Category Archives: Silliness

Silliness

Most Entertaining Spam

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A fair amount of spam shows up in the Dividing by Zero comment area. Most of it’s automatically detected and I don’t have to do anything more than confirm that it should be deleted.
It used to be that a lot of the spam was filled with links to offshore pharmacies, porn sites, or both (the links were quite blatant about their content). More recently, a lot of them have been plain text saying how wonderful the site is and “thank you for the information about this matter” (that last one’s verbatim) and then the submitter would include a link back to their “personal site” which was undoubtedly a pharmacy, porn, or similar site. Every so often though, a spam comes in where I just can’t help but laugh at how absurd it is.
About a week ago, I posted about how you can buy milk and other interesting items on Amazon. A day or two later, I received a spam email with a link to a Russian web site.

So everyone knows that it would seriously hurt if you did get shot right there but your not exactly going to have a serious chance of getting killed so it’s much more sensible to have a bullet proof vest rather than pants, plus you may have to put something pretty heavy there so it might way you down a bit 😛

It has nothing to do with the “Got Milk?” post, but hands down, it’s the funniest spam I’ve ever received.

Silliness

Got Milk?

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Amazon’s been experimenting with selling groceries for a while. Using your Amazon account, you can now buy a gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk. They’re even doing a special promotion right now with Standard shipping for just 99 cents.
Be sure to check out the customer images and review.
Not up for milk right now? How about some nice yellow cake instead? Amazon is also selling Uranium Ore! (Just remember that if you decide to use it as a power source, you’re not allowed to use iTunes to control the reactor. Ditto for using Google Earth.)
The customer images and reviews for this one are also priceless.
If that doesn’t do it for you either, then perhaps you’d like to buy a tank? It’s just the thing for blasting through traffic during your morning commute.
Sadly, none of these products are available with Free Super-Saver Shipping. 🙁

Silliness, Stories, Wylie's Tale

Waving Goodbye!

Whether I’m heading out for the office, or just a few errands, I usually give Wylie some sort of treat before leaving the house.

Wylie’s reaction to this ritual is mostly bored disinterest with the occasional wistful “when will you be back so I can get my ears skritched?” sort of look. He does get excited about the treats though and makes them disappear before I finish putting the gate up.

When I left to run some errands this afternoon though, Wylie’s reaction was something I’d never seen before — He waved goodbye! He immediately started sniffing at the treats, but then he waved a second time. And again! Just a short flapping of his left paw, the sort of “goodbye” wave that children give.

Genuinely surprised by this new behavior, I went to give Wylie a quick skritch on the head to let him know the gesture was appreciated and that I’d see him again soon. Wylie waved goodbye yet again, and now I was able to see what was going on.

That little clown had somehow got his dewclaw hooked on his collar and now he couldn’t get it loose! What I’d been seeing as a series of “waves” were actually repeated attempts to get himself untangled.

I got him unhooked in short order and knowing what happening does take something away from it. But I’m sure Wylie would have waved anyhow if he knew what it meant.

Silliness, Stories, Work

Email from work

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Back when I used to work at the “Shakespeare at Sand Harbor” festival, we used to do a few quick announcements before the show started. Welcoming VIP sponsors, reminding people about the no photography rule, and the one guaranteed to bring in a laugh: “And what festival would be complete without an announcement such as this? ‘Will the owner of the white Toyota Corrolla, Nevada license HOT4U please come to the parking lot? Your headlights are on.'” (The alternative, “Your car is in a no-parking area and is about to be towed” would also get a few chuckles, particularly when it was a BMW or – once – a Rolls.)

Checking in with the office to let them know I’m still alive and they’re gonna have to pay the sick leave after all, I found this beauty which had been sent to the entire office:

Beige Toyota Sienna your windows are down. and its going to rain

The classics never get old.

Assorted Ramblings, Mischief, Silliness

Hello Toothface Fans!

