Tingle Alley is being spammed like mad by an online poker company. (332 comments were left just last night.) Mr. Tingle plans to look for a solution this weekend, but until then we’ve shifted the settings so that comments have to be accepted by me before they post. So if you “Say It!” in the next few days there will be a delay (sometimes a lengthy one) before your comment posts. Sorry about that. We’re going to do our best to fix it soon.
To that end, Mr. Tingle has familiarized me with his two-part plan. One, to ban this particular company from the website. Two, to launch a bad-ass spam assault on their website. Yeah, Sunny@moonlightshadow.us, we’re bringing the fight to you, motherfucker!! And we’re bringing the widow of the former president of Nigeria with us!
Lastly, the Muse (or as she’ll appear on the dedication page of my novel: Lucie de la Gucie) has lately returned from the groomers so I’m getting to work. She is on my lap now, with a candy-corn bow and heavily scented with doggy talcum powder, which is dizzying but an improvement on her previous odor of leaves and urine. I was pleased to note when she came through the door that the fur of her backlegs has been shaped so that the top is poofy and the lower leg slender. It looks like she is wearing jodhpurs.
I noticed the evil texas hold em spam action in feedreader. Go forth and destroy!
Also, you inspired me to make a grooming appointment for George Rowe the Dog Who’s Been Rolling Around in the Grass Too Much for His Own Good Lately.
Comment by gwenda — 10/14/2004 @ 2:06 pm
Re: the Muse — I heard Joyce Carol Oates speak at the National Book Festival in D.C. this past weekend, and someone asked her the “How are you so prolific?” question. Her answer? She has a cat, Christobelle, who sits on her lap while she’s writing and when Oates wants to get up Christobelle often isn’t ready to move. “So I just keep writing,” Oates said. I think you and Oates might be on to something here. Maybe I need to get a cat.
Comment by Laura — 10/14/2004 @ 3:10 pm
Ah, if only I were as prolific as Ms. Oates. Still I love that pets are making an ur-statement in the writing world.
Gwenda, one of the most infuriating things about the spam was it managed to somehow infest 20-30 future posts too. So that when I go to write a new post a spam is already nestled in the Comments! Little parasites!
Comment by CAAF — 10/14/2004 @ 3:51 pm
Lucy is a Papillon (small with big ears; she is often referred to chez Tingle as “the bat cat frog dog” as she often looks like a walking metaphor, something which also obvs. occured to the French as they named the breed after “Butterfly.”) She is supremely runty, almost 5 lbs., whereas the standard is 10-15. But to help her self esteem we call her standard and all the other ones as “Giant Papillon.”
Sorry. I love my dog too much and can go on and on. (I also think it, acute attention to one’s pet, is a liability of not having cable.)
Cats rock. Mr. Tingle is a huge cat fancier, himself. He has a byootiful tortoiseshell kitty … named Kitty.
Comment by CAAF — 10/14/2004 @ 5:45 pm
Glad to hear that y’all like cats too. A lot of dog owners seem to find cats offensive. I am such a nerd I named the first cat I got d’Artgnan and the second one Burke. Lucy is a great pet name. I find it hard to take animals seriously when they are named Snoball and such. But I understand the penchant for going on about pets. They do such funny and interesting things!
Comment by bookdwarf — 10/14/2004 @ 7:55 pm
I had to kill comments at my site for this very reason. Nailing the little fuckers on my dial-up service stole twenty minutes from my life a week. And I post so little on my site that all I was getting — apart from a few lovely readers — were robots visiting.
After I closed commenting, they returned and managed to post comments even though real readers could not.
Before I reopen, I’ll move from pmachine to Moveable Type and use their typekey registration.
Comment by Bill Peschel — 10/14/2004 @ 9:35 pm
I can personally attest that Ms. Lucifer is the most deceptively charming froofy dog ever. Also, since meeting her the ‘Fesser has become obsessed with using the pee pad technology for evil.
Comment by cinetrix — 10/15/2004 @ 12:14 am
Oh, those are known in evil HG as “wee-wee pads.”
Comment by CAAF — 10/15/2004 @ 7:40 am
I feel your pain — it’s been spam city for two days (though it’s died down this afternoon). I’ve set the (WordPress) system to “moderate” for any post that has more than one link. It’s enough to make you crazy, if you’re not laughing at the misspellings and bizarre sentence structure…
Very curious about Mr. Tingle’s ultimate solution as the husband is over his head with work and has informed me that any problems I plan to have need to postponed until next week.
Comment by booksquare — 10/15/2004 @ 7:40 pm
Have the spammers started adding \s to all of the comments here or am I so jetlagged that I’m seeing \s?
Comment by Jeff — 10/17/2004 @ 11:28 pm