Poorman BH sends his regards

The forecast is for "brutal cold." Ah, January, you are making it hard for me to love winter. Boscoe, by the way, ate well yesterday. He didn't even require a splash of canned beef broth on his kibble. (Though he did this morning. One step forward, one step back, let's all do the Boscoe Dance...)

Meanwhile, a couple of days ago, a blog reader (and you know who you are, Willowtree), sent me an email and said he was having some trouble with the word verification on this blog. He couldn't comment because the words that are supposed to be verified before posting a comment weren't showing up on his iPhone. I had activated word veri about a year ago because I was getting Chinese spam and I had gotten tired of deleting it all.

But I wouldn't want to miss any comments from Willowtree (who, I think, now needs to comment constantly, in thanks), so I took off word veri--and found that it is no longer necessary; Blogspot has created a powerful spam filter for comments.

I was poking through it this morning and found nearly 50 spam messages from the last week alone.

Some are in foreign languages--Chinese, yes, but also Spanish and Russian. Some are just random lists of words, most having to do with sex, travel agents, Rolex watches, and recovering substantial sums of money from foreign countries.  Some try to look like legitimate comments ("Good article!" and then a link to a commercial website).

But one was written with passion, with a deep, palpable frustration. It was written by someone who is on the edge of sanity, who is at the breaking point, who knows that spam filters are eating his magnificent words, silencing his unique voice. That one, I decided, deserved to be heard. I have taken out the hyperlink, but I am leaving the rest of the message intact:

It's so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you'll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website PENIS ENLARGEMENT PILLS. I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT! Regards: PoormanBH2011


A note on the photo:  It is not what you might think. It's an old nylon stocking stuffed with ice-melt and tossed onto the ice dam of our roof.  I chose it to illustrate this post because it looked vaguely obscene, which I thought fit well with most of the content of most of the spam.