Once Upon A Time I Had This Spamcatcher...

This is my Spamcatcher Mark II. It is an imperfect beast but I have grown attached to it.

For years I kept this thing as a semi-permanent post at the top of my blog.  I'd fiddle with the posting date every few weeks to trick it into appearing as lead post, and in return it acted as my faithful minesweeper/linebacker, keeping the rest of place mostly clear of spam.

Every few months I'd clean it out because the volume of impacted robot advertising stool would start to affect the the rate at which the blog loaded.

Things change.  I hoisted this version out of my draft folder to recycle for this post (and left all 248 of the original "comments" intact for your amusement.)

Tucked away in some backup file I have  a copy of several 1000-spam-long core samples showing what an absolute feculent avalanche it was.  I even decided to kill a weekend in April of 2006 and have some kicks doing what apparently no one had ever done before -- methodically drilling all the way to the very bottom of the spam food chain:

• Fear and Loathing on the Spam-pain Trail - Pt I:  Spam and Punishment.
• Fear and Loathing on the Spam-pain Trail -- Pt II:  Spamset Boulevard.

I was amused and impressed and unsurprised at how globe-spanning and profitable the business of trying to sell you dog stairs and penis creams really was.  Thoroughly Gibsonesque.

Maybe someday I'll hand those files off to some grad student researching the history of web-based advertising in early 21st century.

Maybe someday I'll just start posting them in slabs and see what that does to my Google profile.

Probably quintuple my traffic :-)

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