Gone Unicorn Hunting!
I’ve gone off unicorn hunting . . .
. . . back in a few days.
Category Archives: Miscellaneous
Tale of Two Worlds
I woke up one morning and realized that I inhabit two worlds. I suppose that may be a good way to describe sleep. It’s like traveling to another world. My waking world belongs to the sublunary realm of humans. My sleep belongs to the superlunary world of the gods.
From the hypnagogic gates to the final hypnopompia, I wander through a strange ether. The gods guide me through scintillating scenery, regale me with mellifluous oratories and music, and surprise me with curious gifts, amorous women, and ambrosia.
I gambol with the spirits of lost loved ones, now denizens of kingdoms in Valhalla and the Islands of the Blessed. I rewrite histories and rehearse futures, like Shakespeare directing plays at the Globe. And I haunt familiar-seeming habitats that I’ve never actually habitated. Déjà vu in HD.
Sometimes wrathful gods attack me with minacious beasts or other malevolent beings, then pour lead into my legs. Or they assign me impossible tasks, as if I’m some kind of Sisyphean inmate. I bear these hagridden episodes by theorizing that they are auguries of misfortune that previse me of avoidable danger.
Sometimes I’m cognizant that this is an alternate reality, and fly lucidly through walls and roofs and sky and space, with a ration of conscious control. But usually it’s all harum-scarum, where I inhabit the only world I know of at the time, and the script is entirely written by a bunch of crazy gods. My input is not welcome.
Shall I tell you about my latest dream? No I shall not. My dreams are only profound to me, as yours are only to you. The dreams of others are boring. It’s hard to hear one without yawning and drifting away. Drifting away to that other world.
That fantastic world of sleep.
Zzzzzzzz . . .
When The Mail Stopped
I parked at my house to take a little nap, before starting my rounds. By the time I woke up I could barely drive the streets without slipping and sliding, and had to return to the post office with most of the mail undelivered.
No one at the post office had ever bothered to check our snow chains to see if they would fit the tires. And they didn’t fit. Mail delivery was canceled for two days, until we could finally get the correct chains.
When we returned to work, we had a high mountain of mail and parcels to climb, and put in many hours of overtime to catch up.
Heavy snows like this are very rare for our area, but some weather reports are predicting the possibility of up to 11 inches falling overnight.
We’ll see.
Meantime, have a Merry Christmas. And if it isn’t white, just look at this photo and enjoy vicariously. And be glad you don’t have to use your shovel.
Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween! (an eerie photo from the Artist Paint Pots trail of Yellowstone National Park)
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing
Imagine you’re buried beneath an avalanche of pork and ham, mixed together in a gelatinous conglomeration of pink, stinky goo. You know, spam. But maybe you don’t have to imagine. Maybe it’s already happened to you.
Spam buries email users every day.
This may not be your problem if you live in Canada or Europe. Those havens have strong anti-spam laws that require your consent before you can be buried in that meaty mess.
But in the U.S.A. it’s a little different. We’re constantly wiping this goopy filth off of us, every time we check our email. America is a spammer’s heaven, and an email user’s hell. It’s the age of Spamalot on this side of the pond.
But the good new is, we have rights. And these rights can help us greatly reduce our spam intake. In 2003, the CAN-SPAM act was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Bush. CAN-SPAM stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing.
Many critics call it the YOU-CAN-SPAM Act, because it doesn’t stop those sick bastard spammers from spamming us. It only gives us rights to limit the spamming. You see, in Canada and Europe you have to opt-in to receive spam. But in America, you must opt-out.
Check out the bottom of any advertising email you receive. The CAN-SPAM Act requires every such email to have an “unsubscribe” link, or equivalent. Click on that link, and it should take you to a website that allows you to unsubscribe from receiving any more email from that particular spammer. Just follow the instructions for unsubscribing.
But be careful. Sometimes the instructions get tricky, and could even deceive you into subscribing for more spam. So read the instructions with a cynical eye for detail.
After you unsubscribe, the spammers have 10 days to take you off their mailing list. And they can’t sell your email address anymore, to other spammers.
I filter my spam, but sometimes a legitimate email gets caught in that filter. Trying to locate it can be like looking for a needle in a stack of sticky, gooey meat-mix. So I decided enough was enough, and I rolled up my sleeves and got tough on spam.
I spent about a half-hour groping through all the spam I had received over the course of one day. The pink, slimy substance was getting all over my fingers, arms, and pants. But I persevered, and unsubscribed from just about every damned gobbet of mystery meat in my bulging spam box.
The next day, much to my surprise, a lot of spam had disappeared. Rather than 40 or 50 spams, I only had about 10 or 15. It appears most spammers are good at taking you off their lists immediately. But some seem to take full advantage of the 10-day grace period.
Now the spam has slowed to a tiny trickle of dripping ooze. The CAN-SPAM Act does seem to work, but only if we, the spammed, do our work and take the time to unsubscribe.
So if you want to dig out from under a giant, suffocating pile of spam, look for the link to unsubscribe, near the bottom of your emails, and go on an anti-spamming tear.
But when you’re finished, be sure to take a shower. That shit is nasty stuff.
Here’s a typical unsubscribe link at the bottom of a spam message from Consumer Reports. Yes even Consumer Reports, an organization dedicated to protecting consumers, spams consumers!
