I get cluster-bombed by a spammer; undoing the damage takes up all of my blogging time today

When I got up this morning and came out to check up on the online world, I was amazed to open up my email and see that a huge, huge, number of comments had come into my blog, dropped in all over the place. They were all spam, from someone claiming to sell football jerseys with links back to his site - a phishing site.

So I had to go through and remove every one. I have no more time left to blog today.

I have always resisted the idea of putting filters on my comments and have just left them open so that anyone could leave a comment at any time without having to type in any kind of code like you see on so many sites and without having to wait for my approval to see their comment appear.

For the most part, this has worked well. From time to time, a bit of spam has worked its way in but the numbers have been small enough that it was not that difficult to remove.

As bad and time consuming as today's cluster-bombing was, it occurs to me that it could be much worse, that the robot that did this could probably do the same to every single post that I have ever put up and multiple times - and could just keep them coming. It could create a situation that would be almost impossible to deal with.

So, sadly, with great reluctance, I have decided that I must put some filters up for my comments.

I would also note that yesterday in my statistics I saw a strange pattern emerge, where someone would come to visit from the "Bloggers Choice Awards" site and then would hop about my site, downloading pictures.* Later, the same thing would happen again.

My theory was that this was a very dedicated voter who was downloading pictures from various sites so that s/he could study and compare before casting an informed vote.

Now I think it was the spammer, because every site that I remember seeing appear in this manner got spammed. I do not know what they intend to do with my downloaded pictures.* The same pattern is repeating itself today, so I think the same perpetrator is preparing another cluster bomb attack for tonight.

As to the above image, I drove into Anchorage late yesterday afternoon to pick Margie up from her Jobe-babysitting stint in Anchorage, as Lavina has today off and so Margie would not be needed.

I am still jet-lagged and yesterday morning I woke up just before 2:00 AM and could not go back to sleep, so I got up at 2:30 and stayed up. I felt okay most of the day until I picked Margie up and then it all hit me, so I asked if she would drive home and she did. At one point, I was trying to nap but I opened my eyes and saw this blue pickup truck turn off the freeway onto the exit just ahead of us. 

I thought what was about to happen might make a good picture, so I removed my pocket camera from my shirt pocket and shot. I then put my camera back in my pocket and closed my eyes again. 

I may just wait until Sunday to post again. Now that it is summer, I find that on Saturday's the visits to my site drop way, way, down as people go out to play. I wouldn't mind playing a bit myself.

*Update: I have done a little research and have learned that anytime a viewer looks at one of my images in slideshow view, statistics shows it as a "picture download," even though no picture has actually been downloaded into someone else's computer. So this is a bit of a relief. It does not appear that the spammer downloaded my pictures at all.

ICC Nuuk, Greenland, part 8: Three of the many gifts and awards given - a mask to the Premier, an Edmunds to Mary Simon, a belated plaque to Jose Kusugak, who learned about his cancer too late

I did not suddenly return to Greenland. I am still here in Wasilla, but with a mountain of work left over from Greenland and now it is time to start posting it, so I will begin with a little award and gift-giving.

There were many gifts and awards given out at the 11th General Assembly of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, held in Nuuk June 28 - July 2. Each of the many speakers received a gift and many honored and accomplished people who attended in non-speaking capacities did also, but, to keep it simple, I will limit this presentation to three.

First, this Iñupiaq mask was given by North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta, President of the Alaska Delegation, to Premier Kuupik Kleist of Greenland, left, in honor of his nation having served as host to this year's General Assembly.

Basking in the honor with him is Hans-Pavia Rosing of Greenland, right, who served as the first Chair of ICC and has been active in the organization throughout its entire history.

This is Ronald Brower Sr. of Barrow, the artist who made the mask.

The most prestigious honor handed out at each General Assembly is the Bill Edmunds Award, named for a man who grew up in Labrador, Canada, to become an Inuit activist. Edmunds was involved the founding of ICC in 1980 and remained active in the organization for the rest of his life.

Mary Simon, a past Chair of ICC, has also been a leader in ICC since its beginning. Here, outgoing Chair Jim Stotts presents her with a plaque that acknowledges her many accomplishments.

Stotts then gives her a scuplture as a gift.

Simons speaks to the General Assembly.

"We still have a lot of work ahead of us to work to improve the lives of our fellow Inuit. Our health and wellbeing should be our next major goal. We must do this in order to provide a better future for our children and youth," she told them, after acknowledging the honor. She said it came as a total surprise.

As do all gathered from each of the four nations, delegates from Greenland and Canada give Simon a standing ovation.

She waves back.

Jose Kusugak, the former President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a national Candian Inuit organization, and the current President of the Kivalliq Inuit Association in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, Canada, was the 2006 winner of the Edmund Award. 

However, the plaque that he was to be given failed to arrive when the 10th General Assembly met in Barrow in that year, so he was awarded it this year, immediately after Simon received hers. It proved to be perhaps the most emotional moment of the entire General Assembly.

