Re-Spamming

Probably I'm not the first person to come up with this idea, but it's a really fun one. Lately, I've been getting a lot of these E-mails with real enigmatic subject lines, like this latest one: 'Conscious approvingly'. And these enigmatic subject lines are matched with real persons names (Bert Lucero) so even though they are appearing in my yahoo bulk folder I still wanted to check them out - the first couple of ones at least and then I got wise.

I'm thinking that the whole deal is precisely that, to make you wonder what the hell 'Conscious Approvingly' means and then you open up the e-mail to find out. It's day trading, that one. There was absolutely nothing about consciousness or approval and Bert Lucero didn't even send that one. I know, there is no Bert involved with any of this; he's entirely fictional.

But here was my brainwave: I've got something to sell (my books) and they've got an e-mail address and at some point a real person will look at my reply. Voila! That's a list I can use to interest people in my books. Maybe they won't be all that interested in clicking through but guess what? I'm not all that interested in day-trading and I opened their stupid E-mail so ... fair is fair. You wasted a few seconds of my time and I will waste a few minutes of yours.

It's just too bad that the people whose time is being wasted aren't really the ones who are ultimately wasting my time. No, they're just some lowly, poorly paid humps who are earning a living. But my books are fun and interesting so it actually is well worth their time to click on through and they will be well rewarded when they buy and read them.

When I reply to these Spam E-mails Yahoo will usually give me a code to type in as an anti-spam measure, so really I'm actually not spamming anybody since I'm not doing it in bulk and the original spammers actually solicited a reply from me, which counts as a response to them even if I'm never, ever going to buy jack from them. Nope, not ever.

About half the time I get the Yahoo message that says: 'Daemon failure message not delivered' or something like that. Oh well, at least I tried.

I got one response from a real live human (yes, they exist in Cyberspace!). He must have gotten my re-spamming right then, because his e-mail came back within about five minutes. He said that he would forward the address because he knew some people who had 'children' in that age range. Oh boy. I rated these books as teen and above so I hope he doesn't think this is for anybody who doesn't have pubes, but I wasn't being misleading so ... it'll be okay. Nobody's morals will be corrupted who doesn't want them corrupted.

I'm going to continue re-spamming because even though the response is quite limited (one) it is rather satisfying to take up arms against the unwanted e-mail that show up in my bulk folder.

Speaking of selling: Oh please, check out my books. For some reason my link bar sometimes goes way to the bottom and not to the right so, please find it and click on my books and get one. You'll be so happy you did.

And tell your friends, too.

Sick Day

Here's the thing: We all know that there's a certain amount of discretion in the use of a sick day. I could've made it to work today if somebody had put a gun to my head. Perhaps, I would not be at all productive, but I could have done it if it was that important.

After all, you say, Steve is well enough to sit at a computer and type, doesn't that mean that he should be well enough to sit at his desk and do whatever it is that he does? Well ... not really. But I still feel a bit guilty, a bit unmanly. Conan would have made it to his job, wouldn't he have?
Am I less manly than Conan the Barbarian?

Wait, wrong question.

Anyways, the flu's been going around the office and it's my turn.

I spent a lot of my time today flat on my back playing Resident Evil 4 - Awesome Game! That is: it's awesome after you get through it at least once and have the special Infinite Rocket Launcher. Once you have the infinite Rocket Launcher you can cruise through pretty much any situation. The one exception is that you can't kill the bad guys if they're too close to you, otherwise you get a lot of backflash and it takes a whole bunch of your life away.

Before this, I would get stuck at certain points and give up for days or weeks. The problem was never knowing what to do - there are cheats and walkthroughs for that - the problem is doing what you have to do. Situations that require quickness, dexterity and coordination just stymie me. For example: At the very end of the game there's a point where the huge boss is attacking you and eyes pop open on various parts of this creatures anatomy and you have to shoot the eye before it closes again then run up to the boss and stab at a parasite on its back.

Oh, that's just hellish and I almost gave up at that point, because I'd done almost the entire game and there was nothing left to see after that, so what was the point? At best I would win myself a long cut-scene and that's it. I gave up on Resident Evil Dead Aim before finishing the final boss which was a huge creature with heads popping in and out of it's body and you had to shoot those before it got to you. I never could do that.

Resident Evil 4 has a complicated plot (and that's stretching the word, believe me) and some hilariously mistranslated dialogue. At various points the villains - about five of them, I think - will have you cornered in a cut-scene at their mercy, then ... just walk off. For no reason. And speaking of dialogue there's only one way any line is delivered: sarcastically. And all the villains giggle when they do something diabolical - of course. The hero really should have more of a sense of humor about this all.

Never mind, the plot holes are many and ridiculous and that's not why this game is awesome. It's awesome because of the graphics. If I could just go through this world and look around I think it would be a great game. The monsters jumping out at you are even kind of a distraction but now with all my weapons at max and the infinite rocket launcher I'm running out of room in my satchel.

