www.richardhagen.org

My email address has been out in the wild for so long that I get a lot of spam, at least 100 messages a day. My junk mail filter does a good job of sorting it out, and each night I bounce it back to source as though my address didn’t exist. This won’t help reduce the volume of spam, and it doesn’t make me feel good, but it takes only a tiny bit more effort to bounce it than it does to delete it.

But tonight… tonight I discovered that scammers had harvested my mobile number and were prepared to call it. I hadn’t thought that any scammer would bother spending real money on a targetted prospect. Anyway, someone claiming to be from Singapore phoned me to let me in on a Great Investment, and was able to name me, one of my email addresses (not my main one, which is odd) and, obviously, my mobile number. He said they’d send me an email — which I will bounce — and that there would probably — i.e., definitely — be a follow up call from someone in QA to make sure I understood what was going on.

Here’s the plan:

1. Bounce the mail (and set up an explicit bounce rule for email from their address). I’m also thinking of how to bounce a message a couple of hundred times.
2. If I receive another call I’ll say Could you please hold on a second?, put my phone down and walk away. Bonus: If I could be arsed, I’ll prepare a loop of the audio from here and keep it ready on my iPod ready to play down the phone.

Perhaps you have better ideas?

I’ve manged to track down one episode of Tony Robinson’s series of Old Testament stores Blood and Honey. (Yes, YouTube is an obvious place to look, but I only found out the name of the series today. And, double yes, I know it’s easy to look in Wikipedia, but I think this information was added to his entry since I last looked.)

I’ve also found a cap of James Burke’s series The Day the Universe Changed.  If I could find a copy of The Real Thing, it would be quite nice.

Observation: Many people written up in Wikipedia are best known for. I wonder what Eratosthenes would be best known for?

Spam: ?See the cockasian at work

Thought: Whatever happened to the expresson electronic brain.

Thought: Is Cully Barnaby the Midsomer Murders equivalent of a sonic screwdriver? That is, is she just a plot enabler or plot accelerator? (N.B. An unkind person might describe a sonic screwdriver as the fictional tool of a fictional tool.)

I’m fatigued almost constantly and my brain is doing uncomfortable growing up stuff. Things will be relatively quiet for a bit.

Have a lovely one!

P.S. The climax of this series of Doctor Who looks like it will be fun!

There’s a one-line demolition of The Da Vinci code in The Devil in Amber, by Mark Gatiss. It happens in a confrontation scene between Olympus Mons, who wishes to summon the devil, and Lucifer Box, who is trying to stop him. Olympus Mons is describing the human sacrifice required by the summoning ritural…

OM: “… That sacrifice is a perfect victim, a woman with holy blood running through her veins, descended from an unbroken line of such anointed ones –”

LB: “I’ve heard of such a legend!” I gasped. “A child descended from the union between Christ and Mary Magdalene!”

OM: “Don’t be so fucking stupid, ” snorted Mons. “There’s hundreds of those!”

The Beatles were masters!

Hard Day’s Night

• So why on earth should I moan,
  ’cause when I get you alone
  You know I feel ok
• But when I get home to you
  I find the things that you do
  Will make me feel alright

 

I Feel Fine

I’m in love with her and I feel fine

 

 

Update: … or masters of ennui?

Update: … or maybe the expression of sentiment has undergone hyperbolic inflation since the early 60s?

Update: … or maybe the expression dud root doesn’t scan very well?

My friends and I describe periods of shyness by saying I came over a bit Framish, after Janet Frame, the painfully shy New Zealand author.

I recently learned that Henry Cavendish, the 18th century British philosopher and scientist, was so shy that in order to talk with him, one had to stand in his general vicinity and speak as if into vacancy.

So I propose a new adjective to describe extreme shyness: Cavendish. As in, I came over a bit Cavendish.

… called Podcasts.

(Between Stanthorpe and Boonah.)

Microsoft to sell Joy Division limited edition Zune.

Can you think of less appropriate (or more appropriate) bands for a limited edition Zune?