Tetherd Cow Ahead

Sat 9 Jun 2007

Brother Can You Spare a Dime?

Posted by anaglyph under Sad, Spam Observations, Technology
[11] Comments

My blog has been awash with Comment spam over the last few weeks, and now a new and very annoying trend has emerged with a kind of spam that hijacks the Trackback and Ping functionality of WordPress to make hooks into the spammers’ cruddy sites. It is possible that I will need to completely disable Trackbacks to get rid of this problem and to those of you who like to use this feature I apologize.

Another kind of Comment spam is becoming more prevalent as well: that of the individually hand-entered ‘comment’ that is in fact a link to a spam site or a riff on the ‘Nigerian Unclaimed Fortune’ scam. This means that poor saps are sitting somewhere trawling through blogs entering this data personally. Grim. And now they’ve started with just plain ‘begging’ letters.

At the end of one of my previous Peter Popoff posts, NIMLY had this to say:

Kindly present my prayers to the Lord, as follows, please. (a) I am a deacon (officer) and would like to win souls for God, through performing of miracles, signs and wonders in Jesus Name. (b) My wife would be pleased to have children though doctors said is impossible. (c) our financial situation is very bad and we have much loans to refund every month. (d) we are unable to complete a house project since some years now.(e)I want fultime job at my place of work and good salary, also, work for my wife, who is presently jobless.(f) I have eye and heart problems. My postal adress is – 62 rue A. CAMUS, 68200 MULHOUSE, FRANCE

When I received this comment I was preparing to give NIMLY a good ol’ Cow-style roasting and then it occurred to me that I could check and see if the address he gave was real.

It is. NIMLY lives here:

It is the work of moments to establish that Mulhouse, with its acres of condominiums, is a high immigration/low income city in France, and somehow, suddenly NIMLY became a very real person and I felt overwhelmingly saddened.

Not because I think for a moment that NIMLY is feeble with eye and heart problems, or indeed that he is a Deacon, but because I think that it is very likely that NIMLY is in fact very poor and in need of a fulltime job.

Additionally, NIMLY is plainly not very bright (and certainly not internet-savvy) because he has given out his address for the world to see.

I hate spammers, as you know, but I feel quite sorry for NIMLY. He’s trying on a scam for which he’s hardly equipped in a medium which he really doesn’t understand. NIMLY, if you’re tuning in again, take some advice – forget this caper. You’re not cut out for it and it is likely to turn out badly for you.

Wed 6 Jun 2007

Off The Rails

Posted by anaglyph under In The News, Tragedy, Words
[8] Comments

A terribly tragic event happened in South Eastern Australia yesterday when a semi-trailer collided with a fast moving country train at a rail crossing. Many people were killed and many more hurt.

The news services have been running stories on it all day, and a nutty phenomenon is emerging: witnesses and other associated persons-of-involvement, when describing the scene of the disaster, are prone to blurt out the phrase “It was like a bomb had gone off!”

How many of these observers, I wonder, have actually seen the results of a bomb going off? Why are they using this comparison? Why, indeed, are they using any comparison at all? Surely, for the majority of these people it is most like a train colliding with a truck.

Tue 5 Jun 2007

Money to Burn!

Posted by anaglyph under Hokum, Peter Popoff, Religion, Skeptical Thinking
[8] Comments

OH GOD IT NEVER STOPS!

Drown me in a butt of malmsey! Today, even MORE correspondence from Peter Popoff! This time another MILLION pages of mind-fogging writings and underlinings. And pictures of Prophet Pete. And promises of uncountable fortunes. And dire warnings. And prophecies. And stickers with leaves on them.

I will not bore you much further with any of this (unless he remembers to send me my “bag” of Dead Sea Salt – that’s surely worth a picture), except to say that scanning down the letter I notice that this time he is promising to have included money in this installment. Yes, MONEY!

Oh happy happy joy joy! MONEY! I search through the forest of foolscap pages and find:

Popoff Money

That stuff in the little “bag” on the left is supposed to be the money. It is shredded. And according to the instructions I’m supposed to burn the money with the teeny candle and do something with the resulting ashes (oh, really WHO CARES…?)

