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Spot the scam

I get these periodically. Usually, they manage to address it to “Dear Sweasel” showing they’ve at least scraped the site. Sometimes they pretend to be another blogger trading posts, often on wildly inappropriate topics. Like cosmetics. I’ve never responded (this one has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, which is a novelty).

I honestly can’t work out what the scam is. It isn’t a genuine offer – a link back to a client from a low traffic blog like this isn’t worth effort, and it certainly isn’t worth money.

Any ideas?

Back here tomorrow for the Dead Pool, y’all!

October 5, 2023 — 7:26 pm
Comments: 5

The Judgement of a Weasel

Well! Brouhaha and skullduggery!

I call it for HottyTottyGirl. Leaving a placeholder in the rush of the moment and clarifying it later strikes me as within the spirit of the rules. In fact, I would much appreciate you correct a typo in this way, if you make one. I can’t properly search the thread with misspellings.

However, in the case LesterIII’s described, I probably would have judged otherwise. Making a pick and editing it to a completely different pick later is stretching “dirty tricks” too far. Though there would have been no dirty trick shaming, naturally. I assume it wasn’t a winning entry.

I am a little astonished at Uncle Al fighting his case. I owe him dick and have done for an embarrassingly long time. I’m surprised he’s still willing to play with me. Thank you, Uncle Al. May you harbinge another celebrity death soon. (No, harbinge is not a word).

This is not the giant security hole you might think. Comments are only editable by users for four minutes, after which you have to email and ask me to fix any problems. That’s a pretty tiny window for a self-respecting dirty trick.

And so, tomorrow I go back to work. Had a good holiday. Am sad.

January 2, 2023 — 7:23 pm
Comments: 3

Oops! We’re back

Looks like my database took a nap this evening. Sorry, caught off guard. Please enjoy this large, handsome cabbage Uncle B growed me.

October 18, 2022 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 5

Eyyyy…we’re back!

Sorry. Some kind of MYSQL error for five hours. Back. Talk later!

September 21, 2022 — 8:50 pm
Comments: 6

Speechless

I went to save an image in my \sweasel folder tonight, and the \sweasel folder is no more. It’s gone. It ain’t there. It done vanished.

It isn’t accidentally dropped into another folder. It isn’t in the recycle bin. It’s not on a different drive.

A couple of nights ago, I did a thing I never, ever do and emptied the recycle bin. My C: drive is getting full up. I must have accidentally deleted \sweasel into it some time before. And, because it was the weekend, I didn’t notice until today. That’s all I can think.

What an extraordinary series of coincidences.

Oh, well. It’s only the place I save photos before uploading them, so they’re all here with you. There was some unfinished junk that had been kicking around and some other stuff I guess. If I can’t name it, I won’t miss it.

But gosh.

August 22, 2022 — 7:03 pm
Comments: 9

Oh, that’s nice

It turns out the Classic Editor is a plugin. Download it, install it and…screen goes blank and error message above appears.

Swell.

It’s funny – nothing actually seemed to be broken. I did get an email, and it said the WordPress Automatic Updater was the culprit. Weird this flaw presented itself the exact moment I enabled Classic Editor.

Eh. I disabled Automatic Updater on spec. I’m not in a huge hurry to update anything else. And I got my Classic Editor back! Thank you, commenters.

I ain’t touching anything else today. Enjoy the vintage comments in the sidebar and have a good weekend, all!

August 5, 2022 — 6:18 pm
Comments: 10

Happy St Weaseltine’s, y’all

Old hands will remember this is sweasel.com’s blogaversary. The 15th, in fact. It started out as a blog about the process of immigrating to the UK and afterwards – I’ll be perfectly honest with you – I didn’t know how to stop.

Thanks for commenting, lurking, paddling in the Dead Pool – I was going to say trolling, but we haven’t had a good troll in years – hanging out and generally making this place a bright spot in a weasel’s life.

p.s. Oh, yes – Uncle B and I have been married thirteen years today, too.

February 14, 2022 — 6:37 pm
Comments: 30

Hey, guyz, I’m a meme. I think.


I did a Google images search of “ghost weasel” and it took me to this page of memes. For the record, I don’t really ‘get’ any of them.

Then I had squinted at the base image and I thought, “waaaait a second. Black and white image. Photoshop of a weasel. English channel. Using my caption font. That’s got to be my image!

Only, I can’t find it. I’ve looked at all December posts back to the beginning of the blog in 2007. I’ve looked back through about 50 pages of my blog media gallery, which is 4,494 pics over 225 pages. Tineye couldn’t find it (which is weird, if it really has been used as a meme image).

Assuming the compression is in the original, I suspect it’s an image from the first year of the blog, when it was hosted on WordPress. I was very, very careful to keep file sizes down in the beginning. They didn’t keep any of my images when I stopped paying.

Whatevs. Just a bit of fun.

Oh, why was I searching for Ghost Weasel? Sussex has been ranked as one of the best places in the UK to experience paranormal activity. Not me, though. I live in a 500 year old house and I’m still as psychic as a potato.

October 13, 2021 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 9

The Return of Spoon

I hauled myself out at six this morning, no Spoon. I had plenty to do in the garden (it’s a mess after six months of daily rain) so I hung out and pottered around and about 8:30, a blackberry bramble in the drive began to softly “bok?…bok? Bok?…bok?”

You’ll have to take my word for the question marks. She sounded puzzled. And, honestly, who among us has NOT woken up in a hedge mid-morning with no idea how she got there?

She was about six feet up a bramble, in a kind of hole. I had to get my gloves to lift her out or I would have been torn to bits.

She was safe enough up there. The polands generally go way high and are protected for the night. The danger is next morning, when they flap down to ground level. If there isn’t a human around to stink up the place and keep the foxes at bay, there’s a real risk.

Tonight, all my chickens are right where they should be. Perhaps I can get a decent night’s sleep and a bit of a late morning, for once. Have a good weekend, everyone! (As if weekends held any meaning).

March 27, 2020 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 13

To meditate upon

I’ve said it before; there really needs to be a name for the thing where you set off on the internet looking for a buttermilk biscuit recipe and hours later fetch up on a nine-year-old post from someone’s personal blog about the contents of a lunatic’s stomach.

Yes, that shiny, happy mandala up there is that. Stuff surgically removed from one man’s stomach. There’s an inventory and more (in color!) at the link, but it’s not very well preserved and the objects look like they’re sweating evil. I don’t necessarily recommend the click.

He died on the table.

November 4, 2019 — 9:24 pm
Comments: 13