Is it just me, or is his expression the look of a man whose laxative just kicked in?

One thing I’m enjoying about using WordPress is the Akismet spam filter.  So far it’s protected me from over 90 spam posts (in just about one month) with a 100% success rate (i.e. no false positives).  Interestingly, all of the spam that it’s caught appears to be entered by humans (or at least a fairly reasonable facsimile thereof).  They all use some fairly stock phrases that attempt to flatter you as to your content but that are completely unrelated to the topic of the post.  It comes across as really stilted and silly.

Anyhow, the spam sweatshops were especially busy last night, since there were 14 new spam comments in the filter awaiting my attention (I last emptied it around 5:00pm yesterday).  This one, in particular, though, caught my eye.  Not only do they have the audacity to try to shove this crap into my comments, but it’s kind of insulting to boot!

Dont acquire this the wrong way, but youre entirely boring me right here. Do not get me wrong, I imagine what you need to say is valid…completely! But, youve received to provide me a thing to believe about that involves pictures. You realize what they say, -A picture is worth a thousand phrases.- You could potentially cut down on the terms if you just gave me a few photographs.

If I’m so boring, then maybe you need to find another site to spam.  In the meantime, your comment is being routed to File 13 for proper consideration.

I have come to suspect that the death of our republic will not be accompanied by a thunderous KABOOM but instead by a plaintive whine of it’s for the children (or perhaps its hoary cousin if it saves just one life).

Someone hit my site over the weekend using the following search phrase:
   i have emails which repeatedly continue arriving in my inbox the same “ones over” and over and over again why

Aside from the weird use of quotes, can’t you just feel the desperation in that search?  I think it’s the pathos of the “over and over again why” part that puts it over the top (kind of reminds me of “When will the hurting stop?” [*]).

Anyhow, to answer the question, either you have been targeted by a particularly annoying spammer, or there is a problem with your email program.  I have seen this problem at times with Thunderbird using POP3 when you leave the email on the server and your system is experiencing intermittent network problems as well as insufficient memory.  This was with an old laptop that had insufficient memory and was getting bogged down by a nightly virus scan.  Adding more memory fixed the nightly network problems and I haven’t seen the issue since.

Here’s a little bit of Thanksgiving humor as we move towards Turkey Day:

I saw this ad over at Rachel Lucas’s blog today:

I couldn’t help but think that not only did this product cause her to lose 12 pounds, but it made her go from black to white. Truly an amazing feat!

But not spindled, and only moderately mutilated…

I went to the dentist’s office yesterday afternoon for a cleaning and exam.  When the dentist when to adjust the chair for the exam part, it was like some sort of gremlin had infested its electronics, because it decided to recline me all the way back to horizontal (or perhaps further) and then it came back up and tried to bend me into a pretzel.  Eventually, the thing decided to return to normal and the dentist decided not to press any more buttons.  It was like some sort of comedy gag.

I couldn’t help but notice a recent flare up in the long-running rancorous dispute between the adherents of the pistol design of Gaston Glock and that of John Moses Browning. 

As someone who has owned, shot, and carried both designs, I really don’t get where all the acrimony comes from.  Live and let live, I say, and let each carry what he or she feels most comfortable with.

Isn’t there room enough in our safes for both? 

This is quite possibly the funniest damn thing I’ve seen all week:

Via The Fat Guy.

Another Oleg Volk masterpiece.

Found via Tamara K.