As a blogger, I engage in a daily battle with spammers. They clog up my inbox. Every morning, I have to scrub clean 11D's comment section of their non sequiturs. They send me porn links on Twitter. Some asshole even set up a faux Apt. 11d blog. I loathe them. But I also admire them. The bottom feeders of the Internet age are very smart.
Alex Madrigal has a great article about one spammer who figured out how to rig Pinterest, so he makes $1,000 per day through Amazon Associates. More at the Daily Dot. Considering that 21% of Pinterest users actually buy shit that see on the site, these spammers have discovered the motherlode.
Honestly, I spent about 30 minutes last night playing around with the idea of becoming a spammer.


So, the pot roast. How was it?
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Very good, but it took a lot longer than expected. The recipe called for a 200 oven. I think that was too low.
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At that temperature, your oven is basically a big crock pot.
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“At that temperature, your oven is basically a big crock pot.”
Yeah, and at the low temperature setting, a crock pot takes all day to do anything.
I really like crock pots for stew, beef, or beans–i.e. the stuff that you can’t really overcook. That may be my inner WASP speaking, though. The crock pot is such a very WASP-y invention–cooking for people who don’t like to cook.
Here is Florence King, describing Mrs. Jonesborough, the High WASP 70s housewife and her relationship with the crock pot:
“She likes recipes that ‘you don’t have to do anything to,’ meaning one-step dishes that obediently stew in their own juice in a big pot that turns itself on and off while she reads Jaws. The automatic crock pot is the bane of the Wasp cook because she has such all-American faith in gadgets. The ethnic mother doesn’t trust the pot and keeps checking on it, but Mrs. Jonesborough, believing the pot can do no wrong, throws in a hunk of corned beef, a head of cabbage, and six unpeeled potatoes, then goes to a meeting of the zoning board. By the time she returns the rubber bands are ready to serve.”
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Geez, at that kind of profit, I want to become a spammer too.
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Remember the thing about selling out your dignity for cash? The spamming might have fewer risks than selling out your children, but it’s got to be short lived, unless you specialize in the hrd core stuff involving porn and overseas servers.
(I had to google pot roast to figure out what it was. Now I’m confused ’cause I’m wondering what the meat tied with a string and served for Sunday dinners in 50s sitcoms is.)
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“I had to google pot roast to figure out what it was. Now I’m confused ’cause I’m wondering what the meat tied with a string and served for Sunday dinners in 50s sitcoms is.”
Yep, that’s it.
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“Pot roast” is a member of the set “roasts” that is distinguished mainly by the braising method of cooking (i.e. closed in a pot). A roast not cooked in a pot would usually be a better cut of meat.
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It doesn’t have to be tough. http://www.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/article.asp?docid=26400
I sometimes make a pot roast in my clay pot, too (otherwise known as a roemertopf.) http://www.roemertopf.de/english/
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Would you mind if your obituary listed “spammer” as one of your careers?
Of course, at that point, you would be beyond caring.
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“(otherwise known as a roemertopf.)”
Oh la la.
“Would you mind if your obituary listed “spammer” as one of your careers?”
Or to put it differently, “expert at inexpensive mass marketing.”
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I sometimes make a pot roast in my clay pot, too (otherwise known as a roemertopf.) http://www.roemertopf.de/english/
Apparently, pot roast and brisket and different things, but I can’t exactly figure out why, because I never thought about pot roast one way or the other.
I always say I’m making a “brisket,” but I could absolutely be wrong about that — or I could be making something halfway between the two.
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I don’t even get spam comments on my blog anymore. So you are way above me on the social scale.
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I just got a comment on my blog from an Omaha roofer, encouraging me to go with a light-colored roof for energy efficiency reasons. He’s totally on topic for the post, but there’s also obvious commercial intent, because when you click on his name, it goes straight to the roofing company website.
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