High fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fat

Quel rapport avec la choucroute ? In our case, this incongruous French expression can be more appropriately changed from "what does it have to do with sauerkraut?" to "what does it have to do with spam?". Spam, at least, is only making us sick figuratively.

Having little time and curiosity for most TV shows, I must say that I have never seen Paula Deen's show. But what this article by San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll is depicting is appalling. Don't get me wrong, I am a great believer in home-made food, i.e. food involving simple ingredients. Who in their right mind would add high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated fat to a perfectly good home-made cake recipe? Who would even be stocking such ingredients in their kitchen? (OK, you can probably find tubs of hydrogenated fat in a lot of western fridges.)

But if cooking show hosts, the arch-advocates of home-made food, make it their business to make their audience fat so their big pharma friends can boost their sales figures by singing the praises of lard and 2000 calorie meals, we're in very bad shape indeed...

Facebook spam for grinches like me

My friends know that I'm not a big fan of exposing myself on Facebook. Yet I still have an account and log on to see what my friends are up to, mostly when I'm bored or too tired to do something else. My "security" settings are as tight as can be, I rarely share anything, post anything or "like" anything, and I do not have applications installed. As far as Facebook is concerned, I'm a grinch.

And they don't seem to like that. Recently, they have seemed desperate to make me log on. After about not even more than 1 or 2 days of not visiting the network, I would get an email trying to lure me into believing incredibly important things had happened there while I was away. Somebody must have told them that they were bugging people and actually turning them off, because they're now acknowledging they'd been a little zealous in hitting the send button.

Facebook should be happy with me for a little while now: I actually logged on and updated my status today! What's on my mind? This very blog post.

Take that, spambot!

Did you know that one third of your daily dose of spam may well never reach you anymore? How sad is that!

Apparently, you can thank a guy called Oleg Nikolaenko for all those fake luxury watches you ended up buying believing that would stop the flow of unsolicited mail. Now that Nikolaenko's botnet has been shut down, let's reclaim the space/time/bandwidth the junk was using up!

Wait. Has this translated into a noticeable decrease in the number of spam email you receive daily? A highly unscientific statistical experiment run on a small and non-representative data sample yields the following results. Over a 10-day period extending from Nov 21 to Nov 30, 2010, my gmail account spam folder received about 100 mails. This number drops to about 75 between Dec 11 and Dec 20, 2010. Not quite a 30+% drop, but there's a noticeable improvement from last month.

(Picture found here)

Have some of the bots become headless zombie computers on a vengeful quest of their own to fill the world's inboxes with spam?? Have you really seen any difference since this guy was arrested?

Bring out yer dead

Thanks for checking in on me, United Nation. I haven't been very actively blogging these past few months, but I'm not dead yet. And if I were, would you stop sending out your spam my way?

Many of you will have noticed the title of this post is a line from a well-known Monty Python movie — and you may well have been lured to this page by it, who knows. Fear not, I will not leave your expectations unfulfilled. This video clip should make your visit worth it. Here's the scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Oh, and it's OK if you've already got one, you can still watch it.