WhimsyLand

It's August and I'm wondering if I should turn WS back into a Fully Operational Battle Station.  You know, blogroll, trackbacks, links to litmags, Flash-based email icon, streaming video webcam of my study.  It's been wonderful being my own low-maintenance alter ego, but I somehow feel like I'm violating The Code.

I snuck over to Reb's joint (love the new shades) and followed a link like the old days to Mr. or Ms. Prisoner-In-A-Croissant-Factory-And-Loving-It, who seems way too tuned in to be just anybody, but I haven't figured out just which somebody yet.  I am completely mesmerized by the yellow abbreviations, which I stared at for a full minute before figuring out what they might be.  I'm a puzzle lover by nature, of course, so I didn't really want to know too quickly what I was looking at.  Anyway, it got me to thinking about people whose blog I would like to read if they had one.  The top of my list would be Dean Young, Bob Hicok and Albert Goldbarth.  They're all too famous at this point to actually have blogs, I suppose, and AG hasn't touched a computer his entire life, so that's out.  These gentlemen come to mind because I sent copies of their recent poetry books off with Derek, who is accompanying Kyle and Cath to the outer banks of North Carolina.  The last time I was there was in the '60's and there was simply no there there.  My dad pulled the station wagon up onto a sand dune and we popped a big tent around a campfire we built of driftwood.  An hour after dark, we noticed a million tiny eyes reflecting the light of the fire, circling our encampment.  My dad, a two-war veteran and no wimp, took a flashlight and came back with a small crab in his grip, one of the countless number just outside our lighted circle.  The entire family slept in the car, the children stacked like cordwood in the wayback.  Things are a lot different now.

I only just noticed that my comments are working.  My apologies to those whom I have inadvertently been ignoring.  I wonder how the curry recipe worked out for Rebecca.  Speaking of Ms. Radish King, her always fascinating photos are available on flickr.  You can also see the Dance of the Radish King here, though I doubt that it's officially sanctioned by Loudon Enterprises.

I also just noticed that Outlook 2003 has increased the size of their PST files to 20GB.  As I run out of folder room every 3-6 months, I'm very happy about that.  The reason I run out is that I never delete any emails, even the ones I send.  That means that all the emails, and particularly the attachments, get scrunched up into the PST file until it runs out of room.  If you use Netscape or Eudora or some other email client, you may not have this problem.  If not, you can look into getting an "OEM" version of Outlook 2003, which are sold by various companies all over the Internet.  Actually, you seem to be able to get most major software products (Adobe Illustrator, MS Office, ) from online retailers at 60% savings for legitimate software, and 90-95% savings from less-than-legitimate vendors.  I'm not suggesting that you do the latter, of course.  After all, I make my living from software.

I wonder how many of you have recently started getting penny-stock spam.  I mentioned it to Der and he said he had just started getting a lot of it, too.  The emails are recommendations for small companies whose stock sells generally under a dollar a share.  There are a number of penny-stock promoters who make it a business of buying up loads of very small companies' stock, then hiring a spam-generating firm to swamp the Internet with buy recommendations, causing the price to rise as the promoters are selling off their (generally worthless) holdings.  You are usually advised to "watch this one like a hawk!" and that "this one could go up, up and away!"  The body of the email is an image of the promotion text (that escapes many spam filters) followed by a couple of paragraphs of seemingly harmless, but nonsensical, prose.  A recent example of the latter is "Two fourlane slots eightlane I/O DSP Fibre DDR Gigabit Ethernet customize workflow track consume raises editing AJA thrilled Kona".  Anyway, one guy was so intrigued with stock spam that he started tracking the profits (well, actually, losses) he would have made had he purchased 1,000 shares of every penny stock that come recommended in email.  A small handful actually went up but the majority ended up as partial or total losses.  Everyone needs a hobby, I suppose.  It can't be more arcane than tracking poetry statistics, for example.  In any event, if you are bound and determined to buy stock on the Internet, consider Radish King.

I've stumbled over a few interesting poetry sites recently.  One was Kate Greenstreet's Every Other Day, which has short interviews with authors with their first poetry books (Rebecca is interviewed there, too.)

Hmm.  This post seems to be obsessed with Rebecca.  The Albert Hitchcock movie.  The magazine.  The TV gardener.  The graphic artist.  Did I mention that Kyle was going to be a Rebecca, had he ended up of the XX persuasion?