Midnight
Posted by Gremlin in What's New on Wednesday, 24th April 2002 at 11.41 pm Zulu Time
Time for yet another fun-filled What's New, with your host: ME
Try to contain your excitement out there....
Of course, I'm always happy to be here. Especially factoring how close to death we just came.
My fault: I thought the freeway might be a safe place to be. I forgot momentarily that Denverians are idiots. And mixing idiots with TrEx equals death.
What's TrEx, you ask? No one really knows, exactly. All we know is that it A) stands for Transportation Expansion, B) involves most of Interstate Twenty-five being torn up on a nightly basis, and C) is regarded by everyone but me as T-Rex. Which apparently also stands for T-Ransportationexpansion. Or something. It's entirely possible that the Duhmerican government are behind this one as well.
So I'm driving along at a casual 110MPH or so, when these pagans [Latin: uneducated labourers], who get paid some small amount to wear rather an unfashionable orange and rip apart freeways, suddenly move all the little construction pylon thingys over by one lane, nearly getting mashed by the Boxy Monstrosity™ in front of me, which hit the brakes, powerslid a bit, made it into the next lane over, cut off the guy already in that lane, forgot to stop flooring the brakes, and caused everything northbound to stop in the middle of nowhere. That left me wishing I could get over out of the lane which was so recently a viable path northbound because some huge GarbageTruck painted unfashionable orange decided that the reason to have moved the pylons in the first place was to allow it to get out onto the open road where it could run me over.
The details of my daring escape are, of course, classified. Also, we're negotiating with Tom Clancy for the book rights.
Anyway: having daringly escaped Certain Doom™, I got here to Grot's™, which is really just another Village Idiot™ but the former manager, Grot, who wasn't actually named Grot but should have been, used to bother me a lot by...well...by bothering me. She was the one who coined the term Eating or Non™ at me. Also, she was the one who told the servers here that they were no longer allowed to stop and talk to me, resulting in this strange game where the servers had to circle like sharks, getting little bits of my order, because they weren't allowed to stop moving long enough to hear it all at once.
Grot was really very bothersome. She's gone now.
I think it may have helped that I once pulled out the mobile phone and called Domino's to have a pizza delivered to my table. I nearly got into trouble for that, but I had a pretty good defence: Grot wouldn't let anyone ask me what I wanted to eat, so I improvised.
With Grot gone from Grot's™, the place has become a little better. Not a lot better, but enough that I can stand being here just long enough to write one of these things.
So that's what I'm up to at the moment.
As for actual news...um...we might get some of that later....
Meanwhile: it looks like the spammers have a new tactic which they apparently think somehow exonerates them when they spam me. I got an EMail from some goofy company or other trying to get me to let them send me a bunch of free mailing labels for free plus some country or other's national debt for shipping and handling; this was at the end of the EMail:
If you believe that you may have received this offer in error, please contact Customer Service at abuse@smartergoods.com |
Loosely translated:
We've probably never actually EMailed you before, and we have no particular reason to think you might like us to start EMailing you now. We have, however, got reason to assume that you, like most netisens, are a complete moron who will assume that, if we're EMailing you, it's because we have your EMail address on file from some previous encounter, and, by logical extension, that we have a good reason for sending you this offer for something you could never possibly want, ever. If, however, it turns out that you're not quite as dumb as we were hoping, then we further hope you're at least dumb enough to assume that we still have your EMail address for some good and legal reason, and that you'll go ahead and think that, by replying to this EMail, or clicking the link below, you'll actually be taken off our little SpamList instead of merely confirming for us that your EMail address is actually valid, and not just some weird string of random characters created by our spamming software.
If you believe that you may have received this offer in error, you're retarded; we had every intention of sending this spam to you; we just weren't sure, initially, what your response would be. If your response is that of an idiot, then either take us up on this pointless offer, click on the included link, or even EMail abuse@smartergoods.com which is another way we'll be able to confirm that your EMail address is viable and used on a rucurring basis.
Just in case you ever wondered how these people do things.
The good news is that, regardless what these twits thought they were going to accomplish, they made the fatal error of EMailing me; and, according to the disclaimer, anything EMailed to me becomes my property. Which means that I now reserve the right to use and/or modify the hell out of everything contained in the EMail they sent me, including the images.
I'll probably do some other things to the images when I have more time.
More later....
--Gremlin
