Helmintholog

Last week I finally tired of the 2000+ spams a day that were coming into darwinwars.com. My lovely little Python script showed that about 75-80% of them were dictionary attacks so I fixed things so that all mail was refused (not even bounced) to all but six addresses in that domain. Four were accounts I use for shopping or interacting with people who write through the blog. They get forwarded to me properly. Two were old personal accounts, now spam-swamped. They get bounced with a message to try an address at thewormbook.com instead, on the off-chance that they are legitimate.

The result has been that my spam went down to about three messages per day. Shutting off “sales”, “info”, and “extension” at thewormbook.com killed off most of those. Now I can proudly announce that in the last four days SpamAssassin has caught only two spams. Both were sent to the address I have been using to sign blog comments with. I thought MT made this difficult to harvest, but it’s clearly worth somebody’s trouble, since both were 419 scams, from purported European banks.

From time to time, I like to post photographs of people who comment on this blog. This is Sean (the man kneeling behind him is his ghost writer).

The bar in the new Rada building is one of the least depraved places I know: full of hard-working good looking young people drinking healthy coffees and smoling healthy cigarettes. But whenever I sit there, I remember a story about Edmund Kean, the original bad boy actor, in the Routledge Dictionary of Biographical Quotations.

March 16 … Kean about three o’clock in the morning, ordered a hackney coach to his door, took a lighted candle, got in, and rode off. He was not heard of till the Thursday noon when they found him in his room at the theatre fast asleep wrapt up in a large white greatcoat. He then sent for a potence, some ginger etc., and said, ‘Send me Lewis or the other woman. I must have a fuck, and then I shall do.’ He had it. They let him sleep until about six when they awoke him, dressed him, and he acted but was not very sober. After the play we got him to supper at Sigel’s lodgings and got him to a bedroom and locked him up till the morning. James Winston, Diary, 1825.

If you want a short definition of prostitution, it is to to spend your afternoons on call as a hangover cure.

One mysterious detail in a recent local court case. A Londoner was caught at the security in Stansted airport with a cosh, a knife, and teargas spray. The cosh and the teargas, he said, were left over from his evening job as a bouncer, and he had just forgotten to unpack them before travelling. The knife, however, was something he needed in his day job as a cheese dispatcher. Cheese dispatcher? The phrase appeared in both the local newspaper reports. Does anyone know what a cheese dispatcher does?

[ A big cheese dispatcher would be a high-end assassin, obviously ]

It’s about 20 to 1 in the morning. I just got back from the Rada production of The Governent Inspector, and it is wonderful. Anyone in London this week really ought to try to get tickets. It’s a student production, in the 100-seat Vanbrugh theatre. You may not ever see such good acting so close up again. The play itself is monumental: hilarious and perfectly structured. Runs till Saturday. Go!