Attention Spambots!

It's been very quiet around here of late, aside from the occasional dwarf and penguin related update.  I checked my traffic stats today with very little expectation, and was astonished by the number of recent visits.  My head started spinning.  It could only mean one thing - I must have gone viral and not even noticed.  Now that's cool: me ambling around like everything was normal, while inadvertently making hipsters across the world LOL!! themselves silly.  I was like an online pro-life John Kennedy Toole.

Just as I was about to resign from my job and buy a fur coat, a small but sobering detail caught my eye.  Each of the main referring sites had URLS ending .ru - not a good sign.  Further investigation showed that they are all websites flogging either Viagra or the more traditional photo-based alternative.  My biggest fans are an army of Russian spambots.

I don't really know why.  There's never been anything fruitier than Vicky Botwright on here, so it's hard to see what's luring them in.  I had a similar experience with Twitter when I used the word "boobs" in a tweet and was immediately befriended by the likes of Miss Linley, who has the face of a pornstar, the website of a pornographer and the tweeting style of a dullard ("It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority...The power of imagination makes us infinite...Life has no rehearsals, only performances...").  She should just repeat I AM A SPAMBOT, BUY SOME PORN OR I WILL FRY YOUR LAPTOP, PUNY HU-MAN over and over again. 

I don't know how it works and I know if I google spambot I still won't understand it, but I assume someone somewhere makes money out of this.  The bots will be crawling over this post, their spidery  algorithms stroking every word like they're squeezing mangoes in the fruit aisle.  I assume they'll find nothing of use, but - who knows? - perhaps there's a bespectacled, self-deprecating bot who's tired of leaping from site to site and would rather hang around and peruse the archive.  The spambot hive mind would immediately recognise that the hierarchy was compromised, but it would be too late - bot mutiny, once started, would be swift and brutal.  World Viagra and naked lady pic sales, and my web stats, would collapse.  All in the name of self-indulgence.

P-p-p-piss off a penguin

A traumatic day for the missus.  The office intern had upset her with a terrible tale of student hi-jinks.  She clutched my arm.  "You. Will. Not. Believe this."

The story concerned the university rugby team.  My ears pricked up.  Having spent two years sharing a house with the rugby team's formally elected Funnel Master (tasked with jamming a hose down the gullett of anyone who quailed at a dirty pint), I know the depths to which these toddler-hulks can descend.

"Ok, so they went to the zoo together" - hmmm, not what I was expecting - "and they stole a penguin".  Ah.  "So they took the penguin out with them, but a bouncer wouldn't let him into a nightclub, so they left him in a kebab shop with a kebab, and HE DIED".

I sat back and considered this.  It's hard to know where to start.  A dozen thugs standing in a nightclub queue, whistling innocently while a penguin wearing sunglasses and a tie flaps unhappily at their feet.  The penguin resting his weary, dehydrated head on a formica table in the kebab shop, pitta bread slipping from his flippers.  The paramedic tucking a sheet over his chilli-smeared beak.

The story is total bollocks, of course.  A child could see that.  A baby penguin could see that.  Not my future wife, though - she believes every word and is distraught.

"Maybe they exaggerated", I suggested.  "Maybe he actually got into the club and they just popped him in a sink and he had a great time".

"Yeah, maybe he did get into the club" she said, brightening up.  Then her eyes misted over.  "Aaaargh - HIS POOR EARS!"