Spam magnets

What, I wonder, turns a blog post into a spam magnet? About two years ago I wrote a post about one of the National Park sites in Arizona. It got two comments at the time, which is about par for one of my on-the-road posts, time passed, and then spam began appearing. Because I moderate comments a notice would pop up in my Hotmail account. I'd take a look, and the comment would be obvious spam: a very bland, meaningless sentence that could apply to any post with a suggestion that I check out a link.

Sometimes there wasn't even the meaningless sentence, just a link. They all seemed to originate in southeast Asia, e.g., Malaysia or Indonesia. I never clicked on the links, of course. I have days when I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but even barely awake and non-caffeinated I'm not stupid enough to click on links in spam.

There was another one of those spam comments this morning. Same post. You'd think that after a couple years passed the spammers would latch on to a different URL to target, a more recent post, but apparently not. 

If you're going to write a book, do some research

I managed to depress myself recently by reading This Is The Way the World Ends, a thoroughly researched and remarkably frightening book about the rapid pace of climate change and just how thoroughly screwed we are. I decided I needed some mind candy, a piece of fiction that wouldn't require much thinking at all. You know, a break from reality. I'd check out a mystery, but nothing too dark, something from the Janet Evanovich school of writing instead of James Lee Burke or John Sandford.

For the uninitiated, Evanovich mixes romance and/or sex with the crime and corpses. Her lead characters are young women who manage to stay alluring while eating whatever they want (usually donuts and cupcakes), bumble their way through crime solving, and end up being saved by some dude who is the requisite tall, dark, and handsome (white horse to ride in on is optional). You know, classic female fantasy material. Evanovich also manages to be funny -- if Bob the Dog is involved, odds are there's going to some laugh out loud shenanigans happening -- so definitely mind candy. The mental equivalent of dining on gum drops and Snickers.

My expectations when reading fluff are not especially high. As long as the writing is reasonably smooth and the author doesn't commit too many howlers, I don't feel like it's been a total waste of my time. I'll flinch when I stumble across something that's a blooper, like referencing a cultural icon like a killer car and then saying that Christine was a Ford Pinto when she was actually a Plymouth Fury, but it doesn't matter what you're reading; with most fiction there's going to be blemish or two.

When that blemish turns into a severe case of creeping green crud, a fungus that permeates the entire work, however, I tend to get a tad annoyed. The latest annoyance? Holly Quinn's A Crafter Knits a Clue. I should have known, given the excessive cuteness of the title, but I really didn't expect it to turn into an incoherent hot mess. The first few pages weren't bad.

Then Quinn decided to turn high school basketball into a major plot point. First, she gets the season wrong. She has the sport being played much too late in the school year. Winter is over, daffodils are blooming, people are running around without winter jackets, but it's not even tournament season yet.. In Wisconsin. Let that sink in for a moment. The daffodils are a possibility, especially in the southern part of the state, but it's definitely not the end of Winter yet when basketball wraps up for the year. The Wisconsin state tournament is in mid-March. Maybe she'd never heard the term "March madness"? I can remember March Madness in Madison; there were still snowbanks. Disgusting, melting slushy snowbanks, to be sure, but still definitely not let's run around in just a tee-shirt weather.

Then she makes her teenage character a senior. It's getting towards the end of the school year, he's supposedly hoping to go to U-W on a basketball scholarship, but he hasn't been recruited yet. I used to be a college basketball coach's secretary. I know how this shit works. If a player is worth offering a scholarship to, the college coaches want to see them in action a lot earlier than the end of the season their senior year. They scout kids when they're juniors, sometimes earlier if their names keep popping up in sports reporting, check them out at summer basketball camps, and by the time it gets to be Christmas, they're angling for verbal commitments -- and when it gets to be National Signing Day (February 6 this year) they want the prospective players' signatures on paper. If there are college coaches or their minions at late season basketball games, they're not looking at the seniors. They're eyeballing the younger players and making notes on who to track as a possibility for a year or two down the road. 

