If your company blocks the online player, the BigBadWolf just did you a little favour – download the clip here: CPR.

(Jethro Tull)

….and man invented email and powerpoint slides. He invented adress books and made it possible to send emails to everyone at once. He thought up soppy stories of religion which he spread mercilessly and without thought,
and saw that it was not enough.

He added thinly veiled threats of impending misfortune, or sly insinuations of not caring for family and friends to ensure recipients did not “break the chain” and faithfully assisted in spreading these messages.

But man was not satisfied. In a desperate cry of insecurity, he added a rule: “Though shall send this message to all your family and friends. Though shall also send it to me, and I shall feel vindicated”

I’ll add religious mails to my list of things I hate about the email I get. I think I’ll make this post my standard reply to any further religious mails. A little random something’n'something to think about before hitting “Send” next time round.

Accept for a strange one about kittens, I’m still not getting mail like Seth‘s getting - must be doing something wrong <sigh>

(via email from Pottie) 

“Eskom is able to raise our electricity AGAIN Some people cannot even cope with the last increase in July? Take a stand now and complete this online survey so we can voice our disapproval. This Survey will take a minute to complete and will provide us with the relevant statistics to start the fight against this.”

 Make A Stand against any more imminent increases – Click Here

“….Slick advertising campaigns that promote a caring image obscure a reality of suffering and exploitation.” - Sounds familiar….

“ARA is determined to work with other animal protection groups to persuade the companion animal food industry to clean up its act. ARA supports and promotes the BUAV’s new No Animal Testing Pet Food Standard. For companies to qualify, they have to prove that neither they nor their suppliers are engaged in animal testing that harms animals: that means no invasive laboratory experiments or keeping animals in captive laboratory or kennel conditions for lengthy periods of time – conditions that cannot fulfil their physical and psychological needs.

Many animal food companies issue unreliable and incomplete statements regarding their testing practices and the conduct of their suppliers”

They name these as no-go brands:

• IAMS / Eukanuba owned by Procter & Gamble
• Hills Science Diet owned by Colgate Palmolive The majority of pet food brands available in the UK are produced by two animal testing companies – “Nestlé Purina/Friskies” and “Pedigree, Masterfoods (Mars Inc).”
• Nestlé Purina/Friskies: Alpo, Bonio, Felix, Go Cat, Gourmet, Omega Complete, Proplan, Spillers, Vital Balance, Winalot.
• Pedigree, Masterfoods (Mars Inc): Bounce, Cesar, Chappie, Frolic, James Wellbeloved, Katkins, Kitekat, Pal, Pedigree Chum, Royal Canin, Sheba, Techni-cal (US & Canada), Whiskas. Pedigree also manufacture Thomas rabbit food and Trill bird food.

and provide this list of suitable alternatives (note SA telephone numbers) :

And then because it’s Friday and you made it this far down the article

For the girls:

And the guys:

Problem: Aging.

And some medicine:

Let’s get the obvious ones out of the way first – I delete these as a matter of principal, regardless of content or quality. It’s a public service thing, one day when the mail server achieves self awareness, we don’t want it’s young little mind corrupted with this garbage. Garbage in, garbage out as they like to teach first day programming students.

1. The Incentive
Despite how ridiculous it is, many, many people still forward emails with some sort of “incentive” at the end – send this to x number of people and your wish will be granted or you will have bad luck of some horrific proportion. Karma works both ways buddy, and if you keep on spreading this crap, you might just be reincarnated as a nice soft roll of double ply.

2. The reward
Yes, there are still people who think Bill Gates or some corporation will give them money for forwarding emails. Strangely, most of these people are quite intelligent, and will openly laugh at similarly ridiculous statements such as “beetroot and garlic cures AIDS”.

As for the rest - I try to avoid reading mails likely to contain any of the following phrase before driving.

3: “Spread the joy”
“It doesn’t matter how many people you send this to, just remember if it made you laugh, your friends will laugh too.” …just as long as I do send it along?! A pathetisised version of “The incentive” if you ask me. (Yes, pathetisised is a real word. The makers of Scrabble will pay you $10 for each time you use it during the game. Just mail a pic of the game board here to request a refund of your matric certficate)

4: Rythm blues
 ”Without missing a beat”. Typically found in those “cute” jokes with clever kids in Sunday school. The joke just looses the funny right there, right after the un-skipped beat. Recipe jokes at it’s worst.

5: The STATEMENTS:
“I LIKE THE NEXT ONE IN PARTICULAR” or just before the punchline – “WAIT FOR IT” or “You’re going to love this!”. Some sickos even use combinations like “wait for it – you’re gonna love this!!!!”. Suffice it to say the cringe factor outweighs any humor the message may have contained.

