Category: Rants
They’re Baaaaa-aaack!
Meeces. Yup. Uh-huh.
So, other than that, how was your day, you ask?
Well, this afternoon I had to run over to Olathe to hand carry some court documents through the system over there. It’s a twilight zone. Well, they all are any more, but Johnson County is the most bizarre. I knew there would be some glitch. And there was. The court clerk wanted $5.00. I wasn’t supposed to have to pay $5.00, because I already paid it before. But I knew it was no use arguing. Better to just give her the 5.00, right? So I got out my billfold and laid a five dollar bill on the counter. She said, “It has to be a check.” How do you respond to that? It can’t be right. Hallucination. Reality check: “What did you say?” “It has to be a check. Five dollars.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have my checkbook. It took 15 minutes and two supervisors before they decided that cash would be okay.
I’m not even going to tell you rest of the story. I’ll just summarize: it gets worse.
Yup. Just another typical day.
:banghead:
Tales of the Intrepid Mouse Hunter
So this morning Becky went downstairs to let Cinnamon out for her morning business, and the big 40 pound bag of dogfood shook and made noises and scared the bejeebers out of her. Mouse inside. Or maybe jumping off. Whatever. Becky didn’t like it. Tonight I went down and set out five standard traps and four boxes of d-Con at strategic locations where Cinnamon couldn’t get at them. Just made it back up to the top of the stairs when Clack! Score one for Mouse Hunter.
Lest anyone decry the senseless and inhumane slaughter of these cute little denizens of God’s kingdom, let me just say that we had no takers on the ads we ran during the last invasion, seeking sensitive mouse catchers to collect them up in a humane and painless fashion and relocate them to an environmentally friendly habitat. All we succeeded in doing was generating a heated debate about whether it was humane to abandon domesticated mice in a natural habitat where, deprived through no fault of their own of normal development of defensive behaviors, they would fall easy and unsportsmanlike prey to predators if, indeed, they did not starve first for want of foraging skills in a non-man-made domain. Who knows how long the picketing factions would have scowled and hurled epithets at each other on Lazy Brook Lane if the fellow down on Brush Creek hadn’t been spotted gouging into the gopher runs in his back yard, pitch fork in one hand and baseball bat in the other. Apparently, skewered and battered gopher is more tantalizing than garroted mouse.
p>. :coonskincap:
JC Penney – Spammer
May 18, 2005
General, Rants
3 Comments
John
Today I got spammed by JC Penney. At first, I thought it might be a phishing scam. The link to click in the email was to jcpenneyem.com instead of jcpenney.com. When I checked the “whois” information, however, the domain jcpenneyem.com was, actually, registered to JC Penney. Instead of clicking on the provided link, which included lots of scripting code in addition to the domain, I just entered jcpenneyem.com in the browser address window. That resulted in a “Page Not Found” page. Suspicious. Then I cut and pasted the link out of the email, deleting the part with my email address (the address they used, by the way, is one of my spam addresses – it’s a very old address that has no purpose in the world except it’s on all the spam lists). And guess what — JC Penney, unless somebody went to an awful lot of trouble to duplicate the whole JC Penney website. The first page did have a section to “access your JC Penney account”, but when I investigated, it was the same page (more importantly, the same URL) as my bona fide JC Penney account page. The spammed email address, incidentally, is not the address that JC Penney has on file for my account; nor is it an address I’ve ever given them. The only way they could have that address is by acquiring one of the aforementioned spam lists.
I’m not sure how Becky is going to feel about the fact that henceforth we will never buy anything from JC Penney, but that’s my rule about spammers. I wish everybody who uses the internet had the same rule, and that this marketing decision would put JC Penney out of business. But, sadly, it seems mainstream business has now been sold on the marketing value of spam.
Sigh.