There are multiple additional inconsistencies and bloopers in the book. Quinn really could have used a good editor. In one chapter her heroine is described as having a hard time juggling her purse, a bratwurst, and a soft drink but in the next paragraph she does a both thumbs up salutation to a friend -- and then is immediately back to dealing with both the brat and the drink simultaneously. Does she have four arms? The heroine gives out a slew of $50 gift cards for her shop but then thinks that it's a good thing sales were brisk that day because maybe she'll finally be out of the red. The handing out the gift cards made no sense in terms of plot development anyway. It seemed to be tossed in just to emphasize a little more what an extremely nice person Our Heroine is. End result? It feels sloppy. 

I suppose it could have been worse. One thing that grated a bit even if it didn't qualify as a blooper is the heroine refers to her full-grown golden retriever as her "puppy." Over and over. He's a puppy, not a dog, and although I think it's fine to baby talk to your dog regardless of his or her age in the real world it just reads as childish on the page. Not sure why that was irritating, especially when it could have been worse. Our Heroine could have been thinking of the beast as her fur baby.

Quinn apparently has fantasies of this being the first novel in a series. She may succeed in that ambition. Most readers won't pick up on the stuff that bothered me. Her attempts at humor fall pretty flat (she does definitely channel Evanovich, right down to having a good looking police detective as a romantic foil for the heroine), but they aren't offensive, just ineffective. The writing may be sloppy, but it's not hard to read. Readers who less fussy than I am might actually like the book. Stranger things have happened.

Happy birthday, Nerf

Welcome to the Medicare years.

Feeling a tad depressed

It's odd how one thing going wrong can throw a person off for the rest of the day. I decided yesterday that I felt like going out for lunch, that the S.O. and I should indulge ourselves for a change. We'd have lunch at a restaurant we've gone to many times, enjoy the view of Keweenaw Bay and the Certainteed plant over on the L'Anse side, and relax a bit before going to the museum to do a little work.

Ever have a meal where anything that can go wrong does? From a waitress who was basically just going through the motions of working to a meal that included the world's worst French onion soup and deep-fried fish with batter that was still doughy, things did not go well. My meal was flat-out not edible. Of course, the S.O.'s experience was not much better. He ordered a cheeseburger that arrived sans cheese. He let it slide because it didn't make any difference in the price -- and it could have been worse. At least the meat was there. 

Not a happy experience, in short, but salvageable if -- and this is the big if -- I hadn't had to argue in order to get the charge for the inedible dinner taken off the bill. You know, when you're in a restaurant and food arrives at the table that is not cooked, if the restaurant then tries to tell you "Pay for it anyway" you're not likely to head for Yelp and leave a glowing review. All it would have taken is a server who had brains enough to be apologetic, but, nope, the not-the-sharpest-tool-in-the-shed young woman chose to debate instead.

She really was a terrible waitress. Really bad. Cute, but incompetent. I was reminded of a story the Older Daughter told years ago. She's worked in food service since she was in high school. At the time, she was a server at a family restaurant that had hired several high school students for the summer. One of the students went off on a long rant one afternoon about the incessant demands of the customers. "They want water. They want menus. They want their coffee refilled. They want this. . . .they want that." The O.D. looked at her and said, "You mean they want you to wait on them?" "Exactly!" "What's your job title?" "Waitress." It'd be nice to think a great light then dawned, but probably not.

In any case, the bad meal put me in a miserable mood for the rest of the day. We did manage to accomplish a few things at the museum -- got the trashed case moved out of the way, emptied the rocks out of the box car (no gold, but there is some nice obsidian and specular hematite) -- but probably not as much as I would have felt like doing if I'd actually had something for lunch. Cold, hungry, and annoyed is not a particularly productive combination.

A few of the box car rocks did have labels on them, which suggests they were stashed in there by a now deceased volunteer who slid quietly into dementia a few years before she stopped volunteering. She did some very odd things the last several years she volunteered, but because she'd been so well-organized for so long no one realized she was slipping away until she started becoming aphasic and then told everyone that something was happening to her neurologically.

The museum has had several hard-working volunteers in the past decade or so who succumbed to dementia. I've found some very odd things while cataloging and, to be honest, I worry occasionally about just how weird I'll get before anyone notices. Will there be a place where the information going into the PastPerfect database turns really weird? Will the collections guides end up with sections that look like they were written in Klingon? Just how much will my successors curse me?

