I got this picture via email, not from anyone I know, but from a stranger with the wrong address. Having been among the earlier beta-testers of Gmail, I managed to get a pretty basic email address: bchase@gmail.com. There are a lot of B. Chases in the world, and their friends and family are always emailing me with crazy messages intended for other people. I love when this happens. The above pic is from a guy who works for the humane society, and was attached to an email about the world's biggest dog. All of the information about the world's biggest dog is correct (an English Mastiff named Hercules, weighing 282 pounds and belonging to a guy named Joe Flynn) but this picture is not Hercules. It's a Photoshopped hoax. Still, I love getting stuff like this from strangers.

Once, I got an message from someone who was emailing in sick to work. Jeezus, even I saw through his too-word excuses. "I can hardly move," he said. "I don't want to expose you to this." Reading it, I wondered why he didn't use any "cough-cough" emoticons. Then I wished I could email in sick to work.

I once got an mp3 from a musician named Bethany Chase who wanted to know what I thought of her latest song. "It's great!" I replied. "Are you, like, my third cousin or something?" No, it turned out she had the wrong B. Chase; she was looking for her brother.

Some day I'm going to win $50 million, and somone is going to show up at my doorstep with a giant check and a hoarde of video cameras. After I get jump up and down for about ten minutes, one of them will frown. "Wait a minute. No, I'm sorry," they'll say. "We're looking for Bartholomew Chase."

That's when it stops being funny.