First spammy comment

Yesterday, this blog received its first spammy comment. Marcus left a note regarding a post published last month when my email address won the UK National Lottery. I guess he just wanted to suggest new outlets for my address's gambling addiction.


Sorry, Marcus, this blog will not be a promotional platform for your online casinos. Interestingly enough, though, this comment is somewhat relevant to the post to which it was destined. Also, Marcus and co did not attempt at flooding all my other posts with the same type of comment. Good effort! This is in keeping with this older post described, by the way.

To this day, I have been restricting comment posting to "registered users", i.e. people willing to identify themselves using a Google, LiveJournal, WordPress, TypePad, AIM or OpenID account. I also chose to enable word verification (a step which is automatically skipped if you signed in as a blog author, apparently). Last but not least, I set my comment moderation settings to "always" and get notified by email each time someone leaves a comment.

On various occasions, while trying to leave a comment, the whole identification and word verification process struck me as cumbersome and frustrating. Since Marcus's comment only got caught at the comment moderation stage, why not make it easier altogether for normal people to share their thoughts in the comments section?

Let's give it a try: I just changed my settings to allow anyone to post comments to my blog. If I get flooded with spammy comments (which you will hopefully never get to see), I'll switch back to more restrictive settings.

Acrostics, mesostics and trash metal

If you are still unclear as to what an acrostic is, the first two sentences of the definition given by Wordsmith.org (found here on Answers.com) may help dissipate any remaining ambiguity:

An acrostic is not an angry insect ("a cross tick"), any more than an oxymoron is a big dumb cow. Rather, an acrostic is a poem, in which the first letter of each line spells out a word.

This definition actually debunks two deeply rooted assumptions that I had concerning dictionaries:

• Isn't it unusual for a dictionary to start defining a word by what it does not mean?
• Would you have ever thought it possible to turn to a dictionary for comic relief? I thought humor — if at all present — could only reside in the citations used to illustrate the definition of a word in context.

This may just be that Wordsmith.org is not a conventional dictionary. As refreshing as it may be, this definition could be amended a little. Poems are indeed the preferred embodiment for acrostics, because of their mostly fixed layout, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter can be added to a long line of texts in prose which benefit from a two-dimensional reading. Among the more elegant and recent is Linton Weeks's farewell review in the Washington Post.

In both examples, the "hidden" message was meant to be discovered by everyone. A variant of the acrostic and a more effective cryptographic pattern is the mesostic, which also has you look for subtext by reading the text vertically. While acrostics rely on the first letter of each line, mesostics use the middle of each line.

Do you remember how we were supposed to be able to hear the voice of the devil by playing trash metal tracks backwards?

More f-words

The letter F seems to be particularly prone to open profane words in English. While Arnold Schwarzenegger recently chose to use one common f-word (see this post), Louis Nicollin seems to favor the one ending in "-ag".

Readers from outside France will ask: who the hell is Louis Nicollin??? He's the CEO of one of the biggest garbage collection companies in France and the president of the Montpellier soccer team. Also, he's (hopefully) one-of-a-kind foul-mouthed homophobic and sexist character! Last month, he insulted another team's captain (using his favorite f-word), and proved with his next-day attempt at an apology that it is sometimes best to not apologize at all.

Judging from this article published in Le Monde, the guy is a constant PR disaster. Allow me to select a couple of gems for you and provide a translation into English for your enjoyment:

"On peut se parler, se dire les choses. On est des hommes, pas des gonzesses."
We can talk, say what we have to say to each other. We're guys, not chicks.

"Un clip sur le racisme, je suis prêt à le passer dès demain matin. Mais sur l'homophobie... Après, ce sera quoi, les femmes battues ?"
A video about racism, I'm ready to show it as early as tomorrow morning. But one about homophobia... What is it going to be next? Battered women?

"Si la maire me demande de le passer, je le ferai. Mais je préférerais montrer des filles à poil...".
If the mayor asks me to show it, I'll do it. But I'd rather show naked girls...

Ahh, free speech...