More immediately, in a few days we're going to Marquette. Now I'm wondering if I dare suggest lunching at a favorite restaurant there -- what if it turns out to be crap now too? I'll be stuck eating my own cooking indefinitely.

Exactly what is Trump trying to prove?

Assuming he's trying to prove anything at all, of course.

I read a long article this morning about Trump's visit to McAllen, Texas, a town where the mayor and most of the residents say no actual physical border wall is needed, the current system is working more or less just fine, although the Border Patrol could use some improved technology (e.g., more cameras) and increased staffing at the ports of entry. And Trump agreed with them. The meeting included a show-and-tell of stuff intercepted at the ports of entry (drugs, weapons, various types of contraband) and the consensus was yep, the checkpoints are working. And then Trump told the folks at the meeting that he doesn't really mean a physical wall after all, he's speaking metaphorically, he just wants enhanced border security.

What the fuck?! The government has been shut down for three weeks now because Trump has stated over and over he wants a Wall, a real Wall, a concrete and steel barrier that would be a major physical barrier to anyone trying to cross the border illegally. He's had multiple hissy fits over the fact that Congress will not dedicate $5 billion to his wet dream of a construction project. And then he goes to Texas, right to the border, and says, oh, I'm just talking metaphorically. I repeat, what the fuck?!

He has said something similar in other meetings over the past couple of weeks, but every time there's an actual face-to-face meeting to negotiate an end to the budget impasse, he reverts to ranting about concrete and steel. It's bizarre.

If he doesn't want an actual wall, why the hell did he shut down the government? Just how senile is he? And if he doesn't want an actual wall, why are hundreds of thousands of people now forced to sit and wait indefinitely to be allowed to go back to work?

Maybe somebody should tell him that Obama wanted to build a wall. There's nothing quite like invoking Obama's name to get Trump to do the exact opposite.

Trump is infamous for constantly contradicting himself. Just about every incoherent speech he gives starts off with him saying one thing and ending with the complete opposite a couple hundred mangled words later, but he's definitely topping himself on this wall mess.

[I am, for what it's worth, feeling relatively proud of myself for making it all the way through six paragraphs in which I mentioned Cheetolini multiple times without once referring to him as a wank nozzle, orange shit gibbon, or some of the other phrases that come to mind when his name comes up. I'll just pretend to be an academic and save the good terms for this footnote.]

Another museum mystery

A new year, a new mystery at the museum. This time a minor one, but a mystery nonetheless. Why is this little pink box car stuffed full of rocks?

Seriously. It's full of rocks. It's part of a homemade model train set that was in the back of a display cabinet. In the process of shuffling stuff around in the museum we discovered not only could we not move the display cabinet while it was still full of stuff, we actually needed to jettison the cabinet entirely.

We being the S.O. and myself, of course.

The original intent was merely to shove the cabinet back closer to the wall -- there was a gap of almost two feet behind it -- to make it easier to move some other things past it. I cleared away some objects that were sitting on the floor in front and on the sides of it, and told the S.O. it was ready to shove. We were about to when he took a closer look at the beast and discovered it was racked too badly to move safely. The corners were spreading, there was significant crack in the base, and there were other issues.

Okay, if we can't move it safely the obvious thing to do is empty it, get it out the door and to the landfill, figure out a substitution for it short term, and think about investing in a totally new display cabinet for the long term.

Pink box car is hiding behind stuff right in the middle on the bottom shelf.

Minor digression (aka short rant). All the cases in the museum are apparently ones that came from retail businesses. They're all used and in various states of decrepitude. Some are quite decent; a few are pretty damn old with glass tops that are so scratched up you can't see through them. I can understand hanging on to the really old ones, the ones that look like they came out of a 19th century mercantile, but do not get why the museum felt compelled to keep the pretty modern looking but falling apart case the railroad stuff was in. The museum isn't rolling in money, but it could afford to drop a few hundred dollars on a decent display case. I checked the KC Store Fixtures catalog. A comparable case, one with the equivalent amount of shelf space, can be had for under $300.

