My infant daughter has discovered a "skill" that's so obscure, no one could have ever considered it even remotely possible, particularly not the manufacturers of baby bottles.
Basically, my daughter has figured out how to poke baby bottle nipples down into the bottle, and then douse herself in baby formula like she's auditioning for an infant remake of the movie "Flashdance."
My daughter's ridiculously early foray into wet tee-shirt contest practice would be distressing enough by itself, but that concern is overshadowed by the fact we are CONSTANTLY changing her out of formula-soaked outfits. NOTE: I should clarify that ANY foray into wet tee-shirt contest practice is distressing, whether ridiculously early or not.
I wouldn't be so exasperated by my daughter's actions if I didn't know she knows perfectly well she's doing something entirely annoying. She ENJOYS it. She likes the annoyed attention that's directed at her when I'm carrying her to the changing station for the 50th time each day.
She KNOWS we have no choice but to change her right away, because the time it takes for baby formula to go from mildly sour smelling to "a-zombie-belch-in-the-face-after-the-zombie-ate-a-skunk-dipped-in-pig-manure" is roughly 10 minutes. Honestly, I don't know what the decay-inducing ingredient is in baby formula, but the half-life of that stuff is more rapid than any known radioactive material.
Believe it or not, actually dealing with the aftermath of one of my daughter's impromptu milk baths isn't the worst part, although that is, as stated, monumentally annoying. No, the worst part is witnessing, in real time, a milk bath in progress and not being able to do anything about it. Walking into a room and seeing my daughter holding a full bottle of milk--with the nipple having been freshly poked down into the bottle--makes my heart rate spike like I just witnessed a Viet Cong pull the pin on a grenade and start running at me.
The moment I see my daughter wielding a bottle of milk, sans nipple, time basically slows down as I try to traverse the distance between myself and my daughter. After several slow motion spins and dodges around pieces of furniture, my hand will be about six inches away from grabbing the bottle from my daughter's grip, at which point she'll give me this slightly amused look, right before pours the entirety of the bottle's contents onto her face and down her entire front.
And then. . . THEN. . . she has the audacity to look SURPRISED! It's as if all the countless times she's pulled the exact same stunt just disappears from her memory, and she sits there with this look that says "What just happened? I was dry, but now I'm not?!! Why am I not dry like I was just a moment ago? Oh, goody, Daddy's annoyed! That makes me happy!"
And then we get to do it all again an hour later. Excuse me, I have to go sit in a corner and weep for a few minutes.
I'm a notorious creature of habit, which takes some doing when you think about it--people generally don't stand around thinking about who makes the list of the most notorious creatures of habit, so the fact I'm a notorious creature of habit means I've worked pretty hard at it.
Take this blog. . . sorry. . . THUNDERJOURNAL, for example. I started out on Blogger back in 2002, and then basically allowed someone to swoop in and cajole me into moving to Mu.Nu back in 2004, and I haven't so much as lifted a finger to update it since. The look, the feel, the interface. . . it's all straight out of 2004. Which is fine, if you're viewing my THUNDERJOURNAL on a standard Web page, from a PC or laptop. But, if you pull this THUNDERJOURNAL up on a tablet PC, or a smartphone or a Nook or Kindle, it's kind of like trying to read a Gutenberg Bible that's been inscribed on a fly's wing. My THUNDERJOURNAL doesn't transfer well between the technology of yore and the technology of today.
But, whatever, I don't really care about all that. The smartphone crowd really isn't my target audience. For that matter, I don't really have a target audience.
This was all a long winded segue into the scourge of comment engine spammers. I just generally thought that if I stayed on the same Mu.Nu platform long enough, technology would evolve to the point where comment spamming would be considered a useless pursuit.
The general theory behind comment spamming, as I understand it, is if a spammer can bomb a comment engine with gibberish comments that happen to contain hyperlinks to certain sites, then the search engine algorithms that nobody really understands, but everyone likes to think they do will assume, because those links appear so voluminously on other sites--albeit in comment threads--then those sites will appear higher in search engine query results. I know, I know, it doesn't make all that much sense. It seems as though sacrificing a goat and reading its entrails would be a more effective strategy, but if the Internet excels at one thing, it's giving birth to crazy ideas that enough people believe in to keep espousing them.
So, anyway, as with everything in the world of technology, comment spamming has become fully automated. Banks and banks of computers the world over are dedicated to posting automated comment spam in an outdated and fruitless attempt to boost search engine queries for shitty Web sites no one cares about. I say "fruitless," because I deactivated the capability to post live hyperlinks in comment threads YEARS ago, so all this THUNDERJOURNAL comment spamming is particularly pointless on my site.
BUT IT'S STILL ANNOYING AS HELL!!!!
There was a time, back in the years of, say 2005 - 2006, when I would almost get excited to see a new comment on one of my posts. A COMMENT! A CONVERSATION! SOMEONE HAS SOMETHING TO SAY TO ME! Oh, the glorious Internet!!
Then, around late 2006 or thereabouts, I started seeing "comments" by people named "UGG BOOTS" or "WORLD OF WARCRAFT GOLD" or "IMARAHURU," and I realized comments were entering a sad new era.
That's not to say all comment spammers are that obvious. Occasionally, I'll see a comment from someone with an actual name, like "Joel" or "Amanda" or "Generica," and the comment will entail such positive feedback as:
Great post!! I didn't find the information I was looking for, but I love your writing and will be back soon! Thanx!
Such comment spammers typically put their hyperlink in the URL: field which, admittedly, isn't a futile tactic, because those hyperlinks still appear as active on my THUNDERJOURNAL, so kudus on that, I suppose.
Anyway, it's all generally deflating to sign into my THUNDERJOURNAL GUI and see wall of obvious comment spam awaiting deletion.
If this post seemed to ramble aimlessly, it's because I've been reading too much comment spam lately.