"I really did want to come here and somebody was trying to prevent me from coming here," Kusugak told the assembly, "A few months ago I was diagnosed with cancer and they operated, but they said it was a little too late." He said he wanted to come anyway and to tell the circumpolar people to please exercise their right to get their health checked up early and ofteb, especially if they suspected that something might be wrong.

Despite being told it is a little too late, Kusugak has not given up. He asked the people for their prayers. "I have grandchildren that I want to see grow up and I'm too young... I might have gray hair, but I'm too young."

As he speaks, his words follow on the large screen in the background.

Kusugak is 59.

As he leaves the podium, Kusugak receives an encouraging shake of the hand.

Translators inside Canada's translation booth stand in Kusugak's honor. Interpreter Martha Flaherty wipes away a tear.

View images as slide show

A glance back at beer and merry-making on the streets of Copenhagen; Margie and Jobe; I'm gone so long Carmen loses the connection; Melanie, the gunslinger

On June 26, I spent the afternoon and evening in Copenhagen and yet, until now, had not posted even one picture. This is because life just moved too quickly on and I was never able to. It was a very strange afternoon and evening for me. Here I was, in one of the great cities of Northern Europe, a place that I had never been before and would likely never be again.

I wanted to explore, to see the place, to get some kind of sense of it. But I was so exhausted. I never did add up exactly how long it took to get to Copenhagen from Wasilla, but since it took 25 hours to get to Wasilla from Copenhagen on the return, I assume it was about the same. I hardly slept a wink my last night in Wasilla and, although I closed my eyes and tried pretty hard, I did not get even one minute's sleep on the planes coming over.

So I was walking around the City Center area of Copenhagen, near the Copenhagen Plaza Hotel where I stayed, in a hazy daze. I photographed a number of things that I saw, but never had time to go back and look at those photos.

Yet, I figure I should put at least one in, so here it is, grabbed from the middle of my Copenhagen take. I am not quite certain what was happening, but I heard loud honking and cheers and shouts coming down the road and then saw these kids in the back of a festooned truck. They were drinking beer and laughing and shouting and waving and had positioned themselves at the very center of the universe.

On this day, at this moment, they were the most important people on the planet and they wanted to make certain all knew it.

Maybe they had just graduated from college or something; perhaps it was a sorority thing. I do not know. But they seemed to be having fun and they were very beautiful.

On Tuesday, I got up very early to drive Margie into Anchorage so that she can babysit Jobe through Thursday. I forgot to bring my camera and so had to fall back on my iPhone. Here is Margie and Jobe, waving goodbye to Kalib and Lavina as they go off to day care and work.

Now Jobe watches as his dad pedals off to work.

Margie and Jobe settle down to spend the next few days together.

Jobe, in his special little chair that he can sit in all by himself.

In the afternoon, I stopped at Metro Cafe - my first time finding them open since my return. There was a new temporary barista there, Grace, helping to fill in for Sashanna during those days she cannot come in. Carmen told me that one day while I was gone, Sashanna said, "I miss Bill."

That was kind of nice to hear.

On the other hand, after we had chatted for about two minutes, Carmen looked at me and said, "you've been gone so much, I don't feel the old connection."

I'm not worried, though. It will come back.

Of course, I'll be leaving again next week and for longer.

I don't think I will be home much at all this summer.

Maybe we will have to wait until next winter to get that connection back.

The connection that takes place every weekday for about one to two minutes, right about 4:00 PM.

I took a little drive after I left Metro.

As Margie drove me home Sunday night, I talked to Melanie by cell phone. That was when she told me that she and Charlie would be out for breakfast Monday morning - as you saw. She did not know it was going to be so windy a day as it turned out and did not know that she would be weed-whacking, so she thought maybe we could go canoeing afterwards.

She couldn't go canoeing too long, she said, because she and Charlie had to go to Eagle River in the afternoon to shoot guns.

I was a little surprised to hear this, because Melanie has never been interested in guns.

"You're going to shoot guns?" I responded.

"Yes," she said. "That's what I do now."

So I thought that she had gotten into target shooting with Charlie.

As it turns out, the engineering firm that she works for was going to send her to the Donlin Creek gold mine for three weeks and she will be assigned a slug-loaded shot gun (bear protection) so she needed to practice shooting one.

She was going to leave today, so I guess I won't see her for awhile.

I grabbed this picture at random and included it just as a reminder that I am not done with my ICC Nuuk Coverage. I had stated that I would start it tomorrow, but I have a huge amount to do first and may not be able to start until Friday or even Saturday.

This is Marie Greene, President and CEO of NANA, speaking to the General Assembly from Kotzebue.

View images as slide show

I sleep long and sound and then I'm lazy all day; kids and grandkids come out; Jimmy, my good black cat, disappears / 13 image slide show

Last night, I went to bed at midnight. I would say that I fell asleep within 15 minutes - something that is very unusual for me. And then I have no memory of ever waking up until after 8:00 AM. I then went right back to sleep and stayed that way until about 10:25 AM.

Very, very, unusual for me.

Truly, I have been lazy all day. I have done very little and it has felt good. But there was one horrible event today.

