Tag Archives: humor

Ghostwriters in the Sky

Spam, spam, spam, spam and spam!

Today’s playmate is Mark Gilliam, whose (likely) automaton-generated email portrays him as a Senior Writing Consultant with BookWritingInc.com (that’s kinda redundant, dontcha think?). Since his note was formatted so nicely, it gets an image, rather than a copy/paste:

GhostWritingInc

And after having missed the deadline for this incredible offer, I had to reply, and once again, the itty-bitties make an appearance:

D’oh!  Missed it by two days.  The Itty Bitty Nanobot Fighting League will not be happy, and they are liable to whack me at the piggy-who-cried-waaah-waaah-waaah-all-the-way-home toenail.  (That’s as high as they can jump.  Told ya they were itty bitty!)

And the shame of it is, I wanted to see which ghost you’d attach to telling my tales of love and loss, fighting nanobots and harlot fembots, and the gritty world of competitive itty bitty octagon robot fighting.  I’d love to hear what a ghost like Mark Twain would have to say about something he could never have imagined.  (Fun fact — did you know Mark Twain wasn’t his real name?  That’s incredible!  I wonder which name his ghost goes uses… I’m sure the ghostwriting afterlife is a very busy place, so I could certainly see him wanting his anonymity!)  Or, perhaps the insight of the ghosts of someone like Socrates, Henry VIII (“off with their nanobot heads!”) or even Petyr Baelish!  (And I know Little Finger is fictional, but did you see all the blood on the throne room floor at Winterhaven?!  I mean, you can’t fake that kind of death, so I’m convinced he’s got a ghost somewhere.)

But, having missed your deadline for your week-long celebration (which you only gave me eight hours to meet — even Kiefer Sutherland got 24 hours each season to fight the bad guys!), and given that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I’ll just have to wander this lonely orb, knowing that my itty-bitties’ stories won’t see the light of day.  ’Tis a shame, too, as I think it could’ve been the next Harry Potter-like series, spinning into film, tv, music, books, and holographic underwear (you can only see ‘em if you have an Artoo unit).

Perhaps, once I’m a ghost, I can become a ghostwriter for y’all, too!

Your pal,
Colin

PS:  Who is Bills Gates?  Is that some pimp that’s playing on the name of Bill Gates, and is bragging about all his pimp-scab money?  He’d best watch out — I know the Robot Mafia don’t like no scabs.  I saw what they did to Flexo, and it wasn’t pretty.  I mean, dropping an unbendable girder on a poor unsuspecting bending robot?  That’s low.

PPS:  I know “Bills Gates" couldn’t have been a typo.  I mean, you’ve got the whole humanity of ghosts writing for you, and surely someone’s spirit would’ve said “I don’t think his first name has an ’s’…”

PPPS:  Do your ghostwriters sing, like the robot ghosts in Robot Hell?  I saw that on Futurama too (and since it’s on TV, it *must* be true!), and it looked like they had a pretty hep-cat beat going on.  What kind of music do the ghostwriters enjoy?  I bet it’s traditional monastic chant, followed by swatting their long-dead heads with lumber from long-dead trees.  Yeah, chanting… that’s gotta be it.

Emergency Updates!

Another round of quietness on The ‘Peel, so how about some more spammer fun.

Lat week, I got a note from “Joel Stephens,” who just noticed a post on Canapeel from 2005 — almost TWELVE YEARS AGO! — that is pointing to an emergency preparedness website that has apparently been sucked into another, even bigger emergency preparedness website. I got a little suspicious because Joel’s return email address was at something called ctechemail.com. Looking around, that domain is hidden behind VeriSign, GoDaddy and Domains-By-Proxy, so I was pretty sure it was just a flyby, trying to trick me into pointing traffic to their (presuambly spammy) website.

Added to that was that the “unsubscribe” contact was for a technology product comparison website. Yeah, spam baby!

Well, a few days later, I got a follow-up email… at 4AM!!! It was the same old song and dance… I know you’re busy, but wanted to follow-up, here’s a copy of what I sent, yadda, yadda, yadda.

That deserved a response. 🙂

Somehow, I’d be surprised if you’re actually awake and sending me email at 4am CT.  If you’re actually an awakened human, and not some kind of soulless automaton, just fishing for some relevance through other folks’ websites, then kudos — and good morning!

Why any human would care one iota about an almost TWELVE YEAR OLD post on a blog in the backwaters of the tubes of the interwebs is beyond me, which is why I’m suspicious of your status of machine vs people.  Again, if you’re actually a human, then kudos — and welcome to my way back machine!

Frankly, I don’t have a lot interest in chasing every website name change, deep link change, and company mergers across nearly twenty years of blog postings.  I am only one human — with a staff of nanobots for the Nanobot Fighting League — and I’d rather be writing about the present and future, in the hopes of soothing the souls of those little nanobots, than revising history, presumably to help drive traffic to someone’s new website.  I mean, training the itty bitty botties take a lot of time!!

Thanks for visiting, human, or, if you’re actually an automaton, the nanobots say “Hi cousin!”

Your pal,
Colin

Domain Hijinks

It’s been a little quiet ’round here, so how about some spammer fun.

Yesterday, I got a note from “Grace Anderson,” using some mysterious, weird looking Gmail account, offering to sell me a mis-spelled version of one of my domains.  To heighten the urgency, Grace let me know that they’re taking offers from any interested parties.  Well, that’s pretty much all it took.  Enjoy.

Hi there!

I’ll offer you a chicken.  That’s twice the offer I gave the person last week that offered this domain to me for sale... or maybe a similar one... so much spam, so little time.  I only offered them a Cornish hen, which as we all know, is significantly smaller, and will realistically only feed one or two people.  A chicken, on the other hand, will feed a whole family one meal, plus leftovers for making soup the next day.  And if you’re really good, you can make bone broth from the carcass after making soup.

You would need to supply the vegetables, however.  To qualify for vegetables, you’d need to offer something bigger.

Skywriting would probably get you some vegetables, but it’d have to be really, really good skywriting.  Block letters, in a nice serif font that could be seen for days, including a little glow-in-the-dark material that would keep everything nice and purty across a few days.  I mean, why have skywriting if it’s gonna just disappear, right?

Your pal,
Colin