Money For Nothing

Banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee
That ain't working that’s the way you do it
Get your money for nothing; get your chicks for free

So wrote Mark Knopfler way back in the last Century (1985 to be precise). There have been many interpretations of the song Money For Nothing but for my money at least I reckon Mark was a latter day Nostradamus no less.

The lyrics foretell of a very 21st Century phenomenon. Not unlike the days of the great Gold Rushes, the 21st Century bears witness to the mass pursuit of riches in return for, well to be honest, if not quite nothing then certainly not a lot.

Let's examine a specific chimp at random - billed as make money doing nothing this gem pretty much encapsulates the whole dinero4zero zeitgeist that infests much of today's Internet.

Here we see an individual engaged in hot pursuit of money for precious little by hoping to draw in other individuals on a similar quest to locate the secret to making money for nothing. It's a sort of Moebius pyramid scheme where all the participants endlessly chase each other in a huge loop with no hope of ever actually getting anywhere, or indeed of making any actual money.

This particular site is especially enjoyable for the quality of the writing. For example "...advertisers pays to bux.to to serve adverts to You. Off course..." and my personal favourite "Earn money from home: as proffesional rewriter". Rewriting the word "professional" is simply inspired. One has to guess of course (or off course even) that this is the work of a rather dyslexic Article Spinner.

But even so, failing to run it through a spell checker or at the very least check it looks like English rather than the result of a game of scrabble played through a haze of Class A narcotics? That really is shooting for money for absolutely nothing. And inevitably and justly doomed to failure.

The 21st Century may have ushered in all manner of new and exotic stuff, but short of paying Idiot Tax (or playing the lottery as some call it) you still can't get money for nothing. It's some kind of socio-economic twist on the Laws of Thermo Dynamics. Don't ask why; it just is. If you want to acquire money then you need to provide stuff of value to others. And YetAnotherMediocreMeTooBlogAboutMakingMoney doesn't really tick the value box.

As a slight diversion from making money for nothing, how about spending money on nothing, or even Sarah Palin glasses? As you can see from the link, I'm not making this up; this guy (or gal, this is the web, who can tell) is evidently turning a decent dollar selling Kawasaki 704 spectacles. And good luck to him/her - they've uncovered and exploited a potentially lucrative niche that provides something quite clearly of value to, how shall I put this, a certain type of woman.

Because it would seem that where until only recently it was de-rigueur for the aspiring woman about town to mimic the lively, animated features of a stroke victim using injections of the nerve agent Botox, now it seems the Pitbull-with-lipstick-look is where it's at.

Putting aside the worrying observation that a pig with lipstick is still a pig, it seems that many women have adopted Sarah Palin as a fashion icon and role model. I guess some might also continue with the Botox and aim for the "Pitbull chewing a wasp" look.

I would ask rhetorically, whatever next? Unfortunately I fear the question might be answered all too seriously as "the rod that Hillary Clinton has wedged up her ass - only $324.99 on eBay".