Daily Blague

A great day already, if only because I can open the windows and let in some fresh air. For days now, Kathleen and I have been teetering about in our chilly apartment, hacking and drooping. Kathleen's bronchitis appears to have abated, however, or at least to have left her with nothing worse than a stuffy nose. And while I still feel tired and broken most of the time, I'm buoyed by knowing that this state of affairs has a term: by the end of the month, I expect to be feeling a lot better, thanks to Remicade. Meanwhile, I have a lot to do here, and with luck and patience I'll get through some of it.

Always on Sundays: I was hit by another spam attack yesterday. Thanks to a plugin developed by Chad Everett, the junk was quickly gotten rid of, but I wanted to take some defensive action, so I disabled comments for a short while by removing the relevant cgi file from the server's folders. Restoring comments ought to have been easy; I'd done it only two or three weeks ago. But I'd forgotten the step involving permissions. If you don't know what that means, you don't want to. Thanks to Sarah at Movable Type for reminding me.  

Not that I want to seem cool about it: spam attacks are sickening. At whom is this very offensive stuff aimed? For whom is making the effort to transmit it worth while? Is there more to it than blind spite?

When not battling spam, I was ordering Chinese dishes from Wu Liang Ye, down the street, for a Mother's Day menu party. Our mother was Mme NOLA, currently on a visit to her daughter in Brooklyn. It was very kind of her to come all the way from Park Slope just for take-out, and I felt awful about not cooking. But it was all I could do to transfer the food to serving bowls and line up napkins and chopsticks.