The Sporadic Curmudgeon

About five years ago I published a post entitled For the Love of God, Can’t Someone Save Dino?. Some practical jokers had glued a little vinyl figure of Dino, the family pet of The Flintstones, in front of a live webcam monitoring an active volcano in New Zealand.

It was expected that the corrosive atmosphere inside the caldera would make short work of the beloved plastic saurian.

On a whim, I decided to see if the link to the webcam still worked, fully expecting the poor little critter to be a puddle of purple goop. Au contraire mon frère! As you can see from the image above, Dino is made of sterner stuff. He’s aged less in the last five years than I have. (To be fair to myself, the atmosphere I live in is far more poisonous than the mere sulfurous belchings of a big magma zit.)

So my hat’s off to you, Dino, and the refreshingly whimsical scientists that let you stay where you are.

Sometimes a story comes along that sums up all that’s right with humanity. I’m not going to spoil it for you: just go read it.

If the link ever goes dead I’ll do an update and tell the story. It’s one that needs to be remembered.

I may have just accidentally solved the problem of blog spam comments. Almost 3 weeks ago, while enduring one of my frequent middle-of-the-workweek bouts of insomnia, and in an absolute funk, I posted a somewhat blasphemous question suggesting that God enjoys killing people. Not an especially original thought, and certainly a minor milestone on the long road to perdition, but still not the sort of musing one is likely to hear being discussed amongst the faithful.

Soon after, I appended a comment wondering what sort of effect the post would have on the massive volume of comment spam my site gets (usually 20 or so a day). Five days later, I checked my comment logs, and found to my astonishment that I had received only two spams! Hey, I thought, I may be on to something. I left another comment joking that I should write a program that automatically creates blasphemous blog posts in order to scare away spammers.

Well, it’s been two weeks since that comment. Guess what? Other than those first two spam comments, there has not been a single one posted on my site. (No other comments either, but that’s not especially unusual.) Being a man of science, I checked my usage statistics, and while there’s been a slight falloff of about six hundred visitors, this is insignificant compared to my normal volume.

This is unprecedented. I have not had a day go by since I started allowing comments on the site in which I have received no spam whatsoever.

In other words, I believe I have actually found a way to eliminate the scourge of blog spam. It will need to be independently verified by my peers, of course. If you’re not afraid of divine retribution, go ahead and post a polite, solid question about God’s motives for all the shit we have to put up with, and then see what happens to your spam problem. We may be onto something important here.

Why did it happen? I have a couple of observations. First, it means that spammers are a superstitious, cowardly lot afraid of being associated with the kind of person willing to risk a random lightning strike from a clear blue sky. Second, and far more interesting, is the theological implication that God hates spammers a lot more than he hates honest people asking valid questions about what is at best divine indifference to suffering and at worst sadistic cruelty.

Which I guess is a point in the Big Guy’s favor.

Do we live only so God can kill?