Welcome To Exhibition Please Show Wallet

I love having an email address here at work. I get to see a lot of things that never come to my home computer. I guess that is because we have spam filters in operation at home. I guess this is a case of things that are NSFH....

Some of the stuff is innocuous - the offers from Chinese manufacturers for PCB's and machine tools are  quite genuine. I guess our name attracts that. And of course the nature of our business attracts the inevitable emails from Malaya or the Dutch East Indies asking for supply of 500 cameras and do we take credit cards....?

We get the lawyer's letters informing us that we are the beneficiaries of vast fortunes and we are invited to participate in the smuggling of diamonds, gold, cash and jewels out of various African countries on a regular basis. As yet we have not been asked to buy Irish Sweepstakes tickets or North German Class Lottery tickets but I look for it any day.

Imagine my delight on being offered a place today in a photographic competition in, of all places, Belgrade. That is Belgrade in Serbia, not Montana. You'll remember Serbia - the country that sits in between Romania and Austria-Hungary - about 200 Km by 400 Km - same size as WA's southwest but with more tanks and fighter planes....

Well, anyway, they want photos to enter into a contest - you get four divisions. Everyday life with machine gun, Portrait with machine gun, Fine Art Nude with machine gun, and Open with machine gun. This may prove a little limiting here in WA due to the gun laws but perhaps they will relax the entry rules.

The entries will be judged by four people with acute accents at the ends of their names and more letters behind them than a soviet field marshal has medals. Actually they might BE soviet field marshals.

The prizes? Medals, apparently. See thoughts about soviet field marshal above. Maybe they've got a lot of them left over.

And what do you need to do to enter? Send them money. The basic fee is $ 30 or equivalent in euros, and they have a large section of banking details on their form that deals with wiring them the money.

Please do not think I am being cynical or hard on the Serbs. You can see this same sort of contest here in Australia - indeed I helped a model enter for one just last week that I suspect will prove just about as fair.  Heck, you can get worse conditions in some of the local city and shire contests. Just be aware of what is going on.

Gotta go now - I need to look out a couple of nude girls and a Lewis gun.