Then again, the museum was apparently allergic to spending money on things museum professionals would consider essential, like archival storage boxes. As one of the sweet little old ladies told me when I first began volunteering, "Why should we spend money on boxes when we can get them for free from Larry's?" Larry's being a local supermarket. Well, for one thing, if you spend money on actual file boxes they'll all be a uniform size, they'll have lids, and you can stack them in the attic or the storage building without them turning into a leaning tower of weirdness. But back to the box car full of rocks.

Depot model on case. Notice the large gap between the case and the wall. Given that the case was full, that gap made no sense, but then many things at the museum didn't (and still don't).  

I began emptying the display case. I started with the top. There was a model of the Baraga railroad depot sitting on one end. It sat on a substantial piece of wood. I'd never paid much attention to the railroad stuff until this week when I got forced to deal with it -- it's one of those areas that fell into the I'll get to it eventually category -- and had assumed the wood was the base for the model. You know, the model was attached to the large chunk of wood, which measured about 18 " x 18", basically covering the entire end of the case from front to back. When I tried picking it up, it didn't move. That's when I discovered it was screwed down to the end of the case.

Curiosity compelled me to unscrew that chunk of wood. I already knew as soon as I saw those screws that sure as shit there was going to be a significant hole or a crack or some other flaw under it. I was right. That end of the display case had a hole in the top that you could drop a six-pack of cheap beer through and not worry about it hitting the glass anywhere as it fell. So why the heck did the museum keep that display case to begin with? At one point the museum had a surplus of display cases -- I was told the historical society gave a bunch to the Covington Township Museum when they were getting set up. Why give away good cases but keep a crap one?! But I'm veering into a rant again. . .

Whoever made the model put little green Army men into the cab of the engine. There's also one standing in the door at the back of the caboose. 

Back to emptying the case. I got the top shelf emptied. It turned out to be the usual weird mix of stuff where things were stuffed in there that had no relationship to railroading at all but apparently there was an empty spot of the shelf someone felt a need to fill sitting side by side with some really nifty stuff from the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic. No interpretive labels, of course. I should have gotten into that case years ago.

I am simultaneously impressed by the effort and appalled by the results. 

Then on to the bottom shelf, starting with the homemade model train at the back. It was a little strange (and I don't just mean the upcycled materials it's made from). There were large rocks sitting in the gondola car and the coal tender for the locomotive. Okay. Rock samples. Someone stuck them there to mimic a load, I guess. That sort of makes sense. I take out the locomotive and tank car first. They weigh next to nothing, which is what one would expect when something's made from old plastic bottles and paperclips. Then I grabbed the box car.

It was like trying to pick up a cement block one handed. The thing weighed a figurative ton. I get it out. I open the little sliding door. What do I see? Rocks. The box car is packed full of rocks.

At least I'm assuming it's all rocks. I did not have the energy yesterday to actually empty the box car. I'll do that the next time I'm at the museum, tempted though I am to just inventory the car as is and stick it out in the storage building for some other person to wonder about a few years from now. The one thing I've learned about the museum in my six years of volunteering is to never assume a stash of anything is just junk. Maybe all those rocks are just the equivalent of pit-run gravel, but it's just as likely that hiding in there will be a nice small piece of float copper or some decent Petoskey stones. Maybe there are some gold nuggets a now-deceased member brought back from prospecting in Alaska years ago. When it comes to the museum and it's never-ending odd little mysteries, you just never know. 

Why is common sense in such short supply?

I've been thinking about "the wall" lately. It's hard to avoid doing so when the federal government is shut down because the Toddler in the White House is throwing a hissy fit over not getting his way. I view this obsession with a medieval technology as yet another sign that the man is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Then again, considering that his most ardent supporters are equally obsessed with putting up a humongous wall to keep the close to nonexistent hordes of desperate women and children out, maybe he's just got an even lower opinion of his supporters than I do. If the only thing that will keep his deplorables happy is doing something stupid, then he'll do something stupid.

The whole emphasis on "securing the borders" by putting up a physical barrier to keep undesirables out has always baffled me. Walls have never worked. You can scale them with ladders, break through them, tunnel under, or walk around it blowing a trumpet (Joshua 6:1-21) but sooner or later the wall fails.

