Cross Posted On My Other Blog

Gay Muscle Penis and Akismet Spam

One of the nice features of WordPress is the ability to catch spam comments and put them in a sort of limbo state for my approval or deletion. Very rarely are any of these comments allowed through to the legitimate comment section. A while back, I activated comment moderation, in which every comment written about one of my topics will never go directly to a post. I must approve it first. This way, nothing pornographic or meaningless gets through.

In my capacity as administrator of this blog I can add words to be blacklisted and I can limit the amount of hyperlinks allowed for all incoming comments. This is a great method of screening out the rot. Many of these comments have a dozen or so links to all sorts of back alley websites. Unfortunately, sometimes a good, legitimate comment gets stuck there, too. Even worse for me, is that I have to scroll through each and every one of those comments to weed out the good from the bad. Every once in a while, I find a good one. Sometimes I miss, for which I apologize.

I can understand a correlation between most of these spam comments and some of my posts. A good example of this is my category on diabetes. Because of medical terminology and descriptions of assorted prescription drugs and supplements, I get thousands of spam content for Viagra, Propecia, Oxycontin, Crestor and a slew of other drugs. I can understand how spam spiders find me through words I have written and somehow expect me to publish the garbage they have sent in from the dark corners of the globe. Trust me, I can get upwards of a thousand a day and if I don't have time to search through all of them, that's where the good guy gets lost. I delete them all.

What puzzles me the most, though, is where do the porn ones fit in? What links them to me? I have never written anything pornographic on this blog. I know, once they latch on to you, they will sink every decayed tooth into you and that may explain it somehow. I remember, a while back, I wrote a piece about a silly watch purchase I made many, many years ago. A Hamilton watch, or what I thought was one, turned out to be a "Harmilton." OK, that helps explain why I still get those persnickety "Counterfeit Rolex" spams, but why porn? Even if I was gay, why would I be interested in "Gay Muscle Penis" which further insults by including tons of links to "porn babes" and "naked and nude underage nymphets?" Let's not forget those "tender, puffy nipples," gay guys, as if that would interest you.

Before I retired for the night, I threw out over a hundred spams. This morning, I woke up, powered up the laptop, went to my site and found over 200 comments caught in Akismet. What is the logic behind these comments? They are never going to be published. Maybe, these entities assume all WordPress users are stupid, but I seriously doubt it. I think they solely do it to aggravate the living crap out of us.

The Blog King - iCommandIt

In 1940, Charlie Chaplin starred in a movie called "The Great Dictator". This is kind of, sort of, similar to the movie that paralleled a certain tyrant who once existed in the world.

The poor little guy never knew when the craziness hit him. Still doesn't. I mean, voices in his brain had been telling him a lot of things most of his life. Sometimes, being an only child and distant from the crowd will do that. Aloof. That's what they called him. The inner pain was etched into his very soul. The pain was real, but voices told him it wasn't. It is not a fair life, when deep inside, you understand your brilliance and it becomes an obsession to educate the world. The world must know of your genius! The voices must be heard! They must be heeded!!! You will turn them all into one and become the true voice. Just wait, the world will see.

"I know," he said. "What better way than to start a blog forum? I will make you fishers of persons!" Must be politically correct, you know. "Hey! Who writes the rules here? I do, right?" Sometimes, the voices answer back. Sometimes, the voices are his students. Students in the imaginary classroom of his mind. After all, there can only be one master in the realm of Urbany. The rest must follow. All the world is a student body. "We need new students," he commanded. "There are millions upon millions out there in the mysterious world of blogging. Much more than any mere classroom can hold. There is a whole world of students out there who will listen to my word. They must!"

"There are rules on the Internet you must follow. Why? Because I make the rules. I can make them as I please, any time I want."

You cannot show pictures of your children. You may not show pictures of your pets. You must obey me or you may not be a part of the Internet community. If I capitalize words on my blog, there is a reason for it and you must respect my wishes by capitalizing the same way when you comment back. You must use your full name. Why? Because I demand it. I am an omnipotent leader. How can I be master of the entire electronic universe without this knowledge. I must know who you are to stop the fake on-line identity. You must be truthful, verifiable and legal. I will always have the final say. You must obey my teachings on all subjects. If you disagree, I will rip you apart and banish you. You may not come back. Only I can break my own rules because I make the rules. Do you understand?

Doctors aren't sure when the obsession began. They think it wasn't a particular day that took his mind away. Here was a Midwest country boy living in the urban core, perpetually glued to his keyboard. It was a slow and dramatic evolution. Eventually, all those voices just kept getting louder and louder. The on-line voices and the ones in his head became confused. Where are they all coming from? These new voices answered back. Sometimes, he didn't like what they had to say. This must stop!

The doctors told him to get out of the house. All teachers take vacations. Stop sitting at the computer, staring at your blog all day and into the night, waiting in stark anticipation for your students to respond to your strokes of brilliance. "They are masterpieces. I know it. My students know it. How long will it take before the entire world knows it? They must! Hurry! Answer me! I command it!"

One day his students stopped paying attention. They became blind to his madness. They logged out.

I saw a man named Bill one day

My parents live on a small street in a town outside of Orlando. It has about a dozen homes on one side and two on the other. There's a small lake across from their house and several of the other homes. Many years ago, a neighbor, Bill, came down with a very rare form of leukemia. I know a lot more about that disease today than I did back then. It's hit closer to home than I ever would have wanted it to. That is a different story. This one is about Bill.

It was Bill's lake. Bill was always successful in life, from what I could see and what I heard from my parents and the other neighbors. He was well liked. He and his wife had many friends together. His doctors could do nothing for him here, so he went out to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Unfortunately, he was a little too old and the leukemia had taken too strong of a hold for the doctors out there to do much. Oh, they tried different procedures but nothing worked. Eventually, he was sent home to live out his remaining days in as much comfort as his doctors could provide. My parents kept me informed, in spite of the fact that I really didn't know him all too well. Every time I'd visit, I'd make it a point to ask about Bill if they didn't tell me.

One afternoon, I went to see my folks. Driving by Bill and his wife's home, I saw him standing in the driveway. I waved, but he didn't respond. He didn't even look at me. He seemed to be staring out into an empty void and I noticed his face was pale, almost gray. I thought, well, he's not in the best of health right now, anyway. Intently, I watched him as I drove by, thinking that this would more than likely be the last time I'd see him. Something seemed different, but I had no idea what it was. It's as if he was somewhere else. I distinctly remember him wearing a plaid or flannel shirt of some kind. I thought to myself that he must be nearing the end of his journey and, perhaps he was too weak and unresponsive to acknowledge me. I knew he had been declining, but I had no idea what kind of shape he was in.

I pulled into my parents' driveway and went in. The first thing I said after our greetings was that I had just seen Bill standing outside his home. I waved and he didn't even notice me. Poor Bill.

"That's impossible," my mother said.

"Why? Is he too sick to get out of bed? I mean, there he was."

"No, David, Bill passed away two days ago in the hospital."

I went out and looked. He was gone.

When Human Life is a Series of Zeros

If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?

"The skin of last night's main course."

- Kevin Underwood, on his profile at futureworldruler.blogspot.com , titled "Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K."

When a computer comes crashing down and a fatal error message flies into your face, there is a reason why. It could be a virus - or it could be a conflict of some kind, like certain applications that don't like each other. Your operating system, for example, has resident fonts. Let's say you purchase a $10 CD with thousands of fonts to install. Your computer might already have Palatino installed on the hard drive. You choose one from your CD called, let's say, Palamino and load it into your Fonts folder. In computerspeak, everything is a series of ones and zeros, known as binary language. The only difference between those two fonts might be a couple of ones or zeros. When your computer goes looking for Palatino or Palamino, there isn't enough of a difference between the two. Your computer recognizes them both simultaneously, becomes confused and freezes up. Unfortunately, you get mad at your computer, not realizing it was brought on by your own mistake.

When humans come crashing down, what are the conflicts that cause these fatal errors? Unless they are acts of violence brought on by sudden rage, most crimes of a physical nature are premeditated. Think of Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, real life Hannibal Lecters, although Bundy didn't make entrees out of his victims.

Pity the family and friends of poor little ten year old Jamie Rose Bolin, of Purcell, Oklahoma. This freckle-faced girl, so full of life and innocence, was brutally murdered and raped, in that order, by her 26 year old neighbor, Kevin Underwood. Pity his family, too. He planned on having her for dinner. Without going into too much unnecessary detail, police found a dagger, a hacksaw, meat tenderizer and barbecue skewers in his apartment, along with her body, which was stuffed in a plastic storage tub in his bedroom closet. “Go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up,” he confessed to FBI agents.

What causes human beings to do this? Animals may stalk their prey, but they do it for survival. Humans do it for the thrill. What goes heywire in the minds of such men?

“For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird,” Underwood wrote on his blog in September of 2004. “If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I’d probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be.”

Does he feel any remorse? What do we do with him? Forgive him? Turn the other cheek? Burn him with the Bundys of the world? He acknowledged, on his blog, the effects of not taking his anti-depression medication. Whose fault is that? Yours, mine or only his? As a matter of fact, his last post came a day after the little girl’s disappearance. Is this the mind of a man who did not know what he had just done and shouldn’t be tried on account of insanity?

Computers are metal and plastic and not nearly as complex as the soft tissue that makes up the structure of the hard drive of the human mind. A computer does not premeditate a fatal error. Only man can do that. But, a computer is a lot easier to fix. How long was this drive to kill inside Kevin Underwood’s brain? Why did he go after a powerless little girl, unable to defend herself? Like a sociopathic online stalker waiting to pounce on the flesh of an underage child, what signals crossed paths in his mind that destroyed the logic that dictates respect and dignity for all human life? Something fried his brain. Now, I think the state of Oklahoma is going to fry it a little more.

This sort of crime - any crime, does not compute in my brain. Sometimes, I wish we could just reformat the whole lot of that giant fragmented mainframe known as humanity. Rest in peace, sweet innocence of youth. We lost it a long time ago.