No direct connection between the two; just a little coffee-break post about TV–with an update on spam, since Spam Karma trapped more than 200 items on this low-traffic blog in the last 14 hours and 45 minutes (that’s after Blake Carver’s upgraded server spam control)!
TV: Here’s the awful truth. My wife and I watch TV year-round, about an hour a day (five or six days a week) during most of the year (two on Saturday, because that’s movie night). “Year round” means that we watch series when they’re new episodes and worth watching, TV-on-DVD otherwise. (Which means “about an hour” is really “42 to 48 minutes” in many cases.)
Our set of TV-on-DVD choices is strong enough that we’re reluctant to take on new on-air series unless they really suit us. That doesn’t mean Big Challenging Shows; it means entertainment, and it’s normally in the 8-10 period. I won’t give you the list; I just wanted to note one new show that did capture our interest–and that’s already completed its first [very short] season. Dunno whether it will be rerun; dunno whether it will return, but we hope so. It’s not world-shattering material, but…oh, wait, maybe it is. The show was Three Moons over Milford, set in Milford, Vermont, and the premise is that a space collision has shattered the moon into three parts–and any one or all of them could come down at any time and presumably wipe out humanity. Which tells you very little about the show, actually, except that it’s a fairly lighthearted study of how people might cope with “this might be your last day” as more of a reality.
It’s on ABC Family. The first season ended last Sunday night. It’s no Moonlighting or Northern Exposure, but it’s not half bad. If they do rerun it, you might give it a try. You might like it. You might not.
Spam: 218 in less than 15 hours, and this isn’t a high-traffic site. The breakdown’s very different this time:
- 99 “Baby buffalo” (you’d have to be a James Taylor fan)–that is, ones with “Are you there?” as all or most of the text, and the spam as the URL.
- 57 cellphone offers (that’s not that different)
- 24 p**n of some sort
- 19 gambling, all of them for exactly the same site
- 12 various inoffensive goods and services
- Six various compliments to drive URLs or links
- One truly random.
A gentle reminder: If you send a legitimate comment and it’s delayed, it probably looked like spam. If it never shows up, it’s because I was off the air for more than 2-3 days and just couldn’t cope with plowing through hundreds or thousands of these to find the mistagged nuggets. And I don’t wonder that high-traffic blogs turn off comments!
Update: Blake Carver, proprietor of LISHost, has done some tweaking of server-side blocks (including blocking all trackbacks, since I don’t allow them anyway). The result: I seem to be down to 10-20 spam attempts a day, a level that I can deal with even after an absence. Thanks, Blake–and if anyone wonders why I recommend LISHost as a host, this is certainly one reason!
Update 2: It was nice while it lasted. The trackbacks are (almost) all gone–but comment spam is back worse than ever: 257 attempts since yesterday afternoon, almost all of them during a one-hour period, pretty much all of them of the “Nice blog!” (and endless variations) variety of link-url spam. All of them, I believe, machine-generated. Man, narcissists out there must have a s*tload of spamments. After all: If they didn’t get through, the jackasses would stop creating them.
