Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2002 > Late August 2002 Edition

Late August 2002 Edition

Well, the house that will be my new abode is slowly coming together into someplace livable. Today my sister is reinstalling the bathroom sink. Next comes the final transport or storage of my sister's stuph. I will move in this weekend.

My two computers, which before now shared a common monitor, keyboard and mouse by a KVM switch, are now separate. The lesser box, which I will use with the DSL line, keeps the common monitor and keyboard. The greater box, which comes with me to the new abode, has a new monitor, keyboard and mouse, and gets a dial-out modem.

Spam

I have already vented myself once on the changing of the Internet into a fetid dump. One of its worse aspects is unsolicited commercial e-mail, commonly known as spam.

Originally a newsgroup term for excessive or inappropriate cross-posted messages, spam now refers to the electronic form of junk mail, especially if it panders to your greed or lust.

Sometimes spam has a link that lets you opt out of the spammer's mail list. You seal your doom if you click it, though, for it tells the spammer there's a live address. Even if that spammer never uses it, your address will almost certainly get passed around to others. After that, the Deluge!

The spam has gotten so bad, esp. over the past couple of months, that I have had to go into my site, kill one e-mail account, and set up a catch-all for the master account. I will see if I can change the master account itself, and hope that one day 'dysmey' will be usable again.

At least my spam problem is gone for awhile. I pity the average user who can only lessen the spam pain with the filters of their e-mail client programs, if they have them or know how to use them. But they can never be free of the crud for even a minute.

IU #1 Party School

Indiana University at Bloomington, my state's incubator for lawyers and other social parasites, has been ranked the number one party school by the newly-released "Best 345 Colleges Guide" from the Princeton Review.

The only reason IU is at the top now, when Ball State usually vies for the honor, is that IU hasn't been part of the survey for the past three years. If it had, it would rank number one every year: drunken parties, frat houses shut down for booze binges and hundreds of alcohol-related arrests make IU the top pickled-processing plant in Indiana.

As you'd expect, the top administrators at IU foamed at the mouth at the news. They'd been trying to build some semblance of an academic rep since they fired basketball coach Bobby Knight. The booze keeps getting in the way…that, and IU's cruddy rep outside the fields of law, arts, humanities and social sciences. (Informatics? C'mon! Next they'd be introducing physiognomy at IUPUI!)

You just can't blame the IU management for being miserable. But that rating isn't telling anyone in Indiana, what they don't already know.

The bellies are grumbling

The papers last Sunday proclaimed, that the bellies are grumbling again. The bellies demand to be fed. Agèd myths are trotted out on display as proof that in the homeland there is great evil. Yes, they say, there is a great evil that can only be absolved by feeding the bellies more and more.

Hearing the grumbling of the bellies are the political and cultural leaders of our nation. To these leaders history is bunk and morals—and by extension justice—are of no relevance whatsoever. And yet, these bellies are such a bother! No doubt our leaders will feed the bellies whatever they want out of the public trough, if only they would just go back to their pens and shut up!

There is no justice in any of this.

Worse, there are those who have overcome their ventritude and have become men and women. These people have a hard enough time working to convince others that they are not bellies, that they worked hard to get where they are! But now bellies big and small are trying to drag them back into the pens, to poison the minds of others against them, to undo all their hard work.


Copyright © 2003 by Andy West. All rights reserved. Last updated 30 November 2003.