Rant on.

I will start with the positive:  On Saturday, the U.S. Senate passed a bill repealing the discriminatory “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy of the U.S. military.  President Obama praised this action and has promised to sign it into the law this week.  It’ll likely be mid to late 2011 before the bill is fully implemented–there are procedures to be created and followed as well as conditions to be met–but soon enough somebody will have to do something other than sleep or fall in love with the wrong gender to get kicked out of them military.

So goodbye to that badness.  The conservatives are wringing their hands and fretting, saying all sorts of disastrous things will happen.  Most of us see their blathering for the nonsense it is and move on with our lives.  The change will take place and we’ll move on with few obvious effects.

Meanwhile, I said goodbye to other badness this morning:  Spam.  Sadly, this farewell is a daily occurrence.  Monday through Friday it happens with my blog here and Saturday through Wednesday it happens with my email.  (Sometimes Thursday and Friday, too.)  On the email side, some things do not get caught my Outlook’s spam filter and I have to mark them as junk.  I don’t blame the filter, really; nothing is perfect.  Although I don’t typically read the spam, I do question the spammers:  How the hell did I get on some of their lists?  For example, I am nowhere near retirement age and have not expressed any interest in such things, but I get AARP offers almost daily.

The really annoying spam is what lands on this blog.  First of all, none of it ever survives.  I zap it every day of the week.  Nobody sees it but me, so it is ineffective.  Second, who writes this shit?  Yes, I know it’s done by a bot, but that just adds to the ineffectiveness.  A lot of them make comments like, “You’re wrong and I can prove it, send me a private message.”  Sixty to eighty percent of what I write doesn’t have a right or wrong, so this is often quite silly.  Sure, you can disagree with my Monday Morning Rants like this one, but how can you prove my Friday Poetry wrong?  Or the links in my Wednesday Wanderings?  It just means somebody is botting this crap and not reading, and this crap makes it obvious.

I know, I know.  This is the way spam works.  It’s just terribly annoying.  It’s also a little scary, because the fact that I get this crap daily and in quantity means somebody out there is still responding to it enough that the people running these bots are profiting from their annoying efforts.  So to those who respond to spam I say:  Stop it.  On the extraordinarily rare occasion that something useful manages to get spammed out and I happen to see it, I don’t respond to the spam.  I might be inspired to look up a competing product just to avoid the spam-user.  Most of the time–which is to say Solar eclipses are more common–there’s nothing even worth thinking about in spam.  Delete it and move on.

So Goodbye, Bad.  See you again tomorrow.

Rant off.