Tonight, I was reading a post on Bill Sledzik’s Tough Sledding about political operatives coming in under the “SpamKarma” radar (insert your own anti-spam defense). From the article in The Boston Globe:

With big corporations now hiring public relations firms to pay fake bloggers to plant favorable opinions of the businesses online, many political bloggers are concerned that candidates, too, will hire people to pretend to be grass-roots citizens expressing views.

“This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant,” Erickson said in an interview. “I expect there will be commenters jumping in and trying to build negative campaigns to cause scandal for the other side. That’s my fear.”

The Internet has already become a prime target for such manipulation. Tom Rosenstiel , the director of Project for Excellence in Journalism , said the growing influence of political blogs, combined with the relative ease of posting negative information anonymously, make them “irresistible for dirty tricks and attack politics.”

It isn’t just political operatives being sneaky fuckers, either. Last October, I wrote a post titled “NBC’s Monday Night Lineup” about, among other things, my growing disastisfaction with “Live From Studio 60.” Now, mind you, I think any comment that appears on a post older than, say, a week, is at the very least, suspicious. Most spammers, after all, spam old posts, in the hopes that a negligent blog operator will allow their comments through (thank goodness for comment moderation and programs like SpamKarma). Yet, the flowering praise heaped upon NBC’s lineup by this random commenter today (who has never commented here before) damn near caused me to arch a brow and observe “fascinating.” After reading the above article, I’ve decided it is probably spam, but I’d like a second, third, fourth, and heck, fifth opinion on it:

Monday night’s on NBC is becoming a great line up. Deal or No Deal is getting a bit old but still fun to watch the reactions of the different contestents. Heroes is one of my new favorite shows its like a primetime drama incorporating all of my childhood memories of the x-men. The new addition to the line up is The Black Donnellys, the face paced TV show incorporates drama, with relationships all set to the backdrop of an irish mob family. It’s like The Boondock Saints but in a TV version..a must see!

The kicker for me? “A Must See!” Either he’s being deliberately ironic or he thinks I don’t know that NBC used to call their evening viewing blocks “must see tv.”

However you pronounce it, I really gotta say I’ve got mixed feelings about this month. On one hand, it’s so damn short by the time it’s over with, you’re sort of like, “How the fuck is it March? Weren’t we just in January?” The downside of that, of course, is that you’ve got the same amount of bills to pay in a very short time frame. Gets worse in the pizza delivery business, since the slow time of the year hits the day after the Superbowl (and of course, the last six months have been nothing to write home about with excitement).

February. You’re a cold life sucking bitch, and I’m glad that in seven hours I won’t have to contemplate you at all for another eleven wonderful months that are all, in some form or another, better than you.

Plus, y’know, hopefully this time next year I’ll be working in an office job and not doing anything involving any combination of “pizza” and “driving.”

So I skipped my ItCM class yesterday to study for my HEL test. So there I am, sitting cross-legged on the hallway, index cards arranged about me, furiously trying to cram the mid-front-vowels into my brain, and two professors go strolling back, casually engaged in a conversation about Baltimore’s ban on smoking.

So the one guy — who shall remain nameless — is commenting on the health aspect, and meanwhile, my brain goes into overdrive and I associate “health” with “hygiene” and I reflect on who it was I saw in the bathroom last week who left without without washing his hands. Yep, Prof Health himself. I chuckled to myself, then resumed to cram back-high-vowels into my brain.

I’ve added a new catagory to my blogroll: Towson University Blogs. There are only two on there right now, and if you’re reading this, and you’re a student, staff or faculty member at the school and you’d like your blog added, e-mail me your blog’s URL with $20 and you’ll be right up. (Hah, just kidding about the cash, feel free to send, though).

What’s Up Today? is the product of a mass comm student named David Madon, who, apparently, is stalking me from school to school (although, until now we’ve never been at the same school at the same time).

More With Les is Les Potter’s blog. Lesis a doctoral candidate and professor in the mass comm department at Towson, and a pretty nice guy from the few e-mails we’ve exchanged.

Go check out their blogs. Leave witty comments. I’m spending all day schlepping pizzas through the county so I can’t do it.