Charming
I’ve mentioned before that I have to field the stuff that come from the website contact form at work, 95% of which is porn spam. This is a little different:
Hello Sir!
I working for Bizcope SEO company in Bangladesh. My client needing backlinks urgently. So sir, I requesting that you give me a do follow, permanent backlink on your blog. When you are done, please sending me email to confirming. Here is my client website:
[website that sells CBD gummies]
Plz also creating a 5 star GMB and Trust Pilot reviewings too.
If I do not seeing a backlink in one week, I am create million toxic blog comment spam and redirect backlink to [my work website] and you can saying goodbye to your Google rankings for 1 year or more.
I trust you making correct decision Sir. I giving you 7 days. If I getting link from you, I will also add a back-link to [my work website] on [a totally different site that sells CBD gummies].
Best wishes from sunny Bangladesh
Dusyanthan Balasubramanian
Bolding mine.
I originally left their address in the post (hence the Google Maps image), but I have since decided they might’ve been set up. In the business comments on Maps, two other people mentioned getting this email: one thought it was a genuine extortion attempt and the other thought it was someone else trying to besmear Bizcope.
Don’t know for sure, but the English is comically bad and the return email address is a boatyard in Florida. I’m thinking probably setup.
We’re having our Easter meal today so we have four days to eat leftovers. A perfectly gigantic turkey is in the oven as I sit here typing.
Have a good Good Friday everyone, and a splendid weekend!
April 15, 2022 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 13
Neighbor across the way
While I was looking up Roger Daltry’s pile, I spotted a thing calling itself the Mary Poppins House. One kilometer away as the crow flies (Google Maps has a neat measuring device which told me that).
Yup, sure enough – P.L. Travers lived there while writing Mary Poppins. It doesn’t appear to be open to the public, though.
I read and loved all the Mary Poppins books, but I never looked up Travers before. I am not surprised to learn she was odd. She was an Aussie who moved to England in her twenties. She had fleeting relationships with men, but lived for some years with a woman with whom she had an “intense” and “ambiguous” relationship.
After parting ways with this woman, at the age of 40 Travers adopted a little boy who was one of seven children. She never told him he was adopted, though, and he never knew until the age of 17, when his twin (!) appeared at her door drunk and demanded to see him.
I highly recommend the Poppins books. They are dark and strange and trippy and `not in the slightest like the movie. I can see why she hated it.
April 14, 2022 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 5
Go fish
I did not know that Roger Daltry lives in East Sussex. He has a bigass house in Burwash, a place we’ve visited many times on account of Bateman’s, Kipling’s old house, is there. Daltry’s lived there since the early Seventies.
He built four ponds (you can see them in the photo there), stocked them with trout and lets anglers come play.
Sounds fab: “Located near Witherenden Hill, the house is built of brick with stone dressing and has twenty rooms and seven bedrooms. It features a tile roof, clustered chimneys, stone fireplaces, stained glass windows, oak panelling and a gallery seventy feet in length.”
I’m not a huge fan, but I like what he’s done to the place. He’s managed to buy up land to make it a huge estate (420 acres, which is pretty huge for the overcrowded South of England) which he’s covered in cows and scenic attractions. And he’s not even hogging it all to himself.
If’n you’ve ever wanted to go fishing at Roger Daltry’s place…and, why not, I guess…the map is here.
April 13, 2022 — 5:46 pm
Comments: 5
Hey kitty! Kitty! Hey! Hey kitty!
Yes, it’s a kitty. My cellphone camera, she is not so good.
I tried to get this handsome black cat’s attention for five minutes on the way to work today and he just stared at me like I’m koo-koo bananaspants. He was neck deep in the long grass and staring out on the morning like he owned it.
It has been said (on Twitter, I feel sure) that people who like cats react to the sight of a cat as though cats were mythical creatures that the cat person has never seen in the flesh before.
April 12, 2022 — 7:20 pm
Comments: 4
I am a big giant baby
Between work and my art club, I was in town for nine hours today. I attended two meetings and I had to take minutes at both. I’m shattered. This is stupid.
Really, how did I work twelve- and fourteen- hour days year after year? I’m a shell of my former Stakhanovite self.
