3950 Dead AOL id comes back to life!

Thursday, June 5, 2014

I have Jay's old email id on AOL.  I haven't used it in something like eight years, because we went through a period where on every AOL update I lost all my saved mail.  I don't even remember the password.  Back when I set up my Gmail account, I set AOL to forward all email to Gmail.  Over the years I've been getting fewer and fewer bits of email forwarded from AOL, mostly ads from cruise lines.  AOL, for all its faults, does a fairly good job of filtering out spam.

Suddenly I'm getting loads of crap forwarded from AOL, all unsolicited spam ads.  It all seems to be coming through some kind of bulk mailer called "iBuilder".

Where the heck did they get that email address?  How do I stop it?

(I may have shot myself in the foot.  It's possible that something somewhere, like a local store I was shopping in, insisted that I give them an email address, and I shrugged and gave them the AOL id without even thinking about it.)

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Bonus rant:
Alexander Fleming DID NOT "discover" penicillin.   He merely named it and gave it a medical stamp of approval, and made it possible to make money on it.  People had been strapping moldy bread to injuries for centuries before he came along.
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3708 Phish hook?

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own

despised and unwanted feelings.

-- Alice Miller, psychologist and author (1923-2010) --

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Actual Subject line and content of an email received today -

Aol.com your accont is loked

(followed by a bogus link to AOL security.)

Gee, do you think it might be fake?
.

3550 Mystery visitor

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Stop dwelling on your childhood and embrace your adulthood. Growing up is becoming the person you wanted to be.

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 For a while now, perhaps a week or two, this blog has been heavily visited by someone(s) in or near Washington, DC.  Whoever it is, they are not the usual visitor.  Feedjit shows them visiting the latest six or so posts in quick succession, every day, sometimes several times a day.  Feedjit also shows where the link is that they came in on - like I know when someone comes in through a Google search, through Google reader, a link in an email, or via a link in another blog or website. 

This visitor will visit five or six posts in less than a minute, and each visit is coming from a different site - and none of those sites have a link to this blog!  In other words, the link origin is faked, and I suspect the "Washington, DC" may be faked, too.

At first I thought it was someone who didn't want me to know who they were, so they were using a proxy.  Now I think it may be a spam robot.  (There's a (very) remote possibility it could be my own government, triggered by my links to middle eastern blogs and that I read a lot of middle eastern news reports and comment on foreign blogs and reports, but that's just paranoia.)

I'm half tempted to take word verification off.  If it's a spam robot, it'll show its colors immediately.

This is reminiscent of a few years ago when I was getting a lot of visits from Fort Meade, near Washington.  I'd heard, when I lived in that area, that Fort Mead is full of spies.  I asked in the blog "Who's coming in from Fort Meade?", and the visits immediately stopped.  Strange. 

Anyone else seeing anything like this?
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3280 Spam

Wednesday, June 6, 2011

"SpellCheck programs may ensure that the word is spelled correctly,
but it doesn't ensure that you used the right word."
-- Me --

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I just came upon another slur against Spam - you know, the ham in a can?

For the thousandth time, Spam is NOT gristle, brains, eyeballs, innards, or anything else.

Spam is perfectly good shoulder/hip meat, and that's ALL it is.

When you buy a boneless ham in the store, ever wonder how it got boneless? When the ham is removed from the bone, there's a lot of meat left on the bone, because the bones are oddly shaped and there's a lot of scrap left when you cut out a nicely-shaped ham (boneless hams come from closer to the joints than bone-in hams, which come from the area with nice straight bones).

Spam is the trimmings left on the bones. Trimmed off, put in a can, and cooked in the can - and that's where the jelly comes from. There's nothing in Spam that isn't also in the ham. If you've ever fried a slice of ham, you've seen it make the same jelly, that turns brown in the pan and tastes sweet and salty.

So quit panning SPAM! Stop following the herd. It's good stuff, nothing to turn your nose up at.
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1428 They've Figured Me Out!

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Spam's getting more seductive. They've finally figured out I'm not interested in increasing the size of my penis, or seeing some teen's "private personal" videos. They've figured out that maybe I want FREE STUFF!

This is really truly the subject lines of the entire contents of my Yahoo id's spam bucket today:

