Jeri Smith-Ready: Spammity Spam

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Spammity Spam

My Spam of the Week is rather intriguing. It promises

sevenfold redemption

which, as the author of a novel about the possible redemption of the Devil, I couldn't resist. The e-mail's interior, however, confused me:

some popular it's williams , cityscape.
may crack on canterelle some slavic, try rejoinder ! backward the maul a sect be shingle it uk.
be belgium , plantain may apparatus.
or society be corrode on adduceit's bowline in polyphemus or kneecap.

but then again, I never really did understand poetry.

posted by Jeri @ 9:15 PM
10 comments

10 Comments:

I think it's just a bunch of letters thrown together. It certainly doesn't make sense.

Posted by: Unknown at 3/10/2006 12:28 AM

Well, yeah. That's sort of the point. I'm not sure why spam producers think this strategy will help get their garbage through to my e-mail box, but I'm sure there's some sort of formula.

After all, it worked!

Posted by: Jeri at 3/10/2006 6:48 AM

Well that's kinda why they do it. They keep changing keywords around in order to get through spam blockers that are designed to watch for certain types of keywords. This is why spam is so hard to avoid. Now matter how many times I block out certain keywords, I keep getting spam from this one lesbian sight because the keywords keep changing.:-) Oh well, that's what delete is for.

Posted by: Unknown at 3/10/2006 10:49 AM

You had me at "canterelle."

Posted by: Dave S. at 3/10/2006 1:15 PM

LOL, Dave!

Taxes are done, and in less than a day. I'm thanking my 2005 self for keeping track of expenses and income along the way, and for making a backup copy of our 2004 return (the previous two years our return got wiped off the hard drive and I had to reenter all the old information).

The amount owed is pretty much coming out to what I thought it would, which means the spread sheet I set up last year is pretty solid.

Next step: figuring out what we owe for 1Q 2006. The fun never ends.

Posted by: Jeri at 3/10/2006 3:00 PM

Do you ever get a refund Jeri? Sheesh the IRS is greedy.

Posted by: Unknown at 3/10/2006 6:33 PM

No, and I hope I never do, because that would mean

a) I hadn't made any money, or
b) I overpaid estimated taxes when I paid quarterly, which is like giving the government an interest-free loan

When you're self-employed, as both my husband and I are, no one deducts taxes from your checks. Furthermore, we have to pay both the employer's and the employee's parts of Medicare and Social Security, which adds an extra 7.65% burden. So self-employed people really earn 92.35 cents on the dollar. It's not fair, but then again, it's not fair to shortchange the Medicare and SS pools either.

We also each have a job outside of the home, and we have our employers take extra taxes out of our payroll to help keep us from falling behind. But I've also set up a spreadsheet detailing our income and expenses to figure out how much we owe each quarter. At the end of the quarter I send the IRS a check. This keeps us from owing a huge amount at the end of the year and paying a penalty for underpayment.

For 2004 I didn't do this, and we owed over 8K (GAAAH!!), which we're still paying off using a credit card. This year, because we're paying quarterly, we only owe $1700, which is really just the fourth quarter payment that we didn't make on January 15 because, well, who has an extra $1700 lying around after Christmas?

Also, every dollar we put back into our businesses reduces our tax burden, because business expenses are tax-deductible.

This tax lesson brought to you by Aleve.

Posted by: Jeri at 3/11/2006 6:55 AM

Note: in the second-to-last paragraph above I referred to "this year," meaning 2005. Doing taxes makes you live in the past.

Posted by: Jeri at 3/11/2006 6:57 AM

Wait. It was the third-to-last paragraph. Sorry.

Posted by: Jeri at 3/11/2006 6:57 AM

I understand completely. Working on magazines means you live int he future. One more day to June(/July)!

Posted by: Rob S. at 3/11/2006 10:56 AM