Oh, and please buy my books. They're really wonderful and you can get to them just by clicking on the link to the right ... go ahead ... try it out.

See how easy it is.

Mrs. Zarqawi

You don't hear to much about Zarqawi's wife, do you? I know he had one, but the news doesn't say anything about her other than she was married to him and that's it. Probably she was grief stricken at his death, though I've got to say: he couldn't have been much of a husband. He wasn't all that good looking, he was chubby with bad teeth and a bad complection and he wasn't too tall. Maybe Mrs. Zarqawi thought he was 'cute' but you know what? The guy was no dream boat for certain.

And he was never around. He was always away from Jordon killing people elsewhere. Sure, he came home every now and then to bomb hotels but most of the time he was 'masterminding' the horrible ends of people who had a different philosophy/religion then he did. You know, that might have been a blessing for Mrs. Zarqawi because the guy sure wasn't the master of charm. You never saw him smile much, not even when he had successfully murdered scores of innocents. He must have had what passes for charisma in terrorist circles but how hard can that really be?

Do you wonder how they met? Were they both perhaps at a falafel shop both reaching for the cucumber sauce when their eyes met and she just fell for the souless unsmiling creep? Probably not. This is the MidEast and almost certainly there's was an arranged marriage and she didn't have so much of a say in her future spouse. In fact, I dare say that if he hadn't had a wife assigned to him he'd have a pretty hard time picking up chicks on his own. He doesn't look like he had 'it'.

When he was away from his wife for so long what exactly do you think he did for romance? This was years that he was absent from his marital bed and a man has needs, doesn't he? Maybe he had a girlfriend but more likely ... boys. Zarqawi probably had a young terrorist in training who looked up to him and admired the courageous and dashing monster that he was.

Well, I guess that's all speculation. He ended his life as a martyr devoting himself to what he believed was God/Allah's will. So, in the Muslim scheme (or the scheme of some Muslims) he is in paradise with his seventy two virgins in a garden eating melons and listening to beautiful music. When Mrs. Zarqawi dies I'm not sure whether she joins him in his paradise as his seventy third partner or if she goes to a separate paradise and gets her own seventy two play mates. Whatever happens, I'm sure she's a whole bunch happier that for now she isn't going to have this bum sharing her bed ever again.

And that's got to be paradise for her.

Nature Vs. Nurture: Why is Damien so Evil?

The new Omen movie is coming out on June sixth, making the date written in Arabic numerals as 6/06/06, which is sort of, but not quite the number of the beast in the book of Revelations. Back in the day when Revelations was written (First Century Rome) letters substituted for numbers so that a word also had a numerical value because letters were interchangeable with numbers. Pretty neat, huh? The problem was that it depended on what language you were doing it in, and for all you Apocalypse nuts out there - none of those languages was twenty first century English.

The Omen was a movie that really, really didn't need to be remade. The first Omen, I recall, was sort of scary for its time and kind of a ground breaker with its use of cinematic techniques. Now, unfortunately, that ground has been broken and it's just trite. The story's the same: Damien is taken in as the adopted son of an American politician in England and he seems to develop horrible supernatural powers and he has the '666' birthmark hidden in his hair. He must be stopped or else he will grow up to be the Antichrist (I think) and bring forth the Apocalypse and awful stuff.

My question is simply: Why is Damien so evil? It can't be nurture because his adopted family does a satisfactory job of providing him a proper upbringing. Of course, many respectable families have children that turn out horrible through now fault of their own, and a lot of famililes that look respectable really aren't. So, we can't let them totally off the hook, but I think the point of the movie is that Damien's father is really the devil - so it's all in the genes. Wouldn't you think?

But if it's in the genes, then Lucifer could only provide half of those genes, meaning that Damien can only be half pure evil, because who was his mother? In the movie, I think he was born from a wolf or something, but he doesn't look half-wolf at all. The wolf, I believe, must have only been a surrogate mother and the real mother was somebody else. That person must be a mystery, but still, whoever the Mother is she can't be pure evil because the Devil is already pure evil, so at best she can be only partly evil and Damien must have some good in him being a sort of half-breed.

Supernatural creatures sure tend to lose a lot when they translate into the real world. They can usually move things with their minds by staring at it real hard, but they can't move much. In fact, they'd all be better off with handguns then with their faulty telekinetic powers. And beings like the incarnated son of the Devil are in human form and have human frailties. In other words, they have to poop. How frightening is the most powerful demonic man on Earth when he has to run off and take potty breaks? Not very, I would say.

In the Omen series Damien assumes his full power when he's an adult in his thirties. The thrill of these movies, if you're well versed in Christian lore, is that it might be kind of true. There might an Antichrist out there growing up in obscurity but fated to take over the world and bring forth Armageddon. However, if you're one of the lucky true believers you'll be raptured up into the sky before all this happens. For the rest of us - if you go by the Omen movies - we have about thirty or so years until this all happens, and I don't know about you, but that's plenty of time for me.


**Check out the Links to the right to find both my books**