Using Spam Cop

Using Spam Cop

2007 March 15 Thursday

Having signed up for SpamCop, I lost enthusiasm about the idea of actually reporting the junk mail that I had received from 62.201.84.236. After all, I'm busy. I have an ongoing stream of problems with which I am confronted, such as the question of how, efficiently, to rectify this:

"I'm afraid of cockroaches since ever I was an elementary school children."

So, I thought, hey, I'll let this thing slide.

But today, when I opened up my Japan-based e-mail box again, there was a second spam message from the same bloody outfit, inviting me to join up with them and have my message spammed to over ten million victims scattered around planet Earth.

Well, that did it!

I logged in to SpamCop for the first time, not sure if I would persevere if it proved to be wretchedly technical. But I found the whole thing straightforward and effortless.

First, they allow you to copy and paste your user name and password, which is what I like to do. Then they give you three options for reporting, and the one I took was to paste the entire text of the e-mail, including headers, into a box.

I pasted and clicked, and their software decrypted the technical gobbledygook and confirmed my surmise, which was that the source was 62.201.84.236.

They had a box in which you could add an optional additional comment, and mine was that these guys had just gone and spammed me a second time in twenty-four hours.

Now I know the process is this easy, I'll make a point of sending the blatantly fraudulent e-mails that I receive, the ones purporting to be from my American bank (which, routinely, sends flyers with statements warning that they never initiate contact by e-mail) or purporting to be from PayPal about my PayPal account. (I don't have one!)

So, given that it's so easy, I'll do it. A fraudulent PayPal e-mail was one that was cunningly designed enough to slip past Gmail's spam filter.

So, yeah, as far as I'm concerned, the war on spam is on.

Apart from getting tempted into the spam war mudfight, I've been pushing ahead steadily with the book of poems I have in progress, GENGHIS LOTUS POETRY COLLECTION. Here is a sample, a revised version of a poem first published in the literary miscellany THIS IS A PICTURE OF YOUR GOD, back in 2005, which seems an enormously long time ago now:

THE ACTIVE CHILD

The active child is, for our purposes,
Death's refutation,
Chaos rebutting entropy.
She is flamboyant with invention,
Alive
With starbursts of astonishment.
Her creation is blamsplam,
Bursting from her seamlets,
Going forth to conquer.
From her ninety-nine infinities
She diasporas,
Populating her planet,
Generating
Phantasmal demographics,
Sherbet cosmologies.
The active child is a crowd, a contingent,
A mob scene in action.
One and none makes ninety.
My lethal conditions,
My unappeased fingernail syndrome,
My afabricated blotting paper psychosis,
My case of turnip's scurf and lugwump's mound,
Fall off their get-well-soon cards
And forget themselves.
She cleos her patras and is empress,
Commanding, demanding,
Coming, like it or not.
She is life at the crescendo,
Her own firebird suite,
Her own exultant fanfare for herself.
Energy in excess is her personal trademark,
Her patent the burning moment,
Her logo the living sun.
If you want the use of the four wild winds,
She requires your royalties.
She is her own one-woman motorbike gang,
Marauding flowers
On her titchy little three-wheeled plastic bike.
She is Miss Trophy Triumph,
Miss Tomato Thief,
Mistress of the flower-stealing grin.
She is someone's daughter,
The one who continues,
The one who does not die.
She is mine.
She is the intolerable demand, the no-can-cope,
Forcing a larger existence,
Like it or not.
She is life beyond cancer.
Caught in the incandescence of her expanding star
I have not the option to be cinders.
Fortunately, there is help.
Grinding up the steak was a great idea
For the delinquent daughter.
For this and many more —
You know the score —
A truly thank you.

The active daughter continues to be active, in the manner of her agegroup. The other day I delivered daughter Cornucopia to the daycare and found a whole mob of demonic infants storming the new playstructure on the grounds.
It looked like the mob that stormed the Bastille.

Today a daycare teacher handed me a letter to deliver to my wife, and it turned out to be about the decision reached by the daycare's principal. He will grant my wife's request that Cornucopia's boxes, the places where I will have to deposit her stuff, will be in easy-to-find places. And all the teachers will be briefed on my eyesight issues.


Cornucopia has by now recovered from her bout of flu, and the week spent at home seems to have reset her clock. She had gotten into the habit of waking up inconveniently early, at 0630, but now she sleeps snoozily through until her mother rouses her at about 0715.

I thought that if we changed our departure routine then she might protest at not seeing her daily dose of the NHK television novel, so, to circumvent that, I decided that we would switch to NHK's channel three, the arts program, before the novel, which starts at 0815, just five minutes before my new departure time of 0820.

I thought the arts program would at least offer us something other than demented robot wars or raucous commercials. What it did in fact offer was high-quality early morning TV, which Cornucopia, who usually ignores morning TV (genocide in Darfur, those pesky North Koreans with their nuclear jockstrap fetish, all that boring adult stuff) went and sat herself down in front of the TV and watched with fascination.

And, arriving as I now do ten minutes earlier at Waniguchi Gakko, I have time to sort out my files, plan my lessons, and sort out any problems the Japanese staff have made for me. Yesterday it was that the room numbers were missing from the day's schedule, and the day before it was that the previous day's schedule had been reprinted, masquerading as new.