For quite a while now, I’ve been meaning to go back and do some cleanup work on the small number of photos I shot out of our hotel room window. The one I originally posted just never looked right to me. This one is the result of some careful Levels work, combined with the updated version of Noise Ninja that works as an Aperture plug-in.

[Update: …and the real Network Solutions sent out notices warning about the scam today, which suggests it was pretty well-distributed]

[Update: already another one today, to a completely different address, also not associated with any domain registrations. This one came from a German IP address that’s pretending to be Yahoo, with disguised links leading to a different Russia-based domain owned by the same “Shestakov Yuriy”, through yet another Chinese registrar. Long ago, I set up a special filter rule for anything coming from a .biz domain; I think it’s time to apply the same rule to any mention of the TLD, in email or browser windows]

This is one of the more transparent scam emails I’ve seen recently.

1. It's going to a randomly-scraped address that has no connection to any domain registration.
2. It doesn't mention any domains that the recipient owns.
3. It claims that this unnamed domain's registration has lapsed, and as the former owner, the recipient is entitled to a percentage of the sale price to someone else.
4. It insists that the only way to claim the money is by clicking on the link (and, of course, filling in a great deal of personal information).
5. The link is labeled "renew your domain", and falsely claims to point to Network Solutions, with ".sys62.biz" (Russian "commerce" domain set up through a Chinese registrar) hidden in the HTML.
6. There's nothing in the link to identify an individual recipient; you won't even be greeted by name if you're dumb enough to click it.
7. According to the headers, it allegedly originated on a machine in Australia that happens to have an IP address in Turkey.

I figure 5% of what they send out will slip past spam filters, 5% of the people who see it will click the link, and 1% of those will be stupid enough to enter the information necessary to have their identities stolen. If they sent out 100,000, that’s two identity thefts. And they probably sent out a lot more than 100,000.

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Makoto‘s t-shirt says 「先生‼男子がポン酢をかけてきます」. All I can tell you is that the design came from Mari Yaguchi’s old radio show, and a bunch of H!P girls have been spotted in it. Apparently they get a bit goofy sometimes, if that wasn’t obvious from her expression.

…is bad for Malaysians. Last week they outlawed women in pants, this week it’s yoga. Yoga because it could “damage their faith” (perhaps physical flexibility leads to the mental kind), but pants and other “tomboyish” behavior because they could lead to lesbian sex.

It would be hilarious if these ’tards weren’t deadly serious. I hope the two Malaysian women I met in Japan aren’t caught up in this mess; they were very Westernized, spoke decent English, and, yes, looked great in pants. If they haven’t already left the homeland for good, I recommend America. West Coast, perhaps the San Jose area…

“Hey, kid, say hi to Joe the Plumber for me…”

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The folks at Boboli have a new line of flatbreads under the Ambretta label. I picked some up at Safeway last night, and this morning’s breakfast consisted of their rosemary flatbread, toasted and combined with roast beef and cheddar cheese into traditional sandwich form. The house now smells like rosemary and butter, which is never a bad thing.

The only email spam I read is the stuff that arrives in Japanese. Every once in a while I’m tempted to print one out and take it into my reading class, but so far I’ve resisted. I’m trying to avoid the “creepy older guy on campus” image.

My English spam seems to focus around filter-evading euphemisms for chemically-induced potency and larger body parts, but the stuff I get in Japanese is about 90% “come to our site if you want to meet women”. The pitch varies from week to week, and the current one is hilarious: 逆援助.

Literally, gyaku-enjo would be “reverse support”, but enjo means something special in the minds of Japanese men: enjo-kousai, which can be translated as either “subsidized dating” or “schoolgirl prostitution”, depending on your mood.

Reverse enjo, then, is every struggling salaryman’s dream: beautiful younger women who’ll pay you for sex. Keep the dream alive, guys.

All the J-E dictionaries I’ve checked either insist or at least imply that the suffix -darake (“full of ~; covered with ~”) always has a negative meaning. Certainly the vast majority of uses are negative, but the reason I looked it up in the first place was a clearly positive example, an illustrated guide to the Imperial Japanese Army called ドキッ乙女だらけの帝國陸軍入門 (literally, “exciting filled-with-maidens imperial army introduction”).

It came up in class this week in one of the standard examples, 血だらけ, “covered in blood”. Mud, idiots, lies, mistakes, demons, and holes are also very commonly used with this suffix, but a quick search of Amazon Japan turns up book titles featuring cats, dreams, cat stickers, angels, women, haiku, mysteries, riddles, and, in the adult DVD section, a variety of special-interest items.

So, usually negative, but can be positive in anything from children’s books to fetish porn.