Sequential Stinking

In a recent blog entry, Roger mentioned some spam he got. He kind of pre-empted me, I'd been planning on talking about spam for months, but somehow I always managed to either forget about it or what I was going to say. It is a fascinatingly odd subject, which, in my humble opinion, is a great example of futility, but obviously has to work to some degree or it would have died out like dial-up Internet connections.

Most email accounts have spam filters, which are now a lot more sophisticated than they were, when they just arbitrarily grabbed anything that had been CC'd to more than three people and this alone has to suggest that for spam to actually work, someone must be trawling through their spam folders looking for cheap meds, penis enlargement, Russian mail order brides, Viagra, credit checks and/or anything else you could possibly imagine, including whatever variant of the Nigerian Prince email. I always find it amusing that you see just about everything 'advertised' in spam apart from arms, illegal drugs and child slavery - which suggests that whoever is responsible for spam is easily traceable by the authorities, contrary to reports we hear or read.

I can understand how some people got sucked into scams such as the aforementioned Nigerian Prince and his millions of dollars - some people are just suckers for allowing their greed to get the better of them - and I can understand why people would go in search of cheap medicine and possibly even Viagra (especially if they're too self-conscious to mention their impotence to their doctor), even if clicking on any of these spam emails will at best leave someone open to credit card fraud and at worst infect their computers with more trojans and phishing ware for whoever is paying for the spam to have access to everything on your hard drive.

I witness fuckwittedness every week on the Internet; from ignorant opinions to people participating in something that warrants no attention from anyone else. [I'm just as guilty of offering opinions and participating in notice boards and forums for the BBC and newspapers, even though I know that the opinion of P. Hall of Northampton is as interesting/valid/important or sensible as I alone believe it to be. I don't care how much common sense you see on a noticeboard or forum, it's still being wasted or pointlessly written because NO ONE will take any notice of it and those that do are NO ONE! But spam? Spam is, IMHO, something that should be dying out or even facing extinction, yet it now seems to be more prolific than ever before and remarkably even more bizarre and weird. Some spam that ends up filtered out of my main mail is just downright unfathomable.

There appears to be three kinds of spam nowadays: spam from recognised places - the kind of thing you sign up for (or have to to gain access to something else) that bombard you with shite until you click on the unsubscribe button or hit the This Is Spam button and it gets filtered into the same place as the Viagra, painkiller, credit and anything that requires you to give credit card details. Then there's the third kind; the stuff that is written in machine code, or hasn't been sent by any one from nowhere, or the kind that just doesn't make sense, like it has been generated by a dyslexic computer or an alien who understands the words, just doesn't know how to arrange them properly. This kind of spam along with stuff that seems to defy all logic - spam that has no links, gives no reason for being sent and more importantly the anti-virus software has scanned and declared clean.

Admittedly, with a billion Internet users worldwide, then less than 0.01% would still net whatever or whoever the scam was from enough money to retire, so I can see the logic in that, but seriously if there are ridiculously stupid people out there, and sadly we know there are, how come they're still alive?

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November 20 - seven raspberries from the garden; 3½lb of horse and field mushrooms and about 1lb of Slippery Jacks from the dog walk. My runner beans that had all but died off a month ago are suddenly sprouting shoots from 'dead' runners; the grape vine is still growing; the young nectarine trees are still green and showing no signs of autumn and the grass needs cutting again. It is a bit weird and obviously it's all going to end in tears and sacks full of dead baby ducklings...

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I spent £40 on ONE pair of shoes yesterday. That is obscene!

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Someone in a 50 yard radius of my house is learning to play a musical instrument. I've no idea what instrument, possibly the thing Rolf Harris was hawking in the 1970s, but whatever it is it currently sounds like a man beating bagpipes to death with a goose.

But, what's just become an even weirder thing, it appears whatever this instrument is you can pluck it as well as blow through it... It must be a chicken!

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Today I have been knee deep in duck pooh. Three times a year (sometimes four depending on debris) we empty the pond. Last night, I had to dance with Vile's Disease again by sucking black, stinky, foetid pond water up and old hose so that gravity would help empty it over night. Today, I had to scoop out a crazy mixture of plums, twigs, duck shit, pebbles and gloop in a big bucket and then chuck it on the veg patch.

It's one of the most icky jobs you could imagine and especially unpleasant in the fog and frost. The ducks also spend three hours barking at you because they have no pond. It's a bloody good job I'm a vegetarian.