If you look very closely you can see that the ‘money’ is really only printed on one side. Just like Peter Popoff, it’s fake.

On the Good News side, I now have THREE reply-paid envelopes. You can bet Prophet Pete is going to be hearing from me real soon.

Thu 31 May 2007

Wear Peiple Meat to Eet

Posted by anaglyph under Food & Drink, Hmmm..., Signs
[19] Comments

A Cow Selling its Own Flesh

Does anyone else find it kinda unsettling to see signs with animals advertising the delights of consumption of their own flesh?

Consider this example. Why is the word ‘meet’ in quotation marks? What does the cow mean by this?

Wed 30 May 2007

I Sea Dead Salt

Posted by anaglyph under Cats, Hokum, Peter Popoff, Religion, Skeptical Thinking, Spam Observations
[33] Comments

Letter Number 3

OK, so I didn’t actually drink the Miracle Spring Water, so much, but it has been about five days. I opened the letter…

Oh beat me senseless with a salmon – TWO MORE FOOLSCAP PAGES of nutty rambling. I can’t begin to describe to you the effect that this has on my brain. And to think I found the Special One Drop Liquid challenging…

Now Prophet Pete is asking me for money (hands up who is surprised?).

I am asking you to plant a HOLY CONSECRATED SEED for a Great Harvest Offering of $17.00. No I don’t want you to send $37 or $77…

Oh silly me. When he said ‘$17.00’ I immediately thought “Oh, surely Prophet Pete you mean $77!”

No. SEND EXACTLY $17.00. Because 1 is the number of the Father… and 7 is the Father’s number of perfection.

Of course! It’s SO obvious! But… erm.. then why not $71.00??

Prophet Pete goes on to predict some remarkable events for my life, including something MIRACULOUS happening on July 7th, possibly the thing he saw in a ‘vision’ revealed to him by God:

I saw a total stranger giving you a beautiful box. When you opened it, joy overwhelmed you when you saw it was filled with money.

Personally, I’m thinking that if a total stranger gave me a box full of money, the expression you might see on my face would more likely be suspicion. Nevertheless, since I’ve been pre-warned by Prophet Popoff, I’m standing by to be overjoyed on July 7. You can be sure I’ll report the events of the day here on The Cow.

Around about this time in the letters, Prophet Pete ratchets up his monetary request from $17 to $27 but neglects to say what the number ‘2’ represents in this case. Maybe 2 is the number of The Holy Ghost, who has been conspicuously absent since the promise of His Instructions in Envelope #1. Or was it Envelope #2. Christ, it’s all so COMPLICATED.

Then, Prophet Pete tells me:

I am going to give you a “Bag”.* In this bag there is some prayer-blessed Dead Sea Salt, this Dead Sea Salt is in and of itself very special.

I know that you are at the moment tormented by an important and serious problem. That is why you must open the bag and use the secret anointed Dead Sea Salt exactly as I direct.

I’ve rummaged through all the papers and I can’t find the “Bag” with the Dead Sea Salt so I guess I don’t get that unless I send off my $17/$27 and empty Miracle Spring Water vial, which is a shame. I’d really like a “Bag” of Dead Sea Salt, but somehow I suspect my $17 would only buy me a 0.17c “Bag” of Saxa.

Sigh. I can’t go on. Truly, Cow fans, this is one remarkably exhausting pile of nonsense. I’d love to tell you about the ‘Silver and Gold BRACELET OF BLESSING’, the offer of Prophet Pete’s PRIVATE PHONE NUMBER and the direct revelations from the prophet AGABUS, but I can already sense you nodding off (like I did every time I looked at the pages of printing and scrawled annotations).

Eventually Prophet Peter Popoff bids farewell:

Your Friend

Egad. Today, Tomorrow and FOREVER. The very thought makes me nauseous. Forever is a really long time. I hate to think how many more pages of impenetrable claptrap he could churn out if he had FOREVER to do it.

I still intend to send off something to Peter Popoff in his reply-paid envelope, and I would love to hear any further suggestions of how we might bring the same kind of joy into his life that he has brought into ours.

In the meantime, it seem appropriate to see what The Spawn would make of Prophet Pete’s Wisdom.

Glitch and the Letter