Category: Humour

Funny. Or meant to be funny. Or about funny.

Is Spam Evil Enough Yet?

Spam! SPAM! Spam! SPAM! Spam! SPAM! Spam! SPAM... — Now more offensive than ever

You know what’s wrong with spam? it just isn’t rude and offensive enough. Or so some people seem to think. As I mentioned, the comment spam you get on a blog is usually of a fawning, “This is the best blog ever and I’m going to tell all my friends to worship your genitals!” nature. Quite a boost when you get your first one, but when they keep on coming – and you notice they all contain a link to something that wants your money – you learn to ignore them.

So someone has decided we need a refreshing change. Here’s a comment I got the other day:

Anzy Machaczkala – Spam Link Removed

Submitted on 2011/10/06 at 9:54 am

The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, I know it was my choice to read, but I actually thought youd have something interesting to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you could fix if you werent too busy looking for attention.

Hey, that could be true of any blog… But before composing a measured reply – like “Shut up now and never speak to another human being again, or I will kill you and everyone you are related to just to be certain that your vile genes are extinct” – I paused to check that it was genuine. After all, it did seem an odd thing to say about a cartoon of an elephant. Also there were three from the same address, the other two quite complimentary and all of them linked to some site in Polish about soccer.

Yes it’s just another example of phony Search Engine Optimisation, offering the ‘service’ of spamming blogs and message boards with posts containing links to a site on the (wholly untrue) grounds that these will be mistaken for genuine interest and so improve its search ranking.

Tip to spammers: Google is not run by crowd of slack-jawed morons.

And while SEO spamming was already a complete pain for people who have to keep message boards clean, now that you guys have decided to actually insult the sites you’re spamming, it’s become a lot more personal.

So I’m off to Poland, and I have a pointed stick for poking soccer balls.

Tags Blog, E-mail, Internet forum, PageRank, Search engine optimization, Spam, Spam in blogs

Humour

Diary Of A Frightened Man 1

Post author By Richard Chapman
Post date October 10, 2011
7 Comments on Diary Of A Frightened Man 1

So my next driving test is heaving close and – what a surprise – I haven’t done half the work I need to. One week to get into shape. I suppose that’s about as feasible as getting into shape for anything else over one week.

OK I have been driving since the last try; virtually every day, and sometimes quite long distances. I just haven’t been test driving. So I’ve spent the last half an hour doing classic three-point turns, with the handbrake at each stop and the regulation distance from the kerb and all of that, just like they like. I’ve come to think of it as a kind of dressage – you know, that thing where they make horses behave like hovercraft. I’m a lot more comfortable with it now than I used to be. What I’m feeling weak on is road-reading, and having three or four fewer eyes than I really need.

I’ve been working on my manners too, letting people merge, smiling and waving, buying drinks. OK not the last one. This isn’t on the test, but my girlfriend is a much more experienced driver and she insists I start as I mean to go on – i.e., not like a bastard.

Don’t be worried or distressed then if I don’t write much of weight in the next week, as I spend more time behind wheels than keyboards. The Presidential election and the collapse of the world economy will have to continue without me. If you want to read the diary of a frightened man making hilarious mistakes however, stay tuned.

Today’s most egregious error: Attempting to leave a roundabout by a road that isn’t an exit.

Excuse: Whoever heard of a one-way street meeting a roundabout!? The town planners are insane.

Tales from the mini-roundabout (blueprintediting.wordpress.com)
The Magic Roundabout (exec-comms.com)

Tags Cars, Driving test, Road

Humour Politics

Quantitative Easing

Ireland’s government is considering making a deeper fiscal adjustment than planned next year in a bid to further distinguish itself from Greece and build on its recent bond market rally. – Reuters

Ah yes. I think they call that “masochism by proxy”. Our government stands ready and willing to show how much we can suffer.

The UK has taken a rather different approach, one not open to us as Euro members. “Quantitative easing” they call it. Sounds like a euphemism for a good solid dump, but it actually disguises something even more unmentionable – what they used to call “printing money”. Of course, they don’t actually print the stuff these days. Who uses cash, darling? Somewhere in some secret turret of the Bank of England, they push a button and simply magic £75 billion into existence.

Doesn’t seem right, does it? If you like, you could think of it as the B of E simply raising its own credit rating and lending itself that £75 billion. But if it’s a loan, who does it have to be paid back to? The future? An alternative universe maybe? I think it’s best to just grit your teeth and accept the reality. Money is fictional. What the B of E has done here is simply made some more up.

Yes, fictional. Money is nothing except what we pretend it is – not even power. Power after all is the ability to make other people do what you want, and money only has that effect if we all play the game, doing what someone else wants in return for mere tokens in the knowledge that other people in their turn will do what we want to get them. If you think about it too much it seems like an utter house of cards. Why do we go along with it – especially we who don’t have so many tokens to begin with?

Well, the only non-fictional way to make people do what they don’t want to do is the threat of direct physical violence. So playing along is preferable to that. Plus it’s hard to see how anyone could be scary enough to organize a whole society through intimidation, certainly not one of any real size.

The other thing that bothers people here is, who owns this £75 billion? Actual wealth like a resource is still there even when it goes unclaimed and unexploited, but money only exists by virtue of someone having it (and someone else wanting it). So when a government just wishes billions into existence, whose exactly are they?

Well the Bank of England gets to spend it, so I guess it’s theirs. What they do though, mostly at least, is immediately use it to buy government bonds. Not from the government, I hasten to add. Modern economics is insane, yes, but it hasn’t quite reached the point where a government invents money to buy the bonds it invented from itself. No, they buy them from people who have invested in them, thereby making those investors’ assets liquid again so that they can spend, spend, spend. Which is good for the economy.

Or so Tories always say when they need to justify the transfer of public funds to private friends.

Will it work? I’m not so sure. When a government makes money up they are unilaterally modifying the rules of the game. Or cheating, as we once called it. This may encourage other people to get creative too. Will markets play fair with the UK government, or will they say that this new stuff just isn’t as good as the old, and they need some more please?

I know where my fictional money is.

UK banks in trouble? – Today’s small business news roundup (simplybusiness.co.uk)

Quantitative easing by the Bank of England: printing more money won’t work this time (telegraph.co.uk)

(MONITOR) Much scepticism on Right about Quantitative Easing #debts (dreadnoughtuk.wordpress.com)

The Pound declines, falling over one percent against the Euro exchange rate (torfx.com)

Tags Bank of England, Business, Government bond, Greece, Ireland, Quantitative easing, £75 billion

Humour

Shitehawk

I used to think this was a peculiarly Irish term of abuse – “Ya shitehawk ya” – with origins obscure and possibly whimsical. Some say it originally meant a manure pedlar. But it seems not; for the shitehawk is a real bird.

And not just any old bird either, but one of the most attractive and impressive of the smaller raptors – the red kite. This is a beautiful creature with ruddy feathers and a swift-like forked tail. It also happens to be a hawk for shite.

Or to put it in more scientific terms, as well as being a bird of prey it’s a carrion feeder, eating the bodies of animals it didn’t kill itself and other handy leftovers. A lot of the raptors double-job like this; after all if you’re built to chase down and murder living food you’re probably pretty high up the queue for the dead stuff too. Indeed debate still rages over whether their cousin¹ the Tyrannosaurus was mainly predator or scavenger. So the red kite is attracted to human settlements, because we pretty much live knee-deep in delicious detritus. It hovers – literally – about our dumps and middens.

It’s as a predator though, taking things people wanted to keep like rabbits and young chickens, that it became persecuted as vermin and was once in danger of extinction. Though not before British soldiers had a chance to apply the same vivid name to the carrion birds they met abroad. In India therefore the shitehawk was a vulture. And apparently the word persists in this role in parts of England, except applied to that new ubiquitous flying rat: the seagull.

I like that – I think I’ll refer to gulls as shitehawks from now on. The name suits those raucous opportunists (video) far better than it does the rare and pretty red kite.