At Least Make it a GOOD Scam

Okay, the stuff below is from my email inbox today. And it's spam, of course. Now, I hate spam, sure, because I'm not a butt.

However, this particular spam is much worse then normal spam. Yes, it's bad, because some cretin is trying to get people's account information and steal them blind, which is extremely skudgy. But THAT'S not even the biggest problem with this email.

No. The biggest problem is the ungodly bad use of grammar here! My gah. What did the English language ever do to them? Send us spam, yes, we know and hate your kind, and we'll live, though less happily than before. Rip us off, sure, people try that if they think they can get away with it, although it's pretty low. But my gah! This is just downright insulting!

"Confirm immediately of your parity the account"?? "We stop temporarily service of your account"??? Now who's supposed to be stupid enough to click through on that? If you're going to try to trick me, at LEAST have the respect for my intelligence to do it well!





Dear Washington Mutual client.
We ask you to confirm immediately of your parity the account to given e-mail.

Please go to: http://client.wamu-online-bank.com/index.php?rHt= 1742490202723995530 (blah blah etc. deleted. I don't want people actually going there.) Otherwise we stop temporarily service of your account.
Thank you for using WAMU Bank!

Please note: This e-mail message was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.
Thank you for contacting WAMU

sorry, cow

sorry, cow

I don't eat the meats... But I like cows. They seem like good people. The people at Sorrycow.com want you to sign their petition. They plan to apologize to a cow. Once they get a million names, a person is going to read the whole thing, all the names on the list, to a cow.

I can certainly understand why it might seem like a good idea to, well, apologize to cows. They really have it kinda sucky, what with the slaughter and the veal and the BRANDING, for gah's sake.

I expect no one in Texas will appreciate this plan. Except Austin. People are not that Texasy in Austin. Maybe Austin would like to secede from Texas and join a blue state. They can be part of Illinois!

But I gotta suspect that having to listen to a million-name-long list of people names is just gonna add to the hardness of the already sucky life of some poor cow.

My new boyfriend

This is the new guy I've been seeing. He's in the Army right now, as you can see from his clothes. Iraq has really been hard on him. He seems really kind of stiffened up by his experiences there.

Making Snooty French Food - Damn You, Alton Brown!

Food Network: Recipes

Alton Brown on Food Network is damn entertaining. He makes cooking snooty French food look like fun. Which is why, on the spur of a whim of an idiotic urge, I decided to make something special for my sister's birthday.

This wouldn't be a problem. But I told her about it. I had to! You can't just show up with coq au vin on someone's doorstep! They'll already be full, because they'll have eaten leftover macaroni casserole. And I don't really know from coq au vin, but I imagine it doesn't sit and molder in the fridge well, like lasagna does. (Lasagna is better the second day. Mmmm.... lasagna....) So I told her, as you do, because she has the kids, and people with kids have massive Timing Issues with meals, seriously. Now I'm really stuck, and I have to actually try to make the stuff! And I don't eat meat myself, so it's not like I can even TRY it! Oh, well, I'm trying to lose weight, but it's still kind of torturous. Torture! Torture!

For the few people here who don't speak French, "coq au vin" means "chicken with wine." Which, uh, is about as snooty and French as you could probably get without a waiter sneering at you. Well, okay, chicken's not so snooty. But trust me, the way they make it, yes, it is definitely snooty.

My sister deserves some fancy, snooty food. Seriously. She never does anything just for herself. I could go into it, but.

So I blame Alton Brown. That guy is trouble. Don't even watch his show! Next thing you know, you'll be buying crepe pans and making homemade soups. Hey! He's on right now! He's making... ooh, lobster! I wonder how hard that is to make...

DAMN him again!

More Hot Burger Lovin'

I-Mockery.com - McSEX!

Well, fortunately for all of us, I-Mockery has taken the McDonald's have-sex-with-our-burger ad one step further, and that makes it two steps too far. (McDonald's itself took it the FIRST step too far.)

The first article at annekatisnothere was:
Would You? Would You Indeed, Hit That?

News: Time Wasted by People! (Save Us!)

World's Largest Twine Ball. Roadside America

People often say that some people have way too much time on their hands. I hate that... Not only is it a cliche, but it's pretty judgmental. Who are they to declare that someone else's interests and passions are pointless and wasteful? Why is the waste of someone else's time such a crime, anyway? Would they approve the time-spending, if the spender had OCD that caused them to obsessively scrub the bathroom floor six times a day?

Besides, a lot of things that have seemed like a waste of time to some people at some point in time have turned out to lead to great things.

Take the giant ball of twine. It's big! It's twine! What could be better than that, unless it involved beer or cheese dip? How could you claim that as time wasted? It's brought at least tens of dollars to small towns in roadside America!

Also counted among things that once seemed like a questionable use of time to some people: the internet. Oh, wait. Scratch that! That's still just a massive waste of time.

