Would you give this woman $300 a day?

Un Chien Bleu had a veritable flurry of comments to posts this week

Twenty of them, none of them real. Now, this is a blog that is lucky to get 20 hits on any article, total. I’m simply not that popular. Luckily for me, There is a wonderful WordPress plugin called Akismet to screen out spammy-looking comments and hold them for me to approve.

Eighteen were to my post about Photoshop brushes. Obviously Photoshop brushes are more spam-worthy than, say, my conflicts with my Rush-Limbaugh-loving aging parents.

They were all automatically generated from the former USSR, with random character titles (“vipmgfrug”), random web site addresses (“pzzhbduklakn.com/“) and random email addresses (“gyqfnc@pujwzx.com“). A few were in Russian cyrillic characters

(“Стол, Стенка и Полочка. Компания «Белорусская мебель»! -единственный официальный представитель в Украине. Спальни, Прихожие, Мягкая мебель, Корпусная мебель, Мебель массив, Мебель для коттеджей, Мебель с натуральной сосны. Мягкая мебель.”)

The other two were notable:

• One linked back to movie review site RottenTomatoes.com with a gmail address, and hopeful comment
  

  “Rather interesting. Has few times re-read for this purpose to remember. Thanks for interesting article. Waiting for trackback”

  Heh, heh. Until Hell freezes over.

• The other one used a Gravatar of pop-mistress Avril Levigne and a linkback to mikesmoneysite.com (“The requested URL /suspended.page/ was not found on this server.”). The title of this missive (“Cool post, just subscribed.”) was
  

  How I Make $300 a Day Posting Links Online

  And now it becomes much clearer.