When I tracked down a trackback to one of my posts, I found this great CounterSpam Project that I want to promote. I’m a big believer that one person can make a difference, and this is a person doing something really worth trying to do.
Exerpted from the explanation of the Project:
……We know the spammers cull email addresses from any source they can. The real prize for them is a live email address. Scripting can automate the sending process, and a text generator can easily spit our address after address, but to get an email address that’s live is the real goal. And one of the easiest ways to accomplish that is to “crawl” a website for any email addresses listed. Sadly, even blogs are being crawled in this way now, with email addresses culled from the comments fields.
I’m undertaking a study…an experiment…a year long project. First, I’ve added an email address to the domain that will never be used. CounterSPAM@ipadventures.com is pretty clearly not an address that a human would knowingly send spam to, particularly since I’m publicly describing the project. It will appear in this entry, and in an occasional conversation on the subject. There will also be a single page describing my CounterSPAM project on my primary IP Adventures domain site. It will never be used to send an email. In short, the only way to find the address will be to crawl this modest web site or proliferation from there. It’s a receive only address that will be scrutinized closely……..
……I’m going to document a year of spam. Every message will be researched and responded to. Prosecuted where possible. Persecuted where legal and appropriate. Publicly derided frequently. Depending on how flagrant the offenders are, there may be a web of shame online identifying them with name, address and telephone number (it is after all, often public information)……
CounterSPAM@ipadventures.com. Proliferate it.
CounterSPAM@ipadventures.com
You go, Ken.

The FX network has been coming up with some great shows lately. I managed to catch most of the episodes of The Shield when it went into reruns. Now I’m hooked on Nip Tuck.
Of course, I’ve had a crush on Julian McMahon ever since he played that devastatingly hunky demon on Charmed. (Yes, I watched that too. Love anything witchy and/or with females who can give as hard as they get. My fascination with such things actually goes back to the 1942 movie, “I Married a Witch” with Veronica Lake and then the 1951 “Half Angel” starring Loretta Young. So you see, the seeds of my feminism and cronehood go way, way back.)
Nip Tuck is far from charming. It’s messy, unpredictable, unnerving, subtle, outrageous, disappointing, redeeming, revealing, and rewarding. Kinda like life. And blogging, sometimes.
I love the complexities of the show’s characters, the infinite shades of their gray thinking. It’s those moral and emotional struggles in all of us magnified a hundredfold — not enough to turn us away, but enough to hit home hard enough to pop our eyes open.
Kinda like our personal blogs should be, doncha’ think?

In my younger years I just loved those bad boys. You know, the ones who are so screwed up that they make you think of bloody wounds when you look at the lush lines of Renoir