In fact, the wall, such as it currently exists along the southern border, is already failing. It's not keeping out undocumented immigrants. Most of them arrive by airplane clutching tourist visas in their hands and simply don't leave when the visa expires. It's not keeping out drugs. The absolute most devastating drug on the market in the U.S. today is fentanyl. It's coming in cargo containers from China, not being carried in backpacks through through the New Mexican desert. It's not keeping out foreign terrorists -- according to the FBI, the bad guys have figured out it's a lot less hassle to come down from Canada than it is to try to come up from Mexico. Among other things, quite a bit of the border between the U.S. and Canada can be crossed in a bass boat.

So if a physical barrier is a dumb idea, what would be a smart one? Well, if most of the people coming across the southern border claim to be refugees fleeing violence of various sorts, how about increasing the staffing levels for the federal workers who process those claims? People complain about the "catch and release" aspects, such as the fact there are long delays between the initial application for asylum and when the hearings are held. Right now asylum seekers arrive knowing there's going to be a long gap between when they get here and when the U.S. government decides their fate. They also know that if they manage to avoid being summarily targeted for expedited removal they'll be released on parole to await the hearing.

Here's a common sense notion: speed that process up. We don't need a wall to slow people down or more border patrol agents to arrest people. We need paper shufflers to speed up the pace of the bureaucracy. Hire more lawyers, more judges, and let the word get out that the time frame is shorter. It's a pretty sure thing that the number of asylum seekers will drop. It's one thing to make the trek to the U.S. knowing that after you turn yourself in you're going to have one or two or even three years to work here and send money back to the family in whatever poverty-stricken village you'e from and quite another to contemplate doing it when the turnaround time drops to a couple months. After all, Jeff Sessions claimed that close to 80 percent of the asylum seekers' claims are denied. That isn't exactly true but it's a handy talking point for this argument. If that many are denied in the end, then the common sense thing to do would be to speed the process up to get the ineligible applicants on to airplanes or buses faster.

Granted, it's not quite as manly, doesn't lend itself to a lot of posturing and macho bullshit about how tough someone is to say "I hired more lawyers" instead of "I ordered the troops to lay down concertina wire."

Actually, a truly common sense idea would be to stop freaking out over "illegals" and go for open borders. Sure, maintain border security in the form of customs enforcement at established border crossings but get a system set up where anyone coming in to the U.S. could work if they wanted to. Foreign nationals can be issued tax ID numbers now and pay income taxes while they're here; that part of the system is already in place. If everyone was working legally there'd be no incentive for employers to hire undocumented workers for less than legal wages and it would be harder to get workers willing to tolerate unsafe working conditions. If you can't hold the threat of La Migra over people's heads, they'll put up with a lot less crap. It would eliminate a lot of human trafficking -- who's going to bother paying a coyote thousands of dollars to sneak them across the desert or smuggle them in a cargo container when all you need is a bus ticket?

Yes, I know there are people who go ballistic at the idea of open borders. They're the same people who are convinced every Spanish speaker they encounter is here illegally and desperate to steal their jobs or sponge off welfare, usually simultaneously. My own thought has always been is that if you're so incompetent or unskilled that the only jobs you can find are ones that will hire people who do not read, write, or speak English and where the major work requirements are a strong back and a willingness to put in long hours for less than legal wages, you've got bigger problems than fear of competition from foreigners. 

Pulitzer Project: Ironweed

William Kennedy's Ironweed was a pleasant surprise. Not only did the L'Anse Public Library actually have it on the shelves (no Interlibrary Loan delays), the book turned out to be readable. Definitely a bit strange, but readable.

Ironweed is set in Albany in the late 1930's. It describes a few days in the life of Francis Phelan, a self-described bum. Phelan walked away from his wife and family in 1916 when his infant son died. Phelan blames himself for the child's accidental death and so runs away from everyone and everything he knew and crawls into a muscatel bottle.

