Spam, spam, spam, spam

I woke up a bit ago to find an interesting present in my e-mail stocking - a trackback ping to an post I made several months ago. From the short snippet I see in my email, it looked, I must say, kind of odd... the post that was being trackbacked had been about the debate over the 10 Commandments monument in Alabama, but the trackback entry itself was called "I got blog spam for Christmas.", so I figured, "why not" and set off to see what it was all about.

Roj of meta-roj had apparently received a blog spam from a fellow named William Cooper who's trying to sell a book. Not only had she tracked down what he was selling, but she went even further, using her log entry information, and provides one of the funniest and most imformative posts I've read in a while. While doing her research, she found several blogs (including mine) that this cretin had hit, and decided to give us trackback pings as "Christmas presents" so we could be sure to take out the trash. See, Cooper is crafty - he didn't make the URL for his book a link - he just typed in the plain URL under his signature - making it much easier to overlook.

I've gone ahead and left Cooper's comment itself (which is mainly a weird string of Bible verses), but am editing out his URL. Now, I normally only edit comments for format - such as putting in paragraphs or taking out hard carriage returns so the comment will wrap properly, regardless of screen size - but I don't edit for content or clean up anyone's spelling, grammar or punctuation errors. I just make it easier to look at. But in this case, I'm making an exception because, even though *I* can't figure out for sure what he's trying to say with his data dump, someone else might find it interesting - but I won't let him use my site for advertising.

Anyway, my thanks to Roj for the tipoff, and figured I'd give her a return-trackback for her efforts! :)