The picture? When I’m going to fob you off with a nothingburger post, I often comb through my old images for an old image to go with. The context for this one is our dishwasher broke down. Pic tickled me for some reason.
April 11, 2022 — 7:01 pm
Comments: 11
Public service announcement
I put together the newsletter for work. Like most, we use Mailchimp. Every time I access audience info, I wonder if people realize how much data we inadvertently get.
If I click your email address, I get your language, percentage of opens, the percentage of clicks, the location you accessed the email from, your favorite email client and operating system, which issues you opened (every one, back to the beginning) and whether you clicked any attachments or links.
But wait! There’s more!
That’s just the data I get on the Audience Dashboard. If I download signup data as a spreadsheet, I get member rating (I have no idea what this is based on), the time you signed up, your IP, you latitude and longitude(!) – I assume this is of your ISP – your timezone, its difference from GMT, your country, your region and the last time your record was changed.
If I had ever asked for it, I also would have your name, address, phone number and birthday.
Just be aware when you sign up to Disgusting Fetishist Monthly.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
April 8, 2022 — 6:13 pm
Comments: 21
Hypnotic
Here, this Israeli commercial photographer, Lior Patel, combines two things I love dearly: drone footage and time lapse.
Unfortunately, I can’t work out how to link to individual videos directly. I even peeked at the page’s source to see if I could find direct links, but it’s all scripts. Thwarted!
Sigh. Okay. Go to the Agriculture page and scroll down. The fifth video after the header is the one from the picture above: sheep being herded in fast motion. I could watch all day (no, really…I’m just that indolent. Give me a G&T and I literally could).
Fields harvesting, container ships offloading, sea birds settling. He also does panoramic stills. I’d link to some of my favorites if I were allowed to.
April 7, 2022 — 6:44 pm
Comments: 3
More Real Estate with Auntie
Eh. I kind of don’t like this one. The Deer Tower in West Sussex.
It’s an 18th Century (feh! Modern architecture) faux castle that once belonged to Judy Garland. It’s not that big – just three bedrooms – but I reckon it gets its £6.25 million price tag from the 120 acre estate overlooking the South Downs. That would be nice to have!
That spacious master bedroom gives me the willies. I think I’d feel really vulnerable sleeping with all that open space around me. I’d rather sleep in a closet.
April 6, 2022 — 6:53 pm
Comments: 6
If I wanted to get some exercise I wouldn’t be playing vidya games
Oh my giddy aunt! It’s the next great innovation in computing technology.
In case you can’t tell what’s going on here, you can strap your phone to your ankle and walk in your VR games. So in case you don’t look quite stupid enough inexplicably waggling your head back and forth and waving your arms about, you can now do it while you march in place like a first grader doing the Horsey Dance. Score!
The program is called Natural Locomotion and it’s a tenner on Steam. Those who gave it a thumbs up said it made the motion sickness cease and open world games like Skyrim became super immersive, but you owe it to yourself to hit the link for the video of what it’s like to watch someone use it.
This has to be the biggest disconnect between what-it-feels-like-to-experience-a-thing and what-it-feels-like-to-observe-a-thing-being-experienced since public sex.
I’ll have to download the demo and give it a try. Natural Locomotion, not the other thing.
April 5, 2022 — 6:19 pm
Comments: 17
Space clerk!
Omigosh, omigosh! Remember that game I was playing before I bought the VR headset? The one I liked? The one that boils down to an inventory management game? I did not realize – they released a free patch to make it compatible with VR. I’m managing my spaceship inventory with my own hands, y’all!
I got talking to a young family on vacation in town today. Parents and three little kids. Mom was holding the lead of a dog – I think it might have been a Labrador. I am not good with dogs. Big handsome beast.
Anyway, the kids were crawling all over him and he was lapping up the attention. I looked at the dog and said, “well, hello” and he went nuts – snapping and lunging.
The woman apologized and said, “you’ll have to excuse him – he was a lockdown puppy.”
She said he’s fine if you ignore him, but if you speak to him or make eye contact, or speak to her, he goes nuts. He has no idea how to sort out people who are a threat from people who are not. They have hope he will gentle down eventually, but this was the first time he was out and about around strangers and he was utterly lost and bewildered.
Now think what we’ve done to children.
April 4, 2022 — 5:31 pm
Comments: 8