For a long time, I’ve been getting email spam in Japanese. I let it pile up in the spam folder and went through it occasionally for laughs, but I haven’t had any since the end of July. Even before that, it had been gradually tapering off, mostly coming from a single source that for some reason always included “LINE” somewhere in the subject.

I still get plenty of Chinese spam containing infected Excel spreadsheets (or, very rarely, infected Word documents), phony warnings from random banks and courts that contain infected zip files, whatever the latest domestic scam is (mostly weight-loss for the past few weeks), and the usual assortment of get-it-up or make-it-bigger medications, which mostly come from Russian domains.

But nothing in Japanese any more. My spam folder has 5-10 per day up to July 24th, and nothing after. The last amusing one was all the way back in December, when one of them dragged out the gyaku-enjo ad again.

The closest I’ve gotten to actual fun spam recently was the Spanish-language one offering a how-to class on making sushi, from a cooking school in Buenos Aires.

Coming in January:

(Youtube (region-locked; I use HideMyAss VPN for moments like this…); web site)

…is the Mouretsu Pirates: Abyss of Hyperspace movie, due out on November 12th. The deluxe edition is only at #86 today.

The official Blu-ray release date for the Bodacious Space Pirates movie is November 12th.

(via a google image search for Schnitzer, but no complaints. No idea where it originally came from, or I’d give proper credit; the largest size I found was here, a 4chan image-archive site)

Nothing says “born in Ohio” like processed meats, purchased in the middle of the night at Walmart.

And, yes, it’s one of my guilty pleasures, and after 20 years of not finding it in California groceries, a little light bulb went on and I tried the local Walmart. They also reliably stock the jalapeno bologna, so I can pretend to a more sophisticated palate.

I passed on the giant bag of Honeycomb cereal snack food, though. That’s a guilty pleasure that would earn a scolding from my doctor.

In a shocking turn of events, a police officer who shot a family’s dog for no good reason actually got fired for it.

I walked into someone’s cube to deliver a new document scanner (the excellent Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500), and found this little gem attached to her monitor cable: