Tetherd Cow Ahead

Since the last post seemed to cause so much puzzlement, and numerous alternative suggestions for the mad scientist’s comment, I’ve decided that you guys need a chance.

OK Acowlytes – have at it!

Boingboing ran a snippet a day or so back about ‘Mr Lee’ the German cat whose owner has equipped him with a camera to record his feline adventures. The ‘Cat Cam’ is fastened around Mr Lee’s neck, and a timing circuit snaps shots at regular intervals.

It is fascinating to see what Mr Lee gets up to in the course of his catty day. Tour #1 has him encountering a bird feeder, several other catty denizens of the area, and even snapping a couple of ‘art’ shots.

After scanning through Mr Lee’s Cat Cam site, the obvious thought occurred to me to try and do the same thing with The Spawn! (Yes, I can hear you all screaming ‘You must be mad! Don’t you want to keep your remaining fingers??!!’)

So, over the weekend I dug out a little Sony Cyber Shot that I was using a little while back in some Kite Aerial Photography experiments and charged up its battery… w00t! still working!

The electronics for the camera had previously been wired to be triggered remotely for the aerial shots so it was pretty easy to re-jig them to work with a little timer chip.

A little bit of trial-and-error and it seemed to work pretty well, and after some ‘cat-proofing’ with an old cellphone case and some gaffer tape, I tied The Spawn down and fitted the GlitchCamâ„¢…

Hmm. Not terribly impressed, but tolerating the humiliation for the moment.

I let him walk around the house for a bit to make sure that the cam was secure and that the timer was working properly. After a little bit of head shaking and scratching he seemed to get used to the GlitchCamâ„¢, so I let him outside.

Off you go little fella! Let’s see what happens in your catty existence!

(Click on the image to start the tour. Type ‘N’ for Next or ‘P’ for Previous, or use the on-screen navigation.)

My blog has been awash with Comment spam over the last few weeks, and now a new and very annoying trend has emerged with a kind of spam that hijacks the Trackback and Ping functionality of WordPress to make hooks into the spammers’ cruddy sites. It is possible that I will need to completely disable Trackbacks to get rid of this problem and to those of you who like to use this feature I apologize.

Another kind of Comment spam is becoming more prevalent as well: that of the individually hand-entered ‘comment’ that is in fact a link to a spam site or a riff on the ‘Nigerian Unclaimed Fortune’ scam. This means that poor saps are sitting somewhere trawling through blogs entering this data personally. Grim. And now they’ve started with just plain ‘begging’ letters.

At the end of one of my previous Peter Popoff posts, NIMLY had this to say:

Kindly present my prayers to the Lord, as follows, please. (a) I am a deacon (officer) and would like to win souls for God, through performing of miracles, signs and wonders in Jesus Name. (b) My wife would be pleased to have children though doctors said is impossible. (c) our financial situation is very bad and we have much loans to refund every month. (d) we are unable to complete a house project since some years now.(e)I want fultime job at my place of work and good salary, also, work for my wife, who is presently jobless.(f) I have eye and heart problems. My postal adress is – 62 rue A. CAMUS, 68200 MULHOUSE, FRANCE

When I received this comment I was preparing to give NIMLY a good ol’ Cow-style roasting and then it occurred to me that I could check and see if the address he gave was real.

It is. NIMLY lives here:

It is the work of moments to establish that Mulhouse, with its acres of condominiums, is a high immigration/low income city in France, and somehow, suddenly NIMLY became a very real person and I felt overwhelmingly saddened.

Not because I think for a moment that NIMLY is feeble with eye and heart problems, or indeed that he is a Deacon, but because I think that it is very likely that NIMLY is in fact very poor and in need of a fulltime job.

Additionally, NIMLY is plainly not very bright (and certainly not internet-savvy) because he has given out his address for the world to see.

I hate spammers, as you know, but I feel quite sorry for NIMLY. He’s trying on a scam for which he’s hardly equipped in a medium which he really doesn’t understand. NIMLY, if you’re tuning in again, take some advice – forget this caper. You’re not cut out for it and it is likely to turn out badly for you.

A terribly tragic event happened in South Eastern Australia yesterday when a semi-trailer collided with a fast moving country train at a rail crossing. Many people were killed and many more hurt.

The news services have been running stories on it all day, and a nutty phenomenon is emerging: witnesses and other associated persons-of-involvement, when describing the scene of the disaster, are prone to blurt out the phrase “It was like a bomb had gone off!”

How many of these observers, I wonder, have actually seen the results of a bomb going off? Why are they using this comparison? Why, indeed, are they using any comparison at all? Surely, for the majority of these people it is most like a train colliding with a truck.

OH GOD IT NEVER STOPS!

Drown me in a butt of malmsey! Today, even MORE correspondence from Peter Popoff! This time another MILLION pages of mind-fogging writings and underlinings. And pictures of Prophet Pete. And promises of uncountable fortunes. And dire warnings. And prophecies. And stickers with leaves on them.

I will not bore you much further with any of this (unless he remembers to send me my “bag” of Dead Sea Salt – that’s surely worth a picture), except to say that scanning down the letter I notice that this time he is promising to have included money in this installment. Yes, MONEY!

Oh happy happy joy joy! MONEY! I search through the forest of foolscap pages and find:

That stuff in the little “bag” on the left is supposed to be the money. It is shredded. And according to the instructions I’m supposed to burn the money with the teeny candle and do something with the resulting ashes (oh, really WHO CARES…?)

If you look very closely you can see that the ‘money’ is really only printed on one side. Just like Peter Popoff, it’s fake.

On the Good News side, I now have THREE reply-paid envelopes. You can bet Prophet Pete is going to be hearing from me real soon.