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GRRR

There's a small group of blogs that I touch base with every day. They're over there on the right. The Daddy of them all is Gutrumbles. That guy Rob is one of those free spirits that is always fun to watch. I suppose because he gets the juices flowing... but he also seems to get his buttons pushed about the same time and way that mine are.

He just took off on a rant about spammers. Now I suspect that he gets a lot more personal mail than I do because he's the kind of guy that pisses a lot of people off. I mean... pisses them off on purpose. I tend to piss people off by mistake. I'll say something about Orlando bus service and suddenly every advocate of public transportation will be at my door with a rope in their hands. Well heck.

But what kills me is the volume. I've got a piece of software from McAfee called Spamkiller that rides on top of my Inbox and filters the stuff as it hits... but damn... the volume! Some mail I enjoy getting. Honest. I like to get chatted up by folks from Australia writing me and asking what the weather is like in Central Florida and whether I'm afraid of alligators. But along with the real emails are mixed in two kinds of crap:

The first is the straight commercial dreck. I figure this stuff is mass mailed like all junk mail based on the assumption that 99.99% of the time they will be shitcanned, but the remaining one percent will make them rich men. That stuff is snuffed out by the good folks at McAfee. At the moment it is running at about a thousand a day. The actual count as of this moment for yesterday and this morning is... 1783. Jeez! And it takes up a lot of time and computer resources to process the stuff. I can tell when the Spamkiller is working because things slow down noticably. Not enough to really make me livid like Rob, but enough so that I'm thinking that I really don't want to subsidise these assholes' desire to sell me something that I don't want. It's sort of like... if the mailman backed up a tractor trailer full of unsolicited junk mail to my mail box every day and I was left with the unenviable task of toteing all of the offers for all the people who want to sell me penny stocks and bigger dick pills and traditional porno and new wave porno with farm animals... I mean, why should I have to carry all this crap to the dumpster? And by extension, why should I have to run something like McAfee out in front of my mail box? I have to pay so that these goons can send me their shit. Grrr.

Now with traditiional snailmail at least the bulk mailers have to spend the money for a stamp and for getting the crap printed and there are thousands of guys out there making a living delivering the mail. But with email all they have to do is push a button to aggravate me. I'd like to find out their physical address and send them a bill. I mean... come on guys. Even with the software to stuff you down the toilet you are taking up my air. Quit it.

The second kind of unwanted mail that I get are crank letters. There is some asshole in Fargo who wants to tell me that he thinks that everyone living in the sunny south is a racist Jim Crow cracker and he wants me to perform some kind of anatomical impossibility so that he can vailidate himself in some sort of sick way. Those guys are colorful, but a trifle redundant. And there are folks who want to come around and put a bullet in my head because some bondsman had to put them back in jail last year and they figure that it's my fault. I suspect that they got put back in the darkie hole because they're losers and didn't go to court like they should. Those guys are so hopelessly inept that they're not much of a threat. I mean... if you've ever tried to fire a handgun while holding it sideways like some dork on TV you will undertand why law enforcement has so much time to eat donuts and pork hookers.

Some of these guys have sent me multiple copies of files of pictures of their diseased body parts and asking if it looks familiar. Again, this kind of stuff takes up time and space and computer resources and is mostly purged by the McAfee stuff, but it still slows down things and I don't want to have to be the point of takeoff for these kinds of loonies. I believe that they're dangerous and crazy people who are out there hating ME may be on a shortlist with the coroner's office. Gentlemen... you need to know that I am armed and dangerous and I practice constantly in order to hone my shooting skills. I do not hold my gun sideways. If you pop out of the bushes near me you need to let me know you're there otherwise you might die trying to straighten me out about something I said on line. Duh!

I guess this whining is part of the price that I have to pay if I want to blog and have a fairly busy web site. But I can fully understand why Rob wants to have the cretins broken on the wheel. My concern is really with the kooks. I wonder if Rob or Velocidude or Jim one of them has ever had one of these idiots show up on the front step toteing a handgun. Fortunately, I think that I'm fairly hard to get to. I work for the State mostly these days and I'm inside a JAC surrounded by metal detectors and my connection to bonding is mostly a thing of the past. But guys... what happens when one of these loonies shows up at one of your Georgia BlogParties?

I know.. I know. But just because I'm a paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out there adjusting for windage.

Bob