Not so much disappeared as just dead

In an attempt to polish up the rusty language skills, I worked my way through an interesting obituary (with the help of a dictionary in another tab of Firefox). I had only recently learned more about yé-yé music (courtesy of Radio Oh-la-la), so it was interesting to read about a Canadian artist in that genre. Most interesting, though, is the snippet of his big hit: the French language version of Doo Wah Diddy:

Quand je l’ai vue elle marchait seule dans la rue,
J’entendu wha diddy diddy dam di di dou,
Elle ondulait des hanches comme une ingénue,
J’entendu wha diddy didididam dididou,
Les yeux bleus (les yeux bleus)
la taille fine (la taille fine),
Les yeux bleus la taille fine
j’en suis presque devenue fou

I’m going to go ondulerai!

Mmskuramoto, another weird spam destination

In the grand tradition of johnsmithsvt, we’ve started seeing spam for mmskuramoto. None of it has been allowed into the system, since it’s coming from a blacklisted IP, so I don’t know what flavor the spam is, but the attempts were surprisingly well-behaved: most spammers treat the 451 we return to blacklisted IPs the same as a 5xx error (they retry maybe once, maybe fifty times, right away, then give up); the mmskuramoto sender backed off the retries very nicely. So nicely, in fact, that I got the originating IP whitelisted and the alias added, just so I could see what the spam was. Unfortunately (or not, probably), they gave up after 14 tries, just a couple hours before they would have gotten through.
For those who care, the blacklisting setup has been modified somewhat since the johnsmithsvt post referred to above: all country-based blocking is done with zz.countries.nerd.dk, but most of the blocking ends up happening because of a bunch of Class A and B size blocks (virtually anything in apnic or south america). We still use zen.spamhaus.org, combined.njabl.org, bl.spamcop.net, dnsbl.sorbs.net, and dnsbl.jammconsulting.com, and they contribute (especially zen), but it’s mostly the huge swaths of net that are blacklisted.

Maybe hold off worrying about the bees for a bit

The bee problem (known officially as Colony Collapse Disorder) may not be as bad (yet) as I had imagined: The symptoms have happened before; even if all European honeybees die, they’re responsible for only 30% of global agriculture’s pollinating; and in their absence, other pollinators will usually fill the niche. Almonds seem to be especially affected, with a large proportion of the available mobile honeybee hives trucked in for the bloom in January.

All American Beef Pizzle!

All American Beef Pizzle! Which should totally be the name of a band. Instead, it’s a dog chew, contaminated with Salmonella (towards the end of the alerts). I am so proud of yet another product of Washington State.

Their opening act would be Muscle Pig IV. Which should contain sulfathiazole, but actually contains sulfamethazine.