So, I wander away from the old blog for a few days, er, weeks, or I guess it's actually been a few MONTHS now (Christ, has it been THAT long? There's a good reason, really, I promise . . . and I'll explain later, I promise, and no it's not something dreary or depressing like a family illness or divorce or anything like that. Something actually positive but complicated). But now I've been getting these random comments popping into my email box, and they're all in Chinese. Or, at least, something that looks a lot like what I assume Chinese must look like, though clearly I've never learned anything about the Chinese language.
And, they're all being left on the same post . . . a trivial little thing called "A Call For Bacon" that I threw out there to get ideas for an article I was writing for the City Paper.
I have no answers, only questions. Questions I've been too lazy to really track down the answer for. But here are the questions:
1. Who are these people leaving comments on this post?
2. Why this post and no other posts?
3. Is that really Chinese?
4. What do these messages say?
5. I am assuming this is all some bizarre automated spam and I should ignore them. Is that true? Are these just posts for some Chinese version of Mexican viagra?
6. How hard would it be for me to figure out the answer to #5?
7. Is it even really worth it?
8. What if they aren't spam but really trenchant comments on something I'm totally missing out on because I'm too lazy to teach myself Chinese just to decipher comments that are probably really just spam?
9. What if Chinese people (or people of whatever nationality they really are, since I haven't even established definitively if these comments are Chinese or something else, and even if they are are they in Mandarin or Cantonese, or maybe some other dialect that I don't even know about because I don't even know what all the Chinese dialects are or even if that's a silly statement because there are thousands of Chinese dialects and I only know there are two, but what if I don't even have those two right . . .
And this is a death spiral of ignorance that has no end. And I don't even know the answer to question #4,231, which is, "Do Chinese people even like bacon?" (Answer: "Of course they do. EVERYONE likes bacon!") And here's the crazy thing: I actually took an entire 3-hour college course on Chinese history AND I've actually been to China! And apparently learned nothing from any of that and all that tuition and airfare money was totally wasted.
So, please, if anyone out there can read Chinese or whatever language these comments are in, please leave a comment telling me and both my readers (or, wait, have all these Chinese comments boosted my page hit rates . . . I need to go check out Google Analytics and find out. I might be making a fortune off those Chinese Google ad word ads that are now popping up, even though I've never made enough off those stupid little ads for Google to even cut me a single check, though it sounded like a good idea at the time.)
Anyhow, stay tuned . . . I've got a really good story for where I've been for the last three months.
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3 comments:
Okay, just checked Google Analytics, and I am duty bound to report that when you stop making any posts at all to your blog and just make a few random Twitter tweets whenever you get around to thinking about it, even mysterious Chinese comment spam isn't enough to keep the hit counts from sagging.
Go figure.
I'm pretty sure its Japanese. Chinese characters don't have that many curvy strokes. I can't read Chinese very well but I can speak it (I'm from HK). As for question #4,231 the answer is probably a yes since pork is used in a lot of Chinese cooking. One of my favorite dishes is the Cantonese version of roast suckling pig. The skin is so crispy, even better than bacon in my opinion.
Thanks to commenters on this and the original bacon post who have helped deduce that these are actually links to Japanese dating service and/or porn sites. Which is good to know, but raises the disturbing question of how a post with the title "A Call for Bacon" managed to draw such attention.
I would block the comments or take the post down, but it's got 57 comments and growing. I sort of feel like the drummer in an old school burlesque house--not much of a gig, but at least there's an audience!
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