Tetherd Cow Ahead

I’m packing up my house into cardboard boxes in preparation for my impending relocation from Sydney to Melbourne. As is always the case when it comes to reviewing the amount of crap one accumulates over the years, there have been many sidetracks, some of which will almost certainly make it to The Cow over the next short while.

This book, which I found in my study, was sent to me nearly two years ago by a fellow blogger with whom I was once in almost daily contact. It is called ‘Strange Red Cow (and other curious classified ads from the past)’ by Sarah Bader. It’s a curious, quirky, charming book and as soon as I picked it up I was reminded strongly of the curious, quirky, charming personality of the woman who sent it to me.

I never actually met her in real life, sadly, and she stopped blogging over a year ago with no warning or explanation, and after the very worst kind of family crisis. She also stopped replying to my emails. I have many friends, both in the real world and in cyberspace, and I know from experience that usually when someone abruptly stops communicating it means trouble. I really hope that’s not the case, and I hope she just got bored with blogging and the ephemera of online friends and has found a really happy and contented space in her real world. I guess I’ll never know.*

Que sera, sera.

When I took a break from my cramming of things into boxes and and had a quick nostalgic browse through Strange Red Cow I found this ad, which I like to think would have appealed to her:

___________________________________________________________________________

*We can say for certain that she’s not attending to her blog. Great drifts of spam now clog up all the comments on her posts, reminding me as nothing so much as an abandoned house with its porch ankle-deep in unswept leaves.

___________________________________________________________________________

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.

My mum used to use the expression “Someone just walked over my grave” to describe that creepy-crawly inexplicable feeling you get when something causes the skin to go up on the back of your neck.

I just looked at my blog stats and noticed that someone from Texas at the IP address 69.153.63.68 had landed on my blog by using the search string ‘child tethered’ (spelled correctly).

I guess there are innocent explanations, and I probably shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but someone just walked over my grave.

Let us all pause for a moment and think about the good things in our lives.

Hahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahhahahahahaha!

Oh shit, let me just catch my breath.

Hahahahaha! Hahahahaahahhaha!

Allow me to present you with two sentences from abovementioned ‘source’:

A conservative encyclopedia you can trust.

And in the entry on Evolution:

Creationists can cite material showing that there is no real fossil evidence for the macroevolutionary position and that the fossil record supports creationism.

Conservapedia’s front page trumpets:

You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of “political correctness”.

… to which I would add ‘… or any actual basis in reality’

I propose that the editors should re-think the name of their site and maybe retitle it as ‘Put-Your-Head-In-A-Bag-opedia’

Hahahahahahaha! Hahahahaahaahahaa! Oh look – a handy sandstone block! I think I’ll smash my head against it a few times.

___________________________________________________________________________

Special Universal Head Advisory: Pete, don’t go there. It will ruin your day.

___________________________________________________________________________

Today it is three years since my beautiful Kate left this place. I’m thinking of you buddy. Rest in peace my love.

Valentine’s Day 1961. Morty Crepe makes final adjustments immediately prior to the launch of the ambitious, yet ultimately fatally miscalculated Love Potion #8.

He never showed his face in public again.