The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Grant Barrett:

I had the same thing happen this week. The total bounces that showed up in my mailbox were about 4500.

I also think it's personal, even though I have no proof and know that this kind of thing happens all the time. I don't think it's a coincidence that the more popular site my becomes, the more attempts are made at comment spam on my site, the more I receive form-letter will-you-link-to-me emails (for sites that have nothing to do with my site's topic), the more attempts are made to spam my email list, the more attempts are made to hack the site, and the more messages I receive wanting me to send money to Nigeria. These scumbags are going through directories of popular sites accumulating domain names, email addresses, domain registration info, and anything they else they think will help them. No doubt those accumulated domains are later fed into mailers. They never cull their lists. I still get spam to email addresses that have not been used in ten years.

It's not their narcissism that bothers me. It's that they've forgotten what their goals are. There goals are to sell product, yet they spend all their time on trying to game the system. Legitimate advertisers have shown repeatedly that if a company spends a relatively small amount of time and money crafting a short, well-written email and then sending it to double opt-in email subscribers, sales will beat those resulting from black-SEO and spam operations every time, even for the same products. EVERY TIME. If they spent more time accumulating legitimate addresses from people who have truly chosen to receive such messages—and, sadly, there are tens of millions of people who have—then they wouldn't have to do any of the tricks. They could spell normally, use real SMTP servers, use full-quality image ads, all resulting in better fulfillment rates.

Huh. I went to high school with Tracy Henke. The same one. She was in the year above mine at Buchanan High School in Troy, Missouri, though she was from a smaller town a few miles away, Moscow Mills (at least, the newspapers say that's where she's from). She was in the same grade as my sister.

Should have written "last century and earlier."

This article by Edward T. O'Donnell from Sunday's New York Times talks about the exact same sentiments—from the last decade and earler. He writes,

Some anti-foreigner hostility was expressed with brickbats and fists, but the most potent weapon was the pen. Samuel F. B. Morse, of later telegraph fame, was among the first to sound the alarm. In 1834 he wrote a series of articles for The New York Observer—later published in a best-selling book titled "A Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States"—that in hysterical prose detailed an alleged papal plot to flood America with Roman Catholic immigrants and overthrow the republic.

Dern, me too, Naomi.

Some of these qualify as eggcorns. That database is a think of beauty.

(spelling intended!)

Point of information that it has been done before.

Please forgive the errors. It's hard to type while flipping the double bird.

I'm one of the people this affects. I have 11 different so-called pseudoephedrine replacements in my medicine cabinet. I tried them all and none of them work as well. Many cause drowsiness (even the supposedly non-drowsy formulas), some cause light-headededness, others interfere with sleep, or, most commonly, too many of them don't work at all for me.

In New York City it's already difficult to find the house brand pseudoephedrine in many stores. Duane Reade, for one, now seems only to carry the Sudafed brand--and it's 30 to 50 percent more expensive, depending on the store and the quantity of pills per package. It's expensive.

Rite Aid is one of several chains that now makes you ask for the drug and fill out a sheet of paper with your name and contact information. It means I can still get the cheaper house-brand version of pseudoephedrine, but in EVERY case, I've had to wait in line in at the pharmacy when there was just one person working and a line in front of me. What should be a 60-second purchase takes anywhere from seven to 19 minutes. Now, perhaps I'm just the epitome of the impatient New Yorker, but I sometimes think I would rather have my lungs fill up with mucous and go to the hospital ten days later when it turns into bronchitis than wait IN ANOTHER DAMNED LINE. (Forgive me for key-shouting, but the asthma means I can't vocalize as loud as I want to.)

This is all besides the civil liberty issues: I should not have to register and present identification in order to take many chronic health problems. There's no clearer way to say it: it's wrong and it's un-American. Jerks.

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