Skip to main content

Comments

One of the things I have enjoyed most about this blog has been the comments left by readers. Sometimes these comments have led onto some very stimulating -well to me, but maybe I am too easily excited - conversations. Over the past few months though, the blog comments have been increasingly swamped by spam , which are machine generated rubbish in English, Korean and Chinese advertising electronic tat, penis enlargement, pornography and get rich quick schemes. These get screened out by the moderation process, but it's tedious to have to do it, and means that comments have to wait a while before appearing, so now I am trying out word verification: you know, typing in some nonsense word to get your comment published. Let me know what you think of it.

In the meantime, would you like to buy this handy electronic gizmo for increasing the size of your dangly bits, thus allowing you to make gazillions of dollars from starring in videos for raincoat wearing audiences?

Comments

Peter Carrell said…
Those 'raincoat wearing audiences' would be, er, your fellow citizens of Dunedin (making aspersions only about the weather, of course) ... but haven't they spent their gazillions on a roofed in stadium so they won't have to wear raincoats ... now I have confused even myself :) ... yes, re comments and funny words, I am afraid the key word is TINA !!
Kate said…
No thanks! But no problem with the word verification. Which coincidentally might be something to do with your last question: It is 'hasdingle'
JoanK said…
Dear Kelvin - I enjoy your blog and go for the word verification - spam is annoying!

When is your consecration date? I would like to add you to our parish prayers. Please give our love to Victoria Matthews.

Joan, Winnipeg Canada
Peter Llewellyn said…
Your word verification thingy is much user-friendlier than the usual incomprehensibles (not three incomprehensibles but one incomprehensible). But how long will it be before the baddies figure out how to crack them? - I have software that can read my handwriting, which is quite an achievement by any standard. I have taken to marking my students' essays online, because I thought they deserved to be able to read my otherwise impenetrable wisdom.

As for my funny word, you are obviously aware I'm an Aussie, 'cos you've given me "regidna", the queen of the echidnas. It is clearly a sign. I have wriitten (or typed) two articles arguing that the echidnas are taking over the world. It's happening.
Anonymous said…
Dear Frend,
I am widow of beloved husband Dr Ole Akintoye. After lifetime of faithful serving the Lord in financial services in Umuahia and Port Harcourt, my beloved husband placed our savings of US$2 million in Ghanaian bank account, to be use for spreading the Gospel in world. I want to release these funds for your Esteemed Ministry! Please send bank account details and PIN number so I can arrange transfer to bless your Ministry!

Your frend in the Lord,
Gloria O. Akintoye

akintoyego@africanet.ni
Merv said…
The thing is .... if you make it too hard to comment, how would you ever find out about Dr. Akintoye's $US2,000,000 available for your Esteemed Ministry?

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old