6: The localisation effort.
This is where the same old joke which was probably quite good at some stage get refactored into a local is lekker version. The  ugly obnoxious woman entering the supermarket with her twins is now Afrikaans with a Capie accent. Lets just say that a lot gets lost in translation and just about the only flavour left is the Lexinton hanging from the corner of her mouth.

Jealousy makes you nasty
One day when I’m all grown up, I’d like to get proper mail like Seth <sigh>

<double sigh>

But Dr Sebastien Farnaud, of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, described the figures as ‘shocking’.

He added: ‘It has repeatedly been shown how irrelevant to human patients animal disease models can be, so sustaining such high animal use is not in the best interests of science.”

Full article here

Brings to mind this quote of Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”.

I know. There are many people who are adamant supporters of these experiments and they will probably have some solid arguments to support their views. My questions is this: Why do we humans insist on producing and using products that are inherently so unnatural, dangerous and toxic that we need to constantly test it on innocent animals to make sure we survive using these products? And don’t tell me about “progress” – cancer rates are soaring as a result of all these “enhancements” we’re making to our food, cosmetics and symptom-treatments ( a.k.a. medicine, if you use the term loosely)

I maintain that prisoners convicted of serious crimes should be used in these experiments. I mean make it relevant, like the man said. The lifers / death-row people could finally prove useful for something in the toxicology tests and you can’t argue – the prospect of becoming a test subject for the next 15-25 years as opposed to getting free room & board should be fairly serious deterrent, especially if the details of the experiments are widely published. 

You can thank me for ruining your tea / lunch / smoke break later, first go have a look at PETA’s website to see what you can do to help stop this.

Article published in the Northcliff Melville Times, week ending Jul 17 2009:

So, I had some spare time, and did the neighbourly thing and googled it for you, as irrefutable proof of aforementioned statements ;-P

This article on IOL features an interview with advocate Charles Pillay, the Ombudsman for Banking Services, who says it’s under no circumstances required for any institution to make a photocopy of your ID book, with the exception of high value bank transactions. This means that even the bank does not need to copy you ID left right & center (like they do when collecting your cards). having said that, they are a low risk in terms of identity theft, being a supposedly secure environment with those personnel having some sort of security clearance.

That however is a completely different story at the retailers where anyone from rent-a-temp staff to job hoppers are making ( and supposedly filing it in a “proper” way ) your ID book & card details. Here is an article specifically on embossing card numbers and I even found a PDF on a government site relating to the same issue.

I’ve grown tired of just swearing at them – it probably just gets removed by their spam filters anyway. There’s no satisfaction in deleting the ones that manage to get through my spam filters.

What else is left?

In my time as a moderator at climb.co.za, I’ve come across many different forms of spammers & so called “bots” leaving all sorts of run of the mill porn links. There was however one exception of a fairly coherent bot, making the post as I’ve pasted below. I thought it was (for a piece created by software at least) quite clever, end kept it, not really knowing why. But, all thing happen for a reason:

I present to you the ultimate reply to emails not worthy of a reply, a reply which states so much yet says so little, the reply to end all replies – I present to you the piece I call “Splattered into strawberry jam” – simply hit reply, and paste this puppy in there.

”
Jennifer Aniston has recently starred in a dog flick picture direct, done a photoshoot with a dog and charmed all her clothes off.
That news stand up one’s less apt, to be fair. But it virtually to be sure happened. The in the matter of is, Jennifer Aniston does a lot of gorge with dogs. Including, ostensibly, rescuing dogs from confident liquidation after they dart out into Sunset Boulevard without warning.
So yay for Jennifer Aniston. And yay for Angelina Jolie, for when she realises that Jennifer Aniston has got more headlines than her and separate-handedly repopulates the sphere’s Iberian Lynx community entirely out of her womb as retaliation.
institute no faux pas here – Marley And Me saved Jennifer Aniston’s career. forward of that came along, Jennifer was stuck in a run of majorly hapless talkies, to some extent leading talkies that were objectively woeful and transparently regard-seeking lesbian TV bitparts.
But Marley And Me changed all that forever. Not merely was it a mob one flick picture expo, but it also allowed Jennifer Aniston to donation an Oscar, trick down a troop of taboo offers and direct oneself in magazines that don’t exclusively run pictures of her accompanied by the headline ‘SAD JEN in any event WON’T BRAD GO!’
And because of this, Jennifer Aniston has vowed to be a champion of the dog community. There’s nothing that Jennifer Aniston won’t do for dogs to direct how thankful she is for Marley And Me – she’ll range their sticks for them if they’re suspicion too fatigued, she’ll lick their testicles if they’ve got arthritis in their necks and aren’t superior to do so themselves, and she’ll plainly discontinue them from being splattered into strawberry jam underneath the wheels of recklessly-impelling traffic.
“

And yes. It’s keyword laden which doesn’t hurt when posted on a new blog like this. I’m a page-hit-whore, sue me  ;-P