My Internet service provider (above) and I are dealing with a massive spam attack at the moment. Some moron thinks Dorseyland, with its fantastic 100-visits-a-day tally, is an excellent place to sell refrigerators, bunk beds, charcoal grills and other, less useful junk.

I’ve tried emailing the websites that are hosting his robot assault, but they don’t care, you know? They really couldn’t give a shit.

I shut down the open comments — everything has to be moderated before it’s published — so none of these spam comments are seeing the light of day. But my friend and his bots are insisting on staying in touch. Keeps ya busy!

With some emerging cyber-technology you just don’t know where you’re heading. I think I came across “Ground Zero” while browsing 2Bangkok.com. It’s not really a game: It lets you choose a location on Google Maps and detonate various types of bombs over it to see the extent of the impact.

Naturally I laid a thud on Bangkok, trying to see if I was safe in the outlying suburbs, but I couldn’t get the program to stay put in one spot on the map long enough to calculate how far the nuclear winter would extend.

Anyway, if they start popping nukes, NO ONE IS SAFE. I thought we were all clear on that point.

I suppose “Ground Zero” is a history lesson, in the sense that the bombs are all famous characters from the tale of man’s inhumanity to man, from the 15-kilotonne Little Boy that smoked Hiroshima to the Soviet Union’s 50-megatonne Tsar Bomba, which in 1961 created “the largest explosion ever”.

If your ears can stand the imagined noise, you can also select Fat Man (21kt for Nagasaki), the Mk28 (1.4mt, 1958) on which Slim Pickens rode to Earth (and Heaven) in “Dr Strangelove”, the B61 (340kt, 1991) now riding on US fighter jets and China’s DF-31 (140kt for intercontinental missiles).

For comparison’s sake, you can also re-create the Chicxulub meteor impact that rid the world of the dinosaur nuisance.

Get trigger-happy here.

“Ground Zero” comes courtesy of Carlos Labs, “a Data Architecture, Integration and Consulting firm registered in Sydney, Australia”. They have nothing to do with nuclear weapons; they deal in computer doodads, or as the website puts it, “the evolution of the data universe”.

I wonder if they’ve seen “On the Beach”, in which Gregory Peck flees as far as he can get from a nuclear war — to Australia. (Spoiler: In vain, as it turned out.)

I could’t find much amusement in Carlos Labs’ “Cycloid” either.

I was scanning the cybersky for UFOs and spotted a cow being repeatedly plucked from its pasture in a very funny fashion on a website actually called CowAbduction.com.

The site complains about the “serious problem”, with the number of bovine disappearances nearly 720,000 and on the rise, primarily in California — possibly because the milk is tastier and creamier, it says — but also in 27 other US states and in Europe and Russia as well.

Evidently the cattle go flying off the surface of the planet with a “meee” rather than a “mooo”, followed by silence.

There are offers of support groups for bereaved farmers (those left eating their cereal with water) and several handy products, such as the fearsome, made-in-California, electric “alien cow crow”, designed to scare off predators but reportedly dangerous for everyone concerned.

Victims, witnesses and sympathetic visitors submit photographic evidence of the phenomenon, such as this picture from John Edgecombe of Cornwall, taken from inside the cockpit of a Cessna at 3,000 feet. There are many reports of Unidentified Flying Bovines.

And here’s Scott Walker’s shot of a spacecraft of some sort actually lifting away a cow. He said he was blind for nearly three hours afterward because of the intense light of the beam.

Well, it didn’t take too long to figure out that the website is another clever promotion from the California Milk Processor Board, the same people behind the long-running and ultra-successful “Got Milk?” advertising drive.

This is the campaign that’s had everyone from Andre Agassi to Zhang Ziyi, with Batman, Bart Simpson and Yoda along the way, wