I treasure the comments that this blog receives, almost as much as I value the friends and relatives that make these comments.  As much as I love your comments though there is a dark side to the blogging biz that I have never shared with any of you, until now.  I’m speaking of course about spam comments, but of a better class of spam than you might be familiar with.  No Canadian pharmaceuticals have been advertised here.  Especially no Viagra spam.  No, these spam comments are much more homespun.  WordPress has a facility, Akismet, that corrals all of this spam and every few days or so I press one button and they all disappear.  All nice and neat, but just as showbiz routinely turns inward and creates a play within a play, so does yours truly blogger here also find himself getting introspective.  Here are just a dozen of the several dozen spam comments that Akismet has intercepted in the last few days:

• You are a very clever individual! – Pink Lingerie [ooh, lá lá!]
• Hey y’all make sure you check out www [that really narrows it down]
• Wow! This blog is sick! How did you make it look like this!? [complement?]
• I seriously enjoyed reading your site. Wonderful material and i’m sure i’m not the first person who finds it exceptionally beneficial. [well, actually]
• You are a very capable individual! [don’t, please stop; please, don’t stop]
• fnyi84x3q5rw1w7txx7410jl1 [garbled? spam from another planet?]
• Your blog has been the highlight of my day. – Colon Cleanser [sheeat!]
• I adore this blog site layout! How do you make it!? It’s very nice! [when I catch them, I grind up the spammers into a fine paste, then I …]
• Well, all things considered… [luv the radio show! don’t get the comment?]
• You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most persons will consent with your site. [Umm, I’m married, you know?]
• I really enjoyed this blog. It’s nice when you read something that is not only informative but entertaining. Greet! [you almost had me there]
• питательная маска + для рук [wait for it, … looks like Greek to me!]

I should apologize to the Hormel people for using as a graphic for this post, a picture of their product’s label.  But the duality of spam has been around for decades, meat product and internet trash.  I believe that as that sage of modern American publicity once said, “There is no such thing as bad press, it is all just press.”  So I defer to that goddess of publicity, Mae West, and I refer Hormel to her also.  So how did the word spam transition from meat to internet?  Sounds like another blogging opportunity.

Folks, I’m back on the morning shift again, where I belong.  I’m getting too old for doing those evening posts.  See you again tomorrow morning.

I see dumb people, walking around like regular people.  They don’t see how stupid they are.  They only see what they want to see.  They don’t even know they’re dumb.  – A “quote” from the movie The Sixth Sense

The topic for this post germinated after I heard this news story about a man who dialed 911 and reported that a suspicious package had been placed on his front porch.  A police officer was dispatched and questioned the caller, “Is this the package, sir?”  “Yes, officer, that’s it.”  “Sir, I see that the package has the Amazon logo on it.   Have you recently ordered anything from Amazon?”  “Um, ah, oh yeah, I ordered a Kindle.”  Book’em Danno!  Case closed, another dumb person is caught in the act of being stupid.

With this preamble it is with some trepidation that I mention that I have checked out from the library the book, Blogging for Dummies.  I like the Dummies series and its competitive series, The Complete Idiot’s Guide.  Both series cover their subjects of choice with a breezy and witty style all the while informing the reader to depth that is surprising and belies the two series’ titles.  Anne is less enthusiastic about these books than I am.  She is still reserving her judgment about them and is waiting for the publishing of Ventriloquism for Dummies.

I am reasonably happy with this little old blog of mine, but in addition to the daily search for new fodder, I am also always keeping my eye out for new directions to take this blog.  To that end, I had to check out the Huff Post article about a half-a-dozen great time-wasting websites.  I would have loved to be featured among them, but unfortunately my blog doesn’t have a schtick like the ones featured in the article do.  I have chosen to discuss the three that I liked best.  I didn’t choose the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, because I thought that it was too dumb.  Wait… Stupid, Stupid, Stupid!  These are the three sites that I liked:

• Please Fire Me is a supposedly anonymous website where readers can submit their own stories about how stupid there co-workers are.  This will work until the first reader’s post actually results in a firing and then the once begging to be fired ex-employee turns around and sues this website.
• Hungover Owls touches upon my sense of avian adoration and features photos of sleepy owls after a supposed long hard night of drinking.  Each picture is accompanied by quipped captions that drive the joke home.  Basically, it is about dumb birds instead of dumb people.
• Middle School Proverbs is the site that I liked the best.  For example, when the site’s author laments about the sentence, “Dog, I heard she got deportationed to New Jersey.”, so many things wrong with that sentence.

Anne could supply similar if not better fodder than is published on Middle School Proverbs.  She has daily access to the same deep well of material, but her sense of propriety prohibits me from sharing the same stories with you, that she shares with me, every evening.  Look back upon your life.  When were you ever at a lower intelligence level than in middle school?  In middle school all you have to do to see dumb people is to simply open up your eyes.