Back to School- Let us buy you a Dell Laptop
$5OO.OO Starbucks Gift Card – yours today!
Let Us Give You A $1000 United Airlines Gift Card
Get Your $500 Target™ Gift Card—plus lots of cool stuff!
Love Your Pet? Here Is A $1000 Visa Gift Card.
Claim Your $100 Loreal Gift Card!
Claim Your $100 Claire's Gift Card!
Want An Abercrombie, Express or Gap Gift Card?
Let Us Pay For 5 Theme Park Season Passes
The New Dell XPS Laptop Is All Yours!
Enjoy A Complimentary 4 Night Luxury Cancun Vacation!
The New Dell XPS Laptop Is All Yours!
Enjoy A Complimentary 4 Night Luxury Cancun Vacation!
Let Us Buy You A Dell XPS M1330 Notebook!
There Has Never Been An Easier Way To Make Money!
There Has Never Been An Easier Way To Make Money!
Get Your Disney Vacation For The Whole Family!
Let Us Give You A FREE $1,000.00 Best Buy Gift Card!
We're giving away $500 Trader Joe’s Gift Cards!
Want A FREE Family Trip To Orlando!
$1000.00 Victoria Secrets Gift Card
Shop For School With Your $1000.00 Staples (r) Gift Card.
Special Notice About Government Auction. Secrets Just For You
James Lost 30 pounds using Colonex
Claim your $500.00 Baby Supplies - FREE!

...Not sure how James and his colon got in there....

#451 Pennsylvania

I'm back from Pennsylvania, the land of scrapple and suicide lanes. Nice Thanksgiving dinner at Daughter's fiance Hercules' grandmother Nana's house, where I finally found out the difference between stuffing and dressing.

Daughter and Hercules came up from New Jersey. They're taking a few days to explore areas in Pennsylvania they might consider moving to. Hercules' mother is on an extended visit from California.

Hmmm, lots of things in the first paragraph to explain to non-Pennsylvanians!

Scrapple IS what most people think Spam is but isn't. When Hormel makes a canned ham, they cut the big hunk of meat off the shoulder, and can it. But there's a lot of meat left on, in, and around the shoulder bones. So they trim all the bits of meat off the bones (getting a bit of the soft gristle, too, pure protein), grind it and put it in the Spam can, seal the can, then cook it. Cooking in the can is what causes all the nice jelly around the Spam. Spam is pure ground-up pork shoulder. Nothing else, nothing yucky. I like Spam.

Scrapple, on the other hand, is made from all kinds of scraps. I had a very bad experience more than 50 years ago when I accidentally saw scrapple being made. It involved huge a boiling vat topped with gray foam that parted to reveal an entire pig head, that rolled up like the "NO!" in a Magic Eightball. It had eye holes. Its tongue was hanging out. It looked at me. To this day, the mere smell of scrapple nauseates me. I was offered scrapple for breakfast this morning, and the severed pig head looked at me again.

Suicide lanes seem to be unique to Pennsylvania. I thought they had gotten rid of them, because they do deserve the name. It's a third center lane on a rural two lane highway, to be used only for left turns from either direction (or, unofficially, for passing a slow farm vehicle or Amish carriage). It runs for miles, down the middle of the road. Naturally, some idiots think it's a "go faster" lane created especially for them. So some innocent will pull into the suicide lane to make a left turn, and be clobbered at 60 mph by an idiot who can't get back into the regular lane quick enough. Unless the idiot has already been clobbered by another idiot doing the same thing from the other direction. Oh well. A lot of Pennsylvania is still nearly virgin forest. Maybe this is how the state keeps population growth down.

AOL Journal Land has been full of arguments and discussions the past week or so about stuffing versus dressing. I never knew there was a difference. Nana served both yesterday. The stuffing was the usual bread etc. mixture stuffed into the turkey. The dressing was mashed potatoes with sauteed onions and celery, and a couple slices of white toast cut into small cubes and then sauteed with the veggies, and veggies and bread were then mixed into the potatoes. I liked both. Yummy.

I'm blathering. I'm kind of avoiding a topic I want to note here. For myself.

This past summer I told Daughter one of my biggest secrets, because it affects her, and because she finally came right out and asked. It was finally unavoidably time. I had hoped she would just sit on the information, because it could potentially adversely affect another, who is deeply involved but didn't know it. Or suspected, because of some questions I had to ask about ten years ago, but didn't know for sure. And probably didn't want to know. And really didn't need to know anyway. Maybe.

Yeah. I should have known better. This is, after all, Daughter. She is what she is and has always been. If she were a dog, she'd be a terrier.

Daughter made contact, an anonymous card last June (which she didn't tell me about until now), and a phone call this past week. They discussed the topic. They're exchanging photos. I can't believe it. My past is coming back to haunt me.

She's handling it well. So's he, apparently. I'm a mess.

I don't know how to feel about it. It's been in the back of my head for 30 years, and now here it is right in front. She played a stored cell phone message for me to hear, and the voice on the phone shook me badly. I asked Hercules' aunt for a cigarette, and I took it down to the basement and smoked it. I don't know why, but when my mind is going six directions at once, the only thing that will stop it and put me back on track is nicotine.

She has given me an email address.

She has pointed him to this journal.

Ack!

I wanted to do an entry on "I want to go home". It's all written up - I wrote it last week, when I noticed that I say "I am content" a lot in these journals, even when things are tearing me up. It's such a difference, and I wanted to explore it. I figured I'd put it in sometime when I have no time to write or nothing to say.

But now I hesitate.

And I'm not sure why.

~~Silk