greyduck.net

As I scrolled through the collection of work email messages I knew I’d be deleting momentarily, one subject line caught my eye. It assured me that ED is a problem for many people, and promised me a way to take care of it. I thought, “Wow, that’s some really well-targeted spam. How did they know I’m a City of Heroes/Villains player? Why yes, Enhancement Diversity is a sham and a pox upon the playerbase.”

Then I thought some more and… laughed. No, sorry, I don’t have that problem. Thank goodness.

This morning I deleted the third in a series of attempted comment spams, all pointing to one or another subdomain of craigrom.com. (No, I’m not linking them. That’d sort of defeat the purpose of deleting the spam comments, wouldn’t it? Don’t worry. I’ve looked and there’s nothing of note to be found there.) The comments all take the rather odd form of an inquiry as to how one can best access my site’s feed. Uh, if you can’t figure out how to find the (well-linked and automation-friendly) feed link on this site, you don’t deserve to use the feed. Thanks for playing, buh-bye.

You’d think that after all this time, other industries would look at the backlash against comment spam and think, “Hmm, maybe attempting to artificially inflate our Google PageRank in this fashion might not work out as well as we might have hoped.” But hey, never underestimate greedy bastards with more money than sense, eh?

If this keeps up I’m going to need a “Spamhatred” subcategory. Granted, I didn’t have to deal with as much of this in years past, but I’m still glad I made the switch. Deleting the spam manually took far more effort; at least WordPress makes it dead easy, and rarely does a spammer actually get their message onto my site.

I’m something of an armchair etymologist. No, that’s not the guy who’s into bugs. Anyway. Today’s Dictionary.com Word of the Day isn’t actually a word but is instead a phrase. I’ve misused this particular term often enough that seeing the proper definition caught my eye, and upon further investigation I read the following:

deus ex machina \DAY-uhs-eks-MAH-kuh-nuh; -nah; -MAK-uh-nuh\, noun:
1. In ancient Greek and Roman drama, a god introduced by means of a crane to unravel and resolve the plot.
2. Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an apparently insoluble difficulty.

The emphasis in Definition Number One is mine, and highlights what I found most amusing. “Deus ex machina” translates to “god from machine,” and it turns out that it’s a more literal meaning than I originally expected. This is the sort of stuff that puts a smile on my face. I love learning where things came from, especially when it includes colorful, fanciful details such as ancient wire-fu antics.

Of course, because I’m a weirdo, the first joke that popped into my head goes something like, “If it was an old-looking goddess, could you say it was a crone on a crane?”

(As an aside, does it creep anyone else out that my search for “Gil Grissom” on Google turned up at least one slashfic link on the first page of results? Ewww.)