Quotulatiousness

December 22, 2010

In Soviet America, bank robs you!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:19

All joking aside, how is this allowed to happen?

The NYT reports on a growing phenomenon of wrongful foreclosure by US banks on homeowners who are caught up on their mortgage payments — and on homeowners who have no mortgage at all. In some cases, homeowners return from vacation to discover their locks changed and their every earthly possession sent to the dump (one woman lost her dead husband’s ashes when her bank burgled her ski chalet). Prominent in the list of banksters who rob innocent people of their homes and all their belongings? Those upright guardians of morality at Bank of America, who have decided that their customers can’t choose to contribute to Wikileaks’s defense fund.

H/T for the headline to commenter “Doramia“.

QotD: A Christmas Carol

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:52

It’s Christmas time, and that means it’s time to enjoy A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ melancholy tale of a productive businessman who gets worked over by three meddling supernatural social workers one Christmas Eve, transforming him into a simpering socialist.

It’s almost as sad as Star Wars, really.

Douglas Kern, “A TCS Christmas Carol”

Bad Boy Fencing Star Implicated in Yet Another Jewel Heist

Filed under: Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:35

Hey, spammers? DIAF!

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:09

I don’t usually have to deal with too much in the way of spam comments, as the Akismet plug-in seems to catch the majority of them for me. The last 24 hours has seen a lot of almost-believable comments that might have been approved, except they are copies of half-a-dozen originals, from similar IP addresses:

“Just wanted to let you know the sidebar looks off in my browser with 1600×1200 resolution.”

“Hey, I haven’t checked in here for a while, but I will put you on my bloglist so I don’t forget to check back.”

“I don’t always agree with your posts, but this was dead on, way to go!”

“Oooh, you’re such an inspiration. I love this blog!”

“Hmm. I am not so sure about that…”

Also amusing is that the posts are recorded as coming from places like “cat.com”, “dog.com”, “strawberry.com”, and “chocolate.com”. I’m assuming they’re all from the same botnet (most are from the 173.234.x.x block and report emails at ymail.com).

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