been invaluable, hat's off.

OT: CBS News No Speeka Englisha

President Obama: The economy, the Congress, the future

Steve Kroft:
We have a new CBS poll, which is out this weekend. And I'll give you the news that's good for you first. People like you. They respect you. They think that you're working hard. And they realize that you faced an enormous amount of trouble and problems, many of them inherited. And you're [sic!] approval rating is four times higher than the Congress.

Not bad. They're approval is quite good, I take it. There doing remarkably well.

Mischugene Old Yenta Dethroned at last: Harriet Klausner no longer No.1

Unless it's a bug that will soon be fixed, Amazon removed the "classic" reviewer ratings: what used to be called "new reviewer ranks" is now the only rank displayed on the site. Aaaaand, our dear Harriet is no longer No.1 however you look at it. She's the proud owner of the rank 815 (as of this moment). This is still about a million times too high, but, well, wow, come on, let us celebrate what we can.

Not only did she lose her absurd topmost place, but her new-style ranking, uncharacteristically, went down a couple of hundred places in the last month or so (she had been bobbing between 650 and 700 for a few years prior to that, submerging a bit and then promptly being rescued (by the Klausner Protection Squad? who knows...)). To be honest, I did not believe Amazon would make such a step, ever (PD Harris did insinuate it as a given long ago, and dayum!, he was right... 'course that was accidental, so let's not make too much of this). Matter of fact, I thought they (Amazon) might introduce even more parallel hierarchies, so as to enable everyone and their sister to be No.1 in some dimension of this multidimensional universe of bullshit all-five-star reviewing.

Well, it's always a pleasure to be proven wrong like that. Today's a good day then: while "the witch" isn't really dead, she's no longer the No.1 witch. Good bye, Harriet, dear, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. 'Cause that'd be very "action-packed" and, as followers of the "subgenre", we would "relish". Over the top of the Empire State building, if you know what I mean.

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And now, boys and girls, let us hold hands and chant:

Harriet Klausner sat on a wall,
Harriet Klausner had a great fall.
All the publishing industry shills and all the useless scribblers with fake posting accounts
Couldn't put Harriet Klausner back on top of the wall.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Standard Disclaimer for Harriet Klausner Reviews:

Courtesy of poster "Guy the Gorilla":

Guy the Gorilla says:
Standard Disclaimer for Harriet Klausner Reviews:

If you are a bona-fide Amazon customer sufficiently interested in this specific book to be reading reviews about it, as well as appended comments, please be advised that you should disregard this particular "review," seemingly "written" by one Harriet Klausner, Amazon's "Classic Number 1 Reviewer." For my part, I cannot provide you with any helpful information regarding whether this specific book you are interested in is good, bad, or mediocre. That is because I have not read it.

And neither has Harriet Klausner.

If I have piqued your curiosity, please, go to this link (it's for a Harriet Klausner review from about a week or so ago), read the comments, and consider the evidence and the numbers yourself:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R36ZCKXKW96MI3/ref=cm_aya_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0425234622#wasThisHelpful

[BTW - This is the set of comments associated with a book called "The Insider" if you are having trouble getting the link to work.]

I also want to point out, and you can easily confirm this yourself, that over the last 9 days, Harriet Klausner has "read" and "reviewed" 105 books, including 49 on September 2nd and 49 on September 3rd. Assuming 300 pages a book, she has theoretically read 31,500 pages during this period. Given that there are only 12,960 minutes in a 9 day period, even if she did nothing but read every second of every one of those 9 days, never stopping to eat, sleep, or use the loo, she would still need to read at a rate of 2.5 pages per minute.

And assuming that is somehow possible, when did she find the time to write 105 reviews during that period?

I invite you to assess these "reviews" yourself. Do they not look like they were simply plagiarized from the dust jacket or inside pages of the book (depending on whether the book is a hardcover or MMP)? Or perhaps lifted from information already prepared by the publishing company? Something fishy is going on here. And note that every book she reviews gets either a 4 or 5 star rating - in this period - 73 5-star ratings and the remaining 32 books receiving a 4-star rating. She likes EVERYTHING she reads? Seriously?

Also - please read the comments that accompany many of the reviews. You will see that there are large numbers of people who are aware of this situation, who make it a habit to constantly check in and write comments to warn unsuspecting persons like yourself that all is not kosher here.

Cheers

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Great job, Guy! This should be automatically prepended to every Klausner "review". Here's a snapshot, just in case (as usual, click on image for full size):