In the last twelve hours or so, many Baltimore area bloggers have recieved comments from a person named “Adam” concerning a university study he’s assisting to conduct which will study the various habits of bloggers and how blogs effect bloggers’ lives. Or something like that.

I usually delete spam - if you want to use me for advertisement, great! Put some cash in my sweaty palm. But people who’ll steal my blog for their advertisements? Fuck ‘em.

Anyway, so I was divided - was Adam’s comment spam? Or not?

I came to the conclusion that it is spam. I see no reason why this Adam person couldn’t go to the trouble to e-mail his research proposal to people rather then post it in the first open-comment post he found.

Maybe I’m wrong. Whatever. I don’t want to read my comments to find out some dude from half way across the country wants me to participate in his little study and he can’t even take the time to bother to look up my e-mail.

Adam’s comment … deleted.

UPDATE

To clarify, because I feel I need to, it seems odd that in order to contact specific bloggers, Adam would contact people through public comments that anyone can read. I mean, what would be to stop me from reading Seadragon’s blog, finding about Adam’s survey in her public comments, then going to Adam’s survey, and then — pretending to be Seadragon — filling it out completely opposite from how she would?

Also, upon reading JJT’s post here, I did go to Adam’s survey site and complete the survey. I still think the way Adam went about contacting people was poorly thought through.

USA TODAY:

John Walton, the son of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and a member of the company’s board, died Monday in a plane crash in Wyoming.

Walton, 58, was piloting the ultralight that crashed shortly after takeoff from the Jackson Hole Airport in Grand Teton National Park, the company said.

I can’t think of a commentary that didn’t sound either super snarky or super cruel (or both), so …

What Gary said to me after I came back from a run,

“I know you tend to splash water around when doing the dishes, but would you mind mopping it before you leave? I almost slipped and cracked my neck … and, y’know, I can’t sue myself.”

Ahhh, but what if you could …

This is what happens when you don’t bother to plan for a scenario that isn’t “best case” …

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday he is bracing for even more violence in Iraq and acknowledged that the insurgency “could go on for any number of years.”

Defeating the insurgency may take as long as 12 years, he said, with Iraqi security forces, not U.S. and foreign troops, taking the lead and finishing the job.

How long would the insurgency have lasted if the Bush Administration hadn’t rushed to war, and had planned out a plan of action for after the invasion? Of course, no one knows. I do know an old saying that seems to hold some wisdom which shouldn’t have been needed, “When you fail to plan, you plan for failure.”

Or in this case, you plan for a lot of dead people.

UPDATE:

In a similar vein, while it’s apparently to much to ask our President and his assorted advisors to plan ahead for what to do after the invasion, they seem to be good about planning ahead to blow shit up.

THE American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war appears to have admitted in a briefing to American and British officers that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began.

If those raids exceeded the need to maintain security in the no-fly zones of southern and northern Iraq, they would leave President George W Bush and Tony Blair vulnerable to allegations that they had acted illegally.

HT: Rox Populi & Shakespeare’s Sister