Posthuman Blues

My email account was spammed beyond capacity again last night. I've been macbot@yahoo.com so long now that I really don't want to change. For one thing, it would require manually changing the HTML code in every one of my Web pages. And it's logical to assume I'd get the same damned junk mail even if I switched user-names. Hopefully Yahoo! is aware of the problem and can put an end to it. If not, spam tends to come in waves; it's the online equivalent to a short-lived but tenacious predatory insect. In this case the insects are locusts.

A more unsettling possibility is that Yahoo! has deliberately reduced my email storage capacity so that I'll buy more disk-space from them. That's basically what they did when they realized that their free website hosting was too good to pass up -- they decreased the data transmittal so that anyone with any effort invested in a GeoCities site pretty much felt compelled to upgrade. (For nine dollars a month, it's not a bad deal. But still . . .)

NASA fulfilled a Freedom of Information Act request I had filed by sending me a videotape taken from a space shuttle. It clearly shows unidentified targets veering away from a flash of light. The best analysis to date casts pretty grave suspicion of NASA's claim that the objects are ice particles close to the shuttle. Lan Fleming, a researcher and NASA employee, has been waging a quiet battle with Jim Oberg, a journalist who functions as NASA's quasi-official debunker. The debate gets confusing, but in the end there's a solid case to be made for intelligently controlled UFOs in near-Earth space. The nagging question: are the UFOs ours or someone else's?

My birthday was Wednesday; I'm 28. I think tonight I'm meeting my parents for dinner. Also, I'm going to return my year-late library books and cough up a check. My plan to sneak the books back into the library never materialized, which is probably a good thing.

The weather is outrageous. My car's thermometer registered 112 F last evening.