Spamcommentology, Part I: Seeking Fake Advice

So one of the regular housekeeping chores involved with running a blog is of course reviewing spam comments. I mean, you don’t have to do it; you can just ignore your spam comments, and let them be fully managed and deleted automatically by your anti-spam plugin. (And you do need an anti-spam plugin. Oh boy do you need an anti-spam plugin.) But if you never review the comments on your spam list, you will miss the (very) occasional real comment that gets caught up in the dragnet, and you don’t really want to leave someone twisting in the wind after they took the time to write a comment, do you?

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Teaser Tuesday: “The Magicians”

So this week I was reading The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, AKA This Is Not A Harry Potter Book Even Though It’s About a College of Magic and References Quidditch.

These are not Ents. Or are they?
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This Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month Reminder Brought To You By An Insurance Company That Doesn’t Want To Insure You If You Have An Aneurysm

So September is Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month, and as it happens, I received this advertisement from AAA life insurance (I added the red box):

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Not A Review Of The “Spider-Man: No Way Home” Trailer

So at this point, everyone who’s interested has seen the new trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home. Multiple times. (Lord knows I have.) For those who haven’t run across it yet, here it is:

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Not A Review Of “A Scanner Darkly”

So recently we watched A Scanner Darkly, the film adaptation, by Richard Linklater, of the book of the same name, which I read last month.

What are the neighbors up to now?
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Teaser Tuesday: “The Stone Sky”

So this week I’ve been reading The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin, the final book in “The Broken Earth” trilogy:

The premise of this trilogy is, basically, that the Earth hates humanity and is trying to destroy it via disasters both natural and man-made.

And here you thought I only read fiction.

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The Early Years: Everyone Loves Monkeys. Apparently.

So this week I peeled a few layers off the top of the giant cache of my old elementary school work that my folks discovered and sent out to me a few years ago, in which I found this early, analog example of collecting “Likes”:

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Technical Support, Mandalorian-Style

So a while back I mentioned that, a year or two after everybody else, I had started watching The Mandalorian on Disney+, and that I had hoped my wife would like it, since she had, unexpectedly, been a fan of the late, lamented, sabotaged-by-Fox Firefly, not to mention the film Pitch Black; so there’s a precedent for her enjoying the Space Western* genre. Sadly, she tuned out The Mandalorian almost immediately, other than her recently-noted strong objection to the characterization of the Frog Lady as a “Frog”. But then there was this scene, at the beginning of a recent episode, after the Mandalorian’s has sustained major damage, requiring Baby Yoda** to be dispatched into, let’s call it a Jefferies Tube, so that the Mandalorian*** can talk him through a minor wiring repair. How does that go? About as well as you would think.

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Teaser Tuesday: “The Lost Fleet: Fearless”

So this week I was reading The Lost Fleet: Fearless, by Jack Campbell, which is the follow-up to The Lost Fleet: Dauntless.

Has anybody seen a fleet around here?
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What Does The Frog Say?

Does it say “Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding”? No, that’s what the fox says, apparently. The frog mostly says things that nobody can understand. But at least the subtitles are there to clarify things, so we can definitively answer this question. What does the frog say when she meets the Mandalorian? She speaks frog.

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