January 24, 2013

• Splogged!

  February 28, 2009, I wrote a blog about electronic cigarettes.

  Yesterday (January 23, 2013) I received the following comment on that blog:

  I want plenty of articles and blogs please upload shortly. (And a link to a site that talks about e-cigarettes.)

   

  Okay. 1.) I have already ‘uploaded plenty of blogs’ between 2.28.2009 and yesterday (although none were about e-cigarettes.) 2.) I don’t know that I think the e-cigarette blog was particularly notable. 3.) ‘please upload shortly’ is not standard English usage. It’s not even necessarily wrong: it’s just not the way an American would say that. 4.) The comment was logged from a blind site created that day with a signature that tells me nothing. 5.) The comment was logged the day after Xanga sent me–and every other Xangan, I assume–a notice about ‘splogs’.

   

  I don’t even know what a ‘splog’ is.

   

  Stolen from Wikipedia: “A spam blog, sometimes referred to by the neologism splog,^[1] is a blog which the author uses to promote affiliated websites, to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites or to simply sell links/ads.”

   

  Yup. I’ve been splogged. Well, the wiki site goes on to chat about the nature of splogs, much of which is gobblety-gook to me, but it does appear I’ve been splogged.

   

  Should I bathe? Rinse my mouth? Close my site?

   

  I have to be honest,here. There is so much about the internet to eludes me. Why would anyone write a virus, for instance? I mean, I understand why our enemies abroad might want to shut down the American branch of the internet or even bring giant corporations to their electronic knees: it’s just the general loose-cannon screws-with-everyone’s-computer-for-no-reason virus writers I don’t understand. You don’t get to see it. You don’t get to watch your victims struggle. At BEST you might get a story written about the damage you’ve done in the newspaper: what kind of gratification is that?

   

  Last year someone hijacked my email contacts and informed everyone I know that I was abandonned and penniless in airport in the Phillipines. Causing all of my friends to wonder how I ever came up with enough money to make it all the way to the airport in the Phillipines. “Has Cheryl ever even been out of the country?” my friends quizzed each other (she has.) “Did YOU know she was going to the Phillipines? Why didn’t she take a boat–I hear they’re cheaper, she could have made it to Japan, by boat…” People called me. “What are you doing in the airport in the Phillipines and how did you answer your home phone?”

   

  “That’s a long flight, isn’t it? I just talked to her four hours ago…”

   

  I’m betting that none of my friends ever sent a dime to free me from the confines of the airport in the Phillipines.

   

  “The woman won’t even go to Florida,” they dismiss, “something about bugs and snakes…” 

   

  My personal favorites, of course, are the Nigerians who are always discovering I am the sole beneficiary of someone I have never heard of who just died, alone and heirless, leaving me millions of dollars in a special account that all I need to do to claim is to send my social security number, my credit card number and the blood of my first-born child to a total stranger who can barely speak English.

   

  The Ability to speak English like someone who actually speaks English is a baseline requirement, for me. 

   

  And now I have been required to write multiple articles about e-cigarettes by a total stranger.

   

  My friend Kari smokes e-cigarettes. She has a whole second purse full of their pieces/parts, which reminds me that when I smoked (real cigarettes, *cough*) I too carried an open pack, a closed pack, a lighter and a book of matches with me everywhere I went. E-cigarettes, it turns out, can subject you to the same health hazzards as real cigarettes.  TRICK! 

   

  I don’t even dream about smoking any more. I used to: I used to dream that I had quit, but every now and again I ‘snuck’ one and the end of the dream would be tallying up just how many I ‘snuck’ in a day and admitting that, once again, I was smoking… But I haven’t had that dream in a long time.

   

  Kari had to switch brands recently. She told me why. Something got hard to find. I don’t smoke e-cigarettes, so I didn’t listen all that carefully, and now I don’t know why she switched.

   

  And the world just goes on splogging. Xanga has come to a crossroads, trying to distinguish real people from the imaginary ones.

   

  I am tired now, and may need to take a nap.

   

      

   

   

  • 3:08 pm
  • 1 Comment