Would You? Would You Indeed, "Hit That"? (Hot Burger Lovin')

world champion: McDonalds Wants You To F*ck Its Sandwiches

Okay. Why should we be surprised? These multibillion-dollar, international corporations have big, fancy ad companies, who are tasked with making the company's products "relevant." They're supposed to give the company a feel that's current, and trendy, and all those things that the golf-playing executives know nothing about.

So we are shown a young guy in an Internet ad saying, that McDonald's sandwich? Oh, yeah, I'd hit it. Of course, they don't quite figure out that "I'd hit it" doesn't mean, gee, I'd love to purchase and consume that product with great enjoyment. It means something way more intimate. Who, exactly, is McDonald's marketing this to, anyway?

When, oh when, will the public's speech more closely reflect the needs of corporate America to sell to us, corporate-America's stock pond? How can we expect the advertisers to come up with campaigns that illustrate our common vernacular, when we insist on making up new phrases that DON'T mean what the hapless advertisers expect?

Another example of, well, crap like this is when Old Navy had a TV commercial advertising that they had prices on the "down-low." They meant their prices were LOW! Not they they were "keeping the information limited to a certain group," as "down-low" really means. (See urbandictionary.com.)

Also, HOW many different ad campaigns are going to use "I've Got The Power," by Snap? Pampers uses it, to illustrate how two-year olds are able to do more and more things by themselves. Hotels.com uses it in their HORRIBLE commercials.

Other commercials for Hotels.com feature Sunburn Guy with a clipboard, standing in the pool. Sunburn Guy goes from hotel to hotel, and apparently stands in all the pools of these hotels with his clipboard. It shows how much work Hotels.com does to get its ratings. Because, you know, you can't rate the hotel without standing in the middle of the pool for several hours. Standing. Staring blankly at the poor children trying to enjoy themselves despite the creepy burned guy in the middle of the pool. And it ruins the accuracy of the ratings if you use SUNSCREEN.

Make Your Shower Curtain Do the Book-Learnin' for You

Amazon.com: Kitchen & Housewares: Top 100 SAT Vocabulary Word Shower Curtain

Okay, this is a darn good idea! A shower curtain with the top 100 SAT vocabulary words on it. That would also be a good way for your kids to learn the state capitals, maybe, or spelling words. Learning! By osmosis! Without visible effort! Magic!

My pal Pattie had this kind of idea when her son was younger. She decided to put up a poster showing human anatomy, so he could learn about internal organs. Excellent plan. Except, oddly enough, little children get scared by pictures of people's insides.

Oh well, it's not like she put up a picture of some surgery off The Learning Channel.

Update So's You Can See What I'm Saying

This is the "Don't Panic" image that I mentioned in the previous post. Except there I called it the "sticking-its-tongue-out thing." Well. Either way it's not... quite right, is it?

Annekat's scratching post

Annekat's scratching post

Oh. My. Gah. I can't believe that thing's still there. "Annekat's Scratching Post" was my first website. And it's still there. Never mind that I don't actually have an account at the service provider anymore. (What are they thinking, though, really? Don't they ever delete inactive accounts?)

By all means, it's worth a visit. (Not really.) There's a cool (not really) image of a round green ball, that when you hover over it, it turns into the sticking-its-tongue-out thing from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I made that image myself. Well, not really. I made the blank ball image, and programmed it to swap with the Hitchhiker's one.

Also, there are some quite useless little utilities. They were sort of amusing, way back in 1999, which is when this site was last updated! Actually, it might have been 1997 that I first put those up...

Invisible! Free! Hit counter and Web stats

StatCounter Free invisible Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats

OMG weird there are people coming here! Oh mah gah there are other people out there with nothing better to do than waste... um, well, pot calling kettle black. Black! Black!

See, I stuck an invisible hit counter on here, thinking I want to know if there are visitors... But I also wanna pretend like I'm cool, and it ain't no thing. (I'm not cool, I'm seriously not what you could call cool. Heh. Dork power!)

I guess the old axiom which I just made up is true... if you blog it, they will read. Because those Internets people are a varied and unpredictable lot. I love the internets.

SmartyKat SweetGreens cat grass kit

Sweetgreens cat grass

My goodness. My cats have really taken to having a nice bit of salad with their meals now, thanks to this cat grass. And, judging by the half-stoned expression of the cat on the box (click the link), well, they're not the only ones.

The cat grass started out all happy and tall, once it got some good sun. But once I gave it to the cats, it was a swift and sure and inevitable decline. Now my formerly fine patch of cat grass is a scraggly little clump of half-eaten stalks. But my desk smells like fresh-cut lawn! Ah, spring.

Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace

Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace

The paranoiac deep down inside of you will surely appreciate this. If you really, REALLY have to disappear, say, to get the Mob off your trail, then this is the how-to for you.

The site owner makes it clear that if you're trying to avoid child support payments or you've killed a cop or something, he doesn't want you to gain by using this information. He goes so far as to say that if you have, in fact, killed a cop, he hopes you have an "accident" on the way to the police station. But I say, why should you take more innocent people with you? A heart attack would be much better.