Anyway, its no surprise that spam marches on, I guess.  But as it does,  it continues to grow increasingly wily. In fact,  I think we might be in The Golden Age of Spam because currently I am getting spam that, although  still annoying, is almost but not quite  hilarious.  The newest batch of spam that I have been obsessing about is disguised to sound like interested remarks by  commenters.  Just imagine  the challenges this kind of spam presents to  the spam provider who now has to prepare  a  ” one comment fits all” disguise for whatever they are selling. It has to seem equally applicable as a comment on a blog about spring break or one about the health care bill. Finding a way to say something that sounds specific yet generic at the same time has got to be a lot trickier to write than the copy for those penis extenders. (One of my favorite of the latter category: “Giving your lovemaking the charge of passion and activeness is what our pilules are REALLY good at!)

In a way the task the spammers are now facing reminds me a little of my first job in TV, writing jokes and sketches for a show called The All New Laugh In.  It was the tail end of the seventies and the original producers of Laugh In decided to revive their hit topical weekly comedy show for a new audience only this time they wanted it to be available for syndication. Toward that end they instructed the writers to try and focus on current events that would also be evergreen. When I asked how that was possible, the head writer offered me subject matter examples: Pollution. Corporate greed. Corruption. You know, generic but still in the news. Needless to say, the show did not catch on like the original version. In fact, I think it only aired twice.  Maybe that head writer guy is in the passion and activeness pilule business now.

Anyway, I have been collecting some of my favorites of the new generic spam comments. All of them contain a live return address link  which is , of course, the real point.

Example #1. is an instant classic. Here it is in its entirety, minus the live link:

“I love the tips on this site, they are always to the point and just the information I was looking for. Theres a link at the bottom of the page its not working, please send me the link at!#%&*+”

While this comment probably goes undetected on at least half of the sites on which it appears, it was absolutely hilarious on this blog because one thing that no one has ever accused me of  being is “to the point and just the information I was looking for.” If I have ever made an actual point, it was probably accidental. To say nothing of the fact that there was no live link at the bottom of the page of my blog on which it appeared. Of course, another give away was the fact that the commenter was named of Celeb Videos…although, for all I know, Gwynneth Paltrow has a new daughter named Celeb. Or Ashlee Simpson does. Or Nicole Richie.

#2 one came from someone named Mortgage Modification. I call him Mort. He was using my rambling thoughts for his research. What a piece of research that must be!

” Thanks for the Blog ! I found it insightful with some research I’m doing right now. I’m going to bookmark this blog and return. What other resources are there on the same subject? Keep posting!”

I gotta give Mort credit where credit is due. His comment has it all:  a few generic complements (Insightful!! Keep posting!) , a statement of purpose (“Some research I’m doing right now”) and then a careful but completely generic question to substantiate the research claim (“What other resources are there on the same subject?). Had I written anything that connected to “other resources on the same subject” , I would have perhaps answered him back and been the lucky recipient of  whatever it is that might be of interest to a guy named Mortgage Modification.  I guess I’ll never know what that might be.

The truth is that I wish all these spammers would just dry up and blow away. But in the mean time, since at least this variety of spam is a almost(but not quite) making me laugh, I think I will begin to return the favor to them by leaving  generic complements for them at the end of each spam. This is the draft I am planning to use:

“Thanks for the chance to partake of your timely valuable services . What you are offering is a welcome addition for anyone of my gender,  lifestyle or demographic sample . I look forward to giving  you my personal information, social security number and credit card security code so that you may contact me repeatedly in the state and zip code of the country in which I am presently living! PS. Giving your lovemaking the charge of passion and activeness is what our pilules are Really good at!”

Where public couples are concerned, I am always cynical at first. But then, if  they persist  for enough years, I   start to buy that maybe they know something that I don’t .  It always takes me a while but damn…as soon as  I make that leap of faith, the next thing I know they are  filing mutual restraining orders.  A good example is Brad and Angie. For a long time they seemed ridiculous  both separately and together. Then recently I started to think that maybe they actually had defied the obvious shallow cliches. I no sooner spoke that silently to myself than  I read that she is trying to kill herself. Boom.  Not only are they both disqualified but I am pissed off at them because  they have made me feel like an idiot for  cashing in my cynical chip . (And as a bonus, in this case,   I want to strangle her for dragging all those children in to such an apparently neurotic mess  of a life .)

And that is why this year ,  it behooves us all to re-examine the greatest love story ever told: Romeo and Juliet.Here we can truly gain wisdom.

