Spam comes in waves, I’ve noticed. OSX Mail gets most of the e-mailed stuff, but lots gets into the comments, and that’s a pain in the butt to handle, MT Blacklist or no. It’s all the usual stuff — penis enlargement, drugs by mail, hot babes just waiting for you to chat with them. Lately, I’ve noticed a spike in fake college degrees.

It’s a nuisance, but it isn’t. I’ve always thought of bottom-feeding advertising as an id of sorts. These folks know who their audience is and where they go, online and otherwise. Right-wing political magazines have — or used to have, anyway — lots of ads for increasing your vocabulary. There was a certain Charles Atlas sell job going on, a sort of “Tired of your college-educated liberal friends kicking sand in your face?” pitch that I always found endearing, sort of. It reminded me that the first time I heard Rush Limbaugh — and I’m talking about way before he was famous, when he was on something like five stations — I said, “This is a fat guy who cannot score with chicks.” And was I right?

I suppose fairness demands I note that left-wing publications have their own id-ads, mostly for products with guilt-free pedigrees and, of course, personal ads.

It’s been a cool June. Coolish, anyway. I find it delightful. There’s a perfect temperature that our house just loves, somewhere in the low 70s, when the windows can stand open all night long and the breeze blows through all the rooms. You can have your air conditioning — give me those nights when the air is filled with the happy sound of illegal fireworks exploding until midnight and beyond.

Heh. That’s my hood.

A few things:

Ron Reagan sounds insufferable, but an interesting sort of insufferable.

Every time I hear that journalists are elitists who are out of touch with the people, I think: Well, it’s not our salaries that make us that way. Gerald Ensley agrees.

I have a secret fantasy life, and it mostly involves food. Baking, to be specific. I have two dreams: 1) To make a buche de noel on Christmas Eve some year when I’m not running around like a crazy person; and 2) To make a wedding cake. Turns out my new friend Hank Stuever shares at least half this fantasy. Only he and his colleague Linda Perlstein actually did it. Eating it, too is their story of how it worked out. Long, but funny:

Things I never thought we would use to make a wedding cake, but did: a power saw, a metal sewing ruler, dental floss, a shish kebab skewer, a Sharpie marker, pantyhose.

Pantyhose! That must be the secret ingredient!