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It’s fun to look at the web site statistics for Dactyl Manor and discover how people accessed the site. For instance, a huge number of visitors are looking for information about anime conventions (clearly I need to break out the convention list by genre in addition to location, date and event name); and although a growing number of people are using recent versions of Internet Explorer, there are still quite a few using versions 4, 5, and 6. (For crying out loud! Upgrade already! Or get Firefox! Sheesh!)
One of the other interesting statistics is how people arrived at this site. About half either came directly to a page they already knew, or followed a link from another page on the site. That’s pretty normal.
The two most frequent sources of external referrals are Google and Yahoo. No big surprises there either.
What did surprise me though is that the third most common source of referrals to Dactyl Manor is Luke’s Blog! So far this month, more than 330 people have arrived here via http://toothface.blogspot.com/. The actual number of referrals is even higher though, because a link to Dividing by Zero appears in the list of “friends” links on every page of Luke’s blog and people have been clicking those links too.
This of course raises the question, why are so many of Luke’s readers heading over here? What on Earth would cause so many people from the Lancaster Theological Seminary to visit my site?
And then it hit me, they’re looking for background information on their Pastor-in-training!
That certainly puts a new light on this site. I’ve never before had so many members of the religious community interested in my activities. (Hopefully none of them are offended by the Naked Eye Candy!)
And what should I say about Luke? He’s a friend, so should I be talking him up? Should I tell the tales of how for as long as I’ve known Luke, he’s been taking blankets and dinner to the homeless?
Or do I tell the truth and write about how for years he’s been carrying on with a married* woman? And to complicate the matter, this married woman, we’ll call her “Kate”, recently gave birth to Luke’s child! Does this guy know no shame?
And then there’s the question of Luke’s wife whom I also consider a friend. Does she know about “Kate”? I’m not really comfortable being the one to tell her, but then again, wouldn’t it better for her to find out from a friend than from a complete stranger?
And you also have to wonder, are the folks at LTS aware that Luke is a Cylon?
On the one hand, the ability to keep quiet is frequently a valuable (and quite rare) skill. On the other hand, isn’t there a responsibility to tell the truth?
It’s a tough call. But when I started to write Dividing by Zero, I knew it was possible that strangers might one day read it.
It appears that day is here.

*OK, sure. “Kate” is is in fact Luke’s wife, Kate; it’s to be expected that they’d spend time together. But it’s not nearly as sensational when you phrase it that way and I do want people to keep coming back.

Photos, Silliness, Stories

Late for Work

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I was late for work last Thursday. To fully appreciate why, you need to understand three important facts about my neighborhood:

  1. Washington Gas is currently working to replace the gas lines. (I much prefer this to having the neighborhood explode one evening.)
  2. On Thursday morning, a work crew arrived a little before 8:00 and removed a steel plate they’d installed a few days earlier, leaving a hole and blocking that end of the street.
  3. I live on a cul de sac.

The view from my front door.
The view from my front door.
The road was completely blocked with vehicles, equipment, and a hole in the pavement.
The road, completely blocked with vehicles, equipment, and a hole in the road.

Silliness, Stories, Wylie's Tale

Jumper

The premise of the movie Jumper is that there are people who are able to teleport themselves anywhere in the world by concentrating on the location they want to be in. It wasn’t a great movie, but it’s a fun concept.

Three times in the past week, I’ve come home to find Wylie sitting in the living room, patiently waiting for me to come home. Wylie would very much like to have people believe that he has the power of teleportation.

The problem with Wylie’s claim is that on two of those occasions, the gate at the top of the stairs had been knocked completely over and most recently, the bottom had been pushed out of place.

Silliness

The Quick Brown Fox… on Steroids

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I needed some “filler text” recently and for whatever reason couldn’t access the Lorem Ipsum generator. Word used to have a feature where you’d type =Random(x,y) (where x and y are integers) and it would automatically write “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy yellow dog” and repeat it x-number of times in each of y-number of paragraphs. I haven’t been able to get that to work in a number of years, so I set out to write my own filler text.
Problem is, I’m Blair. My filler text sentence is slightly longer than what Word used to create. But I only had to repeat it once per paragraph.
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