If you have not had the occasion to do so lately, please allow me to reacquaint you with the details of a timeless model of romantic love .
When we first meet the teenage Romeo, it is a Sunday night and he has decided to crash a ball just to catch a glimpse of Rosaline, a girl with whom he is desperately in love. Instead, he meets the thirteen-year-old Juliet. And even though, only seconds before he was deeply in love with Rosaline, now he knows instantly that this new thirteen-year-old girl is the greatest love of his life. Really. She is. He’s not kidding this time.

Juliet has never been in love before. All she knows about Romeo is that their two families hate each other. But so what? No ones parents ever like anyone cool that you like.  The important thing is that by Monday afternoon, so beautiful is their love, that they go ahead and get married.Just one day later. Maybe it seems hasty but back in those days, time moved so much more slowly than now that a day was more like two days or even three.

Anyway, in lieu of a honeymoon,  Juliet goes back home to spend the night at her parents’ house because her parents do not know about the marriage yet. But  to mark the day in a way that will make it memorable, Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin.  So by the time Juliet gets home,  her family is consumed by  grief.  They are so sad, in fact, that Juliet’s father decides there is no time like the present to arrange for Juliet to marry an older man. Perhaps he is thinking about how life is fragile and time is a-wasting. After all, Juliet is thirteen and not getting any younger.

However, because he’s Juliet’s father is a full grown adult, not a hot-headed teenager with raging hormones, he  knows better than to rush things. So he sets the wedding date for Thursday.

Naturally, the already-married Juliet realizes she must defy her father’s wishes. She is , after all, in the seventh grade.  She has boundaries and  she must  let her intentions be known. She probably could corner him at dinner and ask him to sit down with her for a serious talk. But instead she takes the most sensible course of action under the circumstances. She pretends to be dead.

This choice of action certainly bodes very well for the future of her marriage to Romeo since we now know that the core of any “love-at-first-sight” attraction is usually “repetition compulsion” – wherein a person reenacts the identical behavior and problems first seen in the parent-child relationship. In that respect, perhaps its for the best that Romeo and Juliet decide to  kill themselves a few pages later.. long before we are able to chart their marriage any farther into the future when it most certainly would have descended into scenarios like this:

Romeo (enters parlor) “Juliet! Juliet! My Light! I’m home! And I really have to talk to you about something that is bothering me….You know they say ‘Never go to bed mad’ and Juliet? Juliet? Oh no. Honey. Not dead again.  Please don’t be playing dead again. You were just dead on Monday. I can’t call 911 twice in one week. It is too embarrassing. Juliet? Juliet?”

So, summing up: A thirteen-year-old girl who likes to pretend to be dead married to a teenage murderer who has no trouble falling in love with two different girls on the same Sunday night.

Which leaves us with this slightly comforting fact. There is no reason to lament today’s lack of viable romantic models. Things only seem worse now.  The main difference between love now and then is that back then no one watched Oprah or went to therapy so they didn’t mind calling deranged neurotic behavior “the greatest love story ever told.”

FRANCES BUSS. PIONEER OF EARLY TELEVISION, DIES AT 92.

Ms. Buss was the prototype for Vanna White; she held props and kept score for television’s first regularly broadcast game show, “CBS Television Quiz.” She was the M.C. — or “femcee,” in the showbiz lingo of the time — for a series of instructional shows demonstrating first aid; she was a dancer on “The Country Dance,” a sort of antediluvian “American Bandstand.”

Frances Buss Buch in 2008.

I should add at this point that I didn’t prepare for the task by studying those supposedly impressive commercials that air on the Super Bowl so I had no idea what ball park I was supposed to be playing in. That wasn’t smart. And on top of that I don’t like Doritos.  Not at all. Where salty snacks are concerned, Doritos are not in my top twenty.  Looking back, I have to think that neither of these things worked in my favor.

That said, I made a hypothetical Dorito commercial.  And here it is.  Its nothing at all like the kind of commercials the Dorito company associates themselves with.  I didn’t know that then. I do now. My Dorito CommericalDorito Commerical

Come on…you have to give it up for my Dorito trees! I carefully waded through many bags of Doritos in order to select just the ones with a big loopy fold so I could organically drape them over my plants.  Proving once again that you can take the girl out of the art school, but you can’t take the art school out of the girl.  In fact, lets re visit some highlights of my Dorito plants.  Andy thinks that I would have collected the million if we had only referred to the raw fruits of the Dorito plant as “dorts”. Somehow I don’t think this would have changed anything.

dorito trees

Dungeons and Dragons Prison Ban Upheld

Robert Caplin for The New York Times Published: January 26, 2010

In an opinion issued on Monday , a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the claims in a lawsuit challenging a ban on the game Dungeons & Dragons by the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. The suit was brought by a prisoner, Kevin T. Singer, who argued that his First Amendment and 14th Amendment rights were violated by the prison’s decision to ban the game and confiscate his books and other materials, including a 96-page handwritten manuscript he had created for the game.Prison officials said they had banned the game at the recommendation of the prison’s specialist on gangs, who said it could lead to gang behavior and fantasies about escape.

Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,” prison officials said in court.

When I first met the man with whom I am currently sharing what I laughingly refer to as my life, his solution to my problem was to have me hang everything up in the guest bathroom. Here is the result of that. It was a good idea but there is no more room on those bathroom walls .

So today I am pretending to clean my office. I am trying to throw out books that are hurting my soul because I bought them and know I am never going to read them. Its not that hard for me to throw out clothes I never wear. I should be able to do it with my unused subject matter collection. Therefore, in the interest of encouraging myself to  discard some of this stuff, I am going to write a few words about some of them now.

1.The book: Extended Massive Orgasm: I bought it because …come on. But I just opened it up to a page at random and read this sentence:”Remember that the sensation in your genitals is the most important thing for you to concentrate on.” Um…I kind of think I knew that. I need shelf space.

2. Ann Chamfort’s Great Book of Secrets: Once, about ten years ago, I subscribed to a metaphysical newsletter  under the name Zontar Mozinky because I wanted to see what mailing list bought the name. And I was richly rewarded. I got special personalized mail for Zontar Mozinky for many years, always offering him amazing prophesies of coming riches. I also got this book as a bonus offering. The secrets are mainly magic spells. For instance Prosperity Pasta Sauce: “full of ingredients that bring prosperity and riches: tomatoes, onions,basil ,dill, marjoram and pine nuts. It also contains garlic and cumin for protection from theft. The moon shapes of the zucchini and shrimp will bring you luck.”( I had forgotten that the reason my house has not been foreclosed on is that I always have onions, basil, dill, marjoram and pine nuts on hand. I guess the fact that the basil is pretty moldy isn’t a deal breaker.)

3. The Brainy Echidna: (from the New York Tiimes)  “They are one of the most pacifistic of mammals.” Dr. Rismiller (of the University of Adelaide) said, “Nobody bothers them. They don’t bother anybody. There’s a lot we could learn from them”

And in that level head sits a mighty brain. Among humans, the neo-cortex that allows us to reason and remember accounts for 30 percent of the brain. In echidnas that figure is 50 percent…  To reach them you must hike in to the highlands of Australia on treacherously steep and slippery terrain where it rains 275 inches a year… “If you hold them against yourself, they’re friendly and they won’t struggle,”said Mr. Opiang (founder of the PapuaNew Guinea Institute of Biological research.)”

Damn. I want to hike in to the highlands and hold echidnas against myself.

4. Regarding the disappearing/reappearing nature of duck phalluses: (from the NY Times) : “Some ducks grow phalluses as long as their entire body. In the fall the genitalia will disappear, only to reappear the next spring….A bird phallus is similar-but not identical -to a mammalian penis. Most of the time it remains invisible, curled up inside the bird’s body. During mating, however, it fills with lymphatic fluid and expands in to a long, corkscrew shape. The bird’s sperm travels on the outside of the phallus, along a spiral shaped groove, into the female bird.” (Also: “97% of bbird specie have no phallus at all.  Most male birds just deliver their sperm through an opening.”)

(Who knew that the book I mentioned in #1. was possibly written by a duck.)

5.An article from the NY Times that defines EDNOS, a word I have never heard before.  Its an acronym for “Eating disorders Not Otherwise Specified.” “Ednos remains the nation’s most common eating disorder.”

6.An article from the NY Times about OCD in animals.:” 8% of dogs- five million to six million animals- exhibit compulsive behaviors. Males with the problem outnumber females three to one in dogs whereas in cats the ratio is reversed.” There’s something to be learned from this.I am not sure what.

7. Snackertainment: I have been saving pamphlets and entire magazines on this topic since…(wait for it) 1990. I can’t bring myself to throw away the physical evidence of such a hilarious new word.  In this photo we see Snack Food Association President Jim Shuflet presenting the Top Crunch Award  for snack promotion at SNAXPO ‘90.

Well, back to cleaning. I think this blog solution to my problem has not been the raging success I had hoped. Because I can already sense that I am not going to be able to part with my information about the echidna, or my SNAXPO souvenir.

I also might need to make prosperity pasta someday. Perhaps after my extended massive orgasm.

When some senator you have never heard of gives an impassioned speech about the first amendment, is he really just a mouthpiece for ClearChannel? When a majority of them support the invasion of a struggling impoverished country in the name of freedom everywhere is it because they are seeking real estate to build a Home Depot? Understanding this stuff is like watching a foreign movie without subtitles.

