Yet another crazy spam target

The traffic for johnsmithsvt has dropped off considerably in the last few years, mostly replaced by “elliott”, weirdly enough. This week, though, a new bizarre spam target entered the ring: idlok4.dlqvr. This has the added curiosity of being addressed to a domain that gets just about no mail. Spammers’ ways remain a mystery to me.

The Poetic Mixmaster

From the delightful book by Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (which I highly recommend for other food history and home ec history nerds like me), a poetic mixer interlude:

“Back in 1940, while [Gertrude] Stein and [Alice] Toklas were living in the country house where they spent the war years, a package had arrived from Chicago. Samuel Steward, an American writer they had befriended, had decided to send them a Mixmaster. ‘Gertrude had said she liked things that went around–gramophone records, whirling grouse, eggbeaters, and the world,’ he wrote later in a memoir. ‘The Mixmaster seemed like the perfect gift, a useful to Alice as well.’

Stein and Toklas were ecstatic. ‘The Mix master came Easter Sunday, and we have not had time to more than read the literature put it together and gloat, oh so beautiful is the Mix master, so beautiful and the literature so beautiful, and the shoe button potatoes that same day so beautiful and everything so beautiful,’ wrote Stein. She ended her letter, ‘Alice all smiles and murmurs in her dreams, Mix Master.’ Ten days later she wrote again: ‘Day and night Mix master is a delight….Now Alice works it all alone and it saves her hours and effort, she can write a whole advertisement for Mix master she is so pleased.’ Toklas was using it for everything she could think of, including spoon bread and mashed potatoes. Then disaster–Toklas dropped the bowl, and it shattered. Stein begged Steward to send a replacement:’…you see you can use other bowls but they do not twirl around in that lovely green mix master way and when they do not twirl their contents instead of staying down rise up and spill and therefore the mix master will have to be a mix master still.’ Steward couldn’t send a new bowl until 1945. He also sent new beaters, for Stein reported that the originals ‘got busted.'”

Song of Ice and Fire (so far) Review

A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, A Dance with Dragons; Martin. Yes. This series has been around for so long, and I have been only peripherally aware of it, so when I saw the four-volume paperback boxed set at Costco, I thought “Hey, I guess it’s complete; why don’t I just pick up a set?” Only to find later that not only is there a fifth volume recently released, but there are two more books to come. And each of the last two has taken more than five years in the writing! If you have seen the books, you have seen that they are not thin, either: each is in the neighborhood of 1,000 pages. So I hope that by the time I retire, I will be able to have the last volume beamed into my brain by whatever device Microamazoogle has created for that purpose, and that the embedded ads don’t give me a stroke.
But on to the books themselves. I like them. They do not have break-neck pacing (as you might expect just from the page count), but they did keep my interest (volumes three and four do suffer somewhat from middle-game syndrome: you have all these pieces to get into place for the end game, and it’s hard to keep all their movements vital and involving). Martin does a good job with more point-of-view characters than one customarily sees, though I think I could do without the fanciful naming he introduces in (I believe) volume four.
In some ways, Martin is the anti-Tepper here: where Tepper’s characters are sometimes tiresomely black or white, Martin’s are almost all shades of grey, and in many ways that was refreshing.
Now let’s hope that the success of the TV series is enough motivation to get the last two books out (and not so much motivation that the series expands again).

Your comment spam of the day

I won’t approve the comment, since if you wanted some trendy headphones with the brand of a highly influential hip-hop artist, you would find them in your own way, but this is some of the best comment spam poetry I have seen in a long time:

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