Anyway, you see that I have posted but one picture, yet I have prepared a total of 13 images for this post. I am still tired and lazy - too lazy to place the other images into the post and to write about them in my usual way. Instead, I will present them as a slideshow, not in the order that they happened, but in the order that they just happened to fall when I uploaded them en masse into the slideshow.

You can make of them what you will, but here are a few hints:

Melanie and Charlie came out this morning and treated Margie and I to breakfast at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant. 

Afterwards, the four of us and Jim were sitting out in the backyard noting how overgrown everything is. Margie usually keeps a little patch between the porch and the picnic table trimmed down but since she has been spending her weekdays in town babysitting Jobe, she hasn't done so.

Plus, there was no weed-whacker to be found. I wondered why there wasn't. Melanie said it was because Jacob sold the weed-whackers during the yard sale we had two summers ago, when I was hurt.

Margie got into the car went off to buy two weed-whackers - one electric and the other a hand-swinger.

While she was gone, Jacob, Lavina, Kalib and Jobe showed up.

When he found out that his Mom was buying weed-whackers, Jacob proclaimed his innocence. He said he had not wanted to sell the weed-whackers, but Mom insisted, because she just wanted everything gone.

Then Margie came back and people started whacking weeds.

Jim kept wandering too far for my comfort, so I brought him back into the house.

Then I went to sit at computer for awhile and stare into cyberspace.

At some point as I was doing this, with people going in and out through the doors, Jimmy slipped unseen back outside and disappeared.

We searched and searched for Jimmy, but he could not be found.

I personally went through the dried up marsh twice, but found no sign. Once, as I was doing so, I tripped and fell. I went up and down the road. No Jim.

It was horrible.

Then Lavina found him out in the swamp, but he was frightened, did not recognize her and pulled away from her grasp of rescue. Jacob summoned me to go back and get him. So I did and I came upon a very frightened Jim but no Lavina.

She had taken a bad fall and worse yet, had stepped on a log with a nail sticking out of it and that nail had pierced the sole of her sandals and had gone deep into her foot.

I put Jim back in the house, Lavina and Margie cleaned her foot up and then Lavina, Kalib and I went to Metro Cafe, but they had closed early for the holiday. So we went to Little Millers and got ice cream cones and a shake.

Kalib fed the fish.

Chicago came to me to get a pet.

Other things happened today, too, but this is enough to hint about the slide show.

And here is the 13 image slide show

I hope to get back to work on my ICC Nuuk materials Tuesday, but I do not think that I will begin to present the material before Thursday. I want to spend some serious time with it, first.

Charlie took the picture of Jim and me. Since this blog is about how I view the world, I am not supposed to publish pictures here taken by other people until I photograph those pictures myself, either on my iPhone, my computer screen or as a print, but I remain just too tired and lazy to go through all that right now, so I am presenting the photo just as Charlie took it. It kind of looks like I am glowering at Jimmy, but I'm not. I'm looking at him with great affection.

Flying from Copenhagen to Anchorage - my big day at the movies

I left my hotel in Copenhagen for the airport at 7:00 AM this morning and arrived at my house in Wasilla just before 10:00 PM - 25 hours, when the time difference is factored in.

Here I am in Amsterdam, where the switch from planes was long and tedious. I am too tired to explain. It is now 10:47 PM in Wasilla and I just want to go bed. But first I will finish this blog and set it to publish for 5:15 AM, July 5.

I follow the crowd into the airplane that will take us from Amsterdam to Minneapolis St. Paul. We will fly directly over Nuuk, Greenland.

I watched three movies between Amsterdam and Minneapolis: The Book of Eli, The Hurt Locker and this one, Rinco, a Japanese film with English subtitles. This was the last of the three and I was worried that we would land before I could see the end.

The final scene ended just as our wheels touched the runway. The credits then began to roll, but were almost instantly cut off as the movie service ended.

It's okay. The credits were in Japanese and I can't read Japanese anyway. 

I was thinking about my friend, Chie Sakakibara.

If she had been flying with me, she could have read them - if only they hadn't been cut off.

The final leg, MSP-ANC, was about 6 hours, but it seemed less, so I must have actually dozed off.

Margie picked me up and drove me home. Here she is standing in the backyard. Around us, we can hear the sounds of rockets exploding and firecrackers popping as people celebrate the Fourth.

This will probably keep up, off and on, until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.

Jimmy, with me in my office, getting a drink of fish tea.

Jimmy loves his fish tea. And he loves me. Margie says he has been wandering about, lost, through the house. Now he is happy. He keeps jumping up onto my chest, stays for awhile, then jumps off, drinks a bit more fish tea, then comes back and jumps up again.

He just did, again. He is making it hard to type. 

I don't care. Jimmy's purring right in my left ear and I'm done.

Pistol is here, too.

I haven't seen Chicago yet, but I did hear her hiss just when I walked into the house. Not at me - at Pistol. She does not like Pistol at all. That is why I have not seen her yet.

Now, Jimmy has left. Pistol-Yero has taken his place - but on my lap, not my chest or shoulder.

View images as slideshow