Usually it isn’t my job to propose solutions to these kinds of problems, but I think I have a way to try and minimize the confusion we are all having trying differentiate truth from lies. Maybe it would make everything clearer if we just let the corporations run for office.

I know It sounds kind of harsh at first, but it might not be any worse than our present method for selecting presidential candidates which is essentially to cast a Presidential sit com with a lovable reformed rake character as the romantic lead and a whimsical- but blunt curmudgeon- next-door-neighbor-and-best-friend as his side kick . This old system has worked very well telegenically for decades , but as with all sit-com actors, you never can be sure who these guys are in real life.

With my new plan perhaps the Republicans might create a ticket that would offer Rockwell Manufacturing for President; tough on terrorists (The B1 bomber) but still forward thinking and cutting edge: (Rocketdyne! The Space Shuttle! The semiconductor!) Then perhaps balance the ticket with the friendlier and more gregarious sounding Beatrice Foods for Vice President: Progressive, (Beatrice sounds like it could be a woman) yet traditional (Orville Redenbacher) and concered with domestic security ( Blue Bonnet Margerine , Chef Boy Ardee!). Also, since Beatrice foods is a division of ConAgra, the minority vote would be assured.(Rosarita Refried Beans! Hebrew National! LaChoy! Swiss Miss!)

In opposition the Democrats might run the very relevant to the twenty first century Presidential candidate of IBM; big on leadership (consultants in 170 countries!) and stability (a continuous history since the 19th century!) then add to that the friendlier more youthful and up-to-date Apple for Vice President. (I-tunes! Ipod ! Mac!!)

It makes sense in other ways too. Witch hunts concerning mysterious campaign donors would become a thing of the past. And although many people are inherently suspicious of corporations, all Americans love logos . So between tee shirt giveaways and Nascar races there’d be no more need for those old fashioned empty speeches and slanderous ad campaigns. Instead it will all just boil down to which tee shirt do you want? The one with the lovable Chef Boy Ar Dee astride that cool B1 Bomber? Or the one with that rocking silhouetted iPOD lady dancing atop the more graphically tasteful two-tone IBM letters?

Never again will there be a problem getting the young people out to vote. Imagine the enthusiasm for an election that pitted Mountain Dew against Sprite. Or the Hummer against KFC.

Okay, I know it isn’t a perfect system, but it makes as much sense as what goes on now.  And it certainly is a good match for the new supreme court ruling. Plus it’s completely up front. If the Bush administration had simply run as the Pennzoil/ Halliburton ticket, no one would have had the slightest doubt about what was going to happen to the country in the next eight years.

But since I can’t join, I still wish I could have been there when he explained what he meant by “nonsense’ to seventeen Jewish women.

Goel Razon, a 60-year-old Israeli, was brought to court in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is accused of sexual enslavement, rape, extortion and sexual assault.The police said that the suspect was either 59 or 60, and maintained his cultlike community in several apartments in a neighborhood of south Tel Aviv.

Explaining what he saw as his attraction, Mr. Ratzon said: “I am perfect. I have all the attributes a woman wants.” Police on Monday seized a book of rules written by Razon for his 17 ‘wives,’ hours after he was arrested .His  code of conduct sets out fines to be levied for each infringement. Regulations include: 1. No women shall marry nor shall any woman attack another, either verbally or physically. Fine: NIS 2,000, to be paid into the family kitty. 2. No woman shall question another about her whereabouts. Fine: NIS 100 3. No conversation is permitted in rooms other than the living room. It is forbidden to talk nonsense. Fine: NIS 200 4. No woman shall sit idle when there are dishes to be washed, cleaning to be done, children to look after etc. Fine: NIS 2000 5. Any two women caught fighting will be punished equally. Fine: NIS 2,000 6. It is absolutely forbidden to question Ratzon on his whereabouts or intention. Fine: NIS 400 7. It is permissible to ask to accompany him; but refusal is to be accepted without appeal. Fine: NIS 300 8. No woman shall interrupt Ratzon or intervene in matters not concerning her. Fine: NIS 500 9. All orders are to be obeyed immediately. Fine: NIS 300 10. No woman shall work while a ‘man’ of over 12 years of age is in the house. Fine NIS 3,000 Police began investigating Ratzon in June 2009 after receiving a complaint about abuse from one of the women. He is considered by his companions to be the savior (Goel in Hebrew) of the universe, and is attributed godly and supernatural abilities. Many of the women have his name and portrait tattooed on several parts of their bodies.