Nestled deep in the top left hand of corner of Russia is the city of Saint Petersburg.  It’s kind of like our Seattle, but without all of the coffee and fish throwing.

Well.

Maybe there’s some fish throwing, but I’m sure tourists don’t go there just to get hit in the face by a poorly thrown salmon.

It would seem to be that Saint Petersburg has a few other names such as Petrograd and Leningrad.  The informal name is Piter.  I don’t know why.  According to one of the pictures on the Wiki, this city appears to have some pretty good parking.

So why is the man who capitalizes you telling you stories about encounters with the Crasher Squirrel and amorous TSA agents telling you about some city in Russia that those of us in America don’t really care about?

Ladies and gentleman, the reason I’m telling you about Saint Petersburg is because up until today I didn’t realize that this northwestern jewel of our neighbors to the north, east, or west (depending on which way you go) has a thriving business in the export racket.

Care to guess what they export?

Times up.  It’s Spam.

Mind you, I’m not talking about the canned pork-like substance found on most menus in Hawaii.  I’m talking about the stuff that uses every avenue of the information super highway it can to plant a bug in every virtual orifice you may possess and leaves mounds and piles of unwanted chatter.

In the last 6 weeks, TharpSter.Org (your favorite website) as been hit a number of times with comments about any one of the articles posted on this site.  In each of those cases, the context of the comment is either very generic, or completely unrelated to the subject matter of the verbal brilliance I’ve posted.  Every single one of them lists a website which beckons for traffic.  Every single one of them gets posted on a day where the analytics software used on this site does not register where the article was read at all.

Every single one of them has the same IP address of 188.143.232.39 (pronounced [smeg-muh]).

According to the good people at ip2geolocation.com, the source of this IP address resides in beautiful downtown Saint Petersburg.  Of course, I refer to downtown Saint Petersburg as beautiful on a euphemistic basis.  For all I know, it could have all of the aesthetic qualities of Mills, Wyoming, Cleveland, Ohio, or Arkansas in general.

Naturally, I’m not the only target of the affections of 188.143.232.39.  Do a Google search on this address and you’ll come up with loads of hits which confirm the assertions I’ve made here.  I haven’t reviewed all of the results, but I would assume I’m the only one to have offered up an accurate pronunciation of his/her name.

Naturally I could sit here and mercilessly flame the individual with cranial challenges who chooses to sit on the internet all day and clandestinely hit websites such as mine with the virtual equivalent of the neighbor’s dog poop in your front yard.  As much as they’ve done, it would seem their time would be better served signing internet petitions to ban Comic Sans as a stock font or writing up creative responses to the evils of autocorrect features for iPHone text.  The value and quality of time it takes to do any of those activities appear to be on a level playing field.

Instead, I’m not going to admonish Mr./Mrs. 188.143.232.39 for their activity here at TharpSter.Org.  They probably get picked on enough for wearing Star Trek shirts and Spock ears on the rare chance they go in public.  Comments on this blog are set to be moderated automatically.  No one gets a free pass to comment here unless I moderate it first.  If Mom wants to trash my inadvertent use of a malaprop, she’s welcome to do so after I buzz her in.

Otherwise, blog Spam will no longer be allowed, no matter how innocuous it is.