Phelan bums around the country, works odd jobs here and there, and eventually ends up back in his hometown of Albany, New York. At times he's hanging out with two friends, and at times he's on his own. Sort of. He keeps seeing ghosts, people he knew years ago and that are now long dead. Some of the ghosts are people he just knew, hung out with in hobo jungles or met while riding the rails, but several are people whose death he caused, almost all unintentionally: a fellow he tangled with in Chicago who cracked his skull when Phelan threw him and he fell back against a concrete bridge pillar, for example.

The book flows smoothly despite the frequent flashbacks to different episodes in Phelan's life and his conversations with people who aren't really there. It's one of those books where you find yourself wondering exactly why you're reading it -- after all, it's the life of a bum at the tail end of the Great Depression, a dude who's definitely leading a fairly grim life -- but the writing sucks you right in. This book for sure falls on the upper end of the scale in terms of readability.

When I did a Google image search to find a cover photo, I noticed it was made into a film back in the '80's. The book won the Pulitzer for 1984; the movie was released in 1987 so Kennedy's agent must have done a good job of peddling the screenplay. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starred in the film. When I saw that my first reaction was "Why?!" The book is pretty damn grim, although Kennedy's writing is so good the plot doesn't repel you. However, I cannot imagine sitting in a theater for two hours to watch a movie about a drunken bum and his cronies lurching around from dive to dive and speculating about where they can find an abandoned building that would be safe to sleep in for a night. This is one movie that I will not look for online despite the superstar casting.

That said, I do recommend the book to anyone who appreciates good writing.

Next up: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie. I know Lurie can write; now the only question is whether or not it's going to be another Interlibrary Loan request. The L'Anse library really does devote way too much shelf space to Danielle Steele.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum?

All the talk recently about just how we all should remember George Herbert Walker Bush got me to thinking about the whole notion that we're only supposed to say good stuff about dead people. Why?

Is it so the family won't be upset? Bush the Elder was a politician. His kids and grand kids have been around politics their entire lives. They know the man was not perfect, that some of his decisions were based more political expediency than on principle, like when he was trying to get elected in a Southern segregationist state so publicly opposed civil rights legislation. He had definite moral failings. After all, he pardoned Oliver North after that treasonous swine negotiated with both drug dealers and the anti-U.S. Iranian government. He also apparently believed that anyone who became ill with AIDS deserved it, at least until hemophiliacs like Ryan White entered the public consciousness. .

Okay, so it makes no sense for the ordinary person (or anyone else) to try to pretend once a politician is dead that they had no flaws. What about when it's someone you actually know?

I had been thinking about this recently anyway. I've hit the age where if I go to a social gathering it's more likely to be a funeral than a wedding. The life expectancy for women the year I was born was only 69, which means if I go by the old actuarial charts I've passed my sell-by date (it's now 78.9 so I've got a ways to go before more than half my age cohort is dead). Not surprisingly, I see obits and funeral announcements for various acquaintances on a pretty regular basis.

So is it okay for me to mentally start singing "Ding dong the witch is dead" when I learn that someone I didn't especially care for has beaten me to taking the dirt nap? You know, someone where if I were male I might give serious consideration to pissing on the grave? Am I obligated to say something nice if or when her name comes up in conversation? Or can I continue to use my favorite terms for her, which might not be obscene but certainly have never been complimentary?

As for why I've spent the past 40 years or so thinking of the person as "that bitch?" It's simple. She was mean to one of my kids. It's weird. I have several acquaintances who worked actively to destroy my relationship with the S.O. They devoted a lot of time and energy to trying to split us up (which I'm pretty sure neither of them remembers now) but I've never felt the animosity* toward them that I retained for this stupid person who made my kid unhappy. It's not like I spent a lot of time brooding about it but if the woman's name came up, my reaction was consistently to think bad thoughts and to hope her life sucked. I think the old aphorism "Hell has no fury like a woman scorned" is wrong. It's more like Hell has no fury like a pissed off mother.

Short answer to the question of do I have to say nice stuff now that she's pushing up daisies? Or, more accurately, do I want to? Nope. Depending on who's around, if her name comes up she's still going to be "that bitch."

*To be honest, there might be no ill will because they failed. As to why they tried to begin with? It's a mystery.