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What is this?
It's Bill Peschel's professional and personal home on the web. Welcome. Poke around in the drawers and cupboards. There's a lot of interesting stuff here.
What's the Reader's Almanac?
It's my 2008-2009 nonfiction book project. A year's worth of entertaining and thought-provoking stories and anecdotes about writers and their books, tied to the day they occurred. Published regularly. Here's a list of the essays published so far.
Why is it on the web?
I don't have an agent or a contract, so this is my way of building an audience, and seeing if there's any interest in the book. The daily deadlines don't hurt, either.
Are you going to write anything else here?
Sure. The occasional book review, a collection of links to neat articles and websites, and my opinions. You know, the usual stuff you find on the web.

Recent Reader's Almanac Posts
Saturday Literature Links
Thoreau makes an ash of himself (1844)
Dickens leaves the United States, gratefully (1842)
Uprisings and Downfalls: Troy, Sherlock Holmes, the Irish Rebellion and Brendan Behan
A Merry Shakespeare (1597)
Petrarch: Just one look (1327)
Writers at Play: Brendan Behan and Jackie Gleason
Writers at Rest: Henry James


Recent Reviews
The Unscratchables. Cornelius Kane.

Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days. Al Columbia.
Mostly Harmless. Douglas Adams.
Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop. Lee Goldberg.

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September 16, 2009

Spammers! Come here and I’ll cut you


Futurama Roboto Stabs A SpammerI suppose I had to crack someday. For the last week, since I wrote "My cat is my alarm clock," I've been getting spammers trying to insert their web sites for stupid cat-related products. For three days, I've been opening my mail and seeing "You have just received a comment" and cringed.

Go in, remove the spam, leave, come back and find it again.

Finally, I figured out how to close comments to that entry.

Now, some idiot from "www.Bridesmaiddressesunder100.com" has decided that my account of the burning of London in 1666 is the ideal location for a bit of spam.

So I edited it a little:
Wow, interesting reading, thank you for sharing. Just by looking at those amazing pictures it gives you a breif inisght to that historic night. By the way, did you know http://www.bridgesmaiddressesunder100.com is a scam? It is! We rip people off all the time! Bridesmaid Dresses Under $100 spams sites like this one because we have a little bit of money to hire monkeys such as me to spread our crap all over the Internet. So don't forget, Bridesmaid Dresses Under $100 wants to rip you off! So come and get screwed today!
I'll probably go back and remove it, because it wouldn't do, but I think I'll leave this up long enough for Google to stick it in their cache.

Because I don't know what else to do, short of cutting off comments entirely, but damn I had enough! I want to cut this site's head off and put it on a stick.

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3 comments about

'Spammers! Come here and I’ll cut you'

That’s very funny. I hope it gets back to them. Or, at least, to their computer.

Posted by Dick Stanley on 09/17

I get between 10 and 600 (literally) spams a day, which is why I put Akismet to work on all incoming comments.  Right now it’s batting .996.

Akismet was designed for WordPress, but it’s been ported to some other platforms, including ExpressionEngine.  (It requires an API key, free from the developers.)

Posted by CGHill on 09/17

We were talking about email spam at lunch the other day and Google got high marks for success in blocking spam. I seldom get any. I seldom get spam comments on my blog either. On one hand I am afraid Google may become the new Microsoft (evil overpaid overlords of computer-dom), on the other hand I really like not having to deal with spam.

Posted by Charles Pergiel on 09/18
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