Here are the countries I’ve visited:

And the states:

I am not well-traveled, yet I have this idea in my head that I am. Strange.

Update: As has been pointed out in comments, I have impolitely not included a link to the place where you can make these maps: http://www.world66.com/myworld66 There. All fixed.

Tired of the Nigerian scam? Join the party:

It has been described as the internet’s first blood sport and is fast becoming one of the web’s favourite pastimes. Fed up with having their inboxes clogged with emails from Nigerian fraudsters promising untold riches, the victims are finally hitting back.

Scam-baiting – replying to the emails and stringing the con artists along with a view to humiliating them as much as possible – is becoming increasingly popular with more than 150 websites chronicling the often hilarious results.

The site most prominently featured in the Guardian article is 419eater.com, in case you want to have a look-see.

Honestly, who would respond to the Nigerian e-mails? It’s so tragic.

(My favorite reverse Nigerian scam is the Cthulu scam, which I have mentioned here before.)

I got spam-hit again last night. I think I’ve deleted 30 so far, and with the way MT is set up, it takes forever to delete lots of spam comments. The frustrating thing is that the spammers’ IP is 206.184.208.20, which reportedly is the same IP I’m posting from, so I can’t block that IP.

I am really frustrated by this.

One of the reasons I was excited by blogging software is the commenting feature. I have become bad about responding to mail—comments were a way of hearing readers’ reactions.

But deleting this spam shit and then rebuilding my site is unwieldly and unfun.

Later: At least 150. (I’m not sure what the original count was.) Is there nothing about the web that spammers and pornographers can’t ruin?

I love the Web. Today I found a blog devoted to awful plastic surgery of the stars, complete with incriminating photos.

I spent the first half of What Lies Beneath wondering why in the hell Zemeckis would give Michelle Pfeiffer’s plastic surgery such extreme close-ups. The changes documented in Pfeiffer’s looks are tragic.

Not half as tragic as Meg Ryan’s. Ouch.

Any aspiring actor, actress, or Olympic decathlete should be forced to see this site.

Anybody know what’s happened to Iraqi blogger Riverbend?

Update: Never mind, she’s back. Her site was replaced by a photo of a building, maybe an apartment building, with flowerboxes on the windows for a while.

Usually I don’t like photo caption contests because for the most part captioners just take the easy way out, but this picture with captions over at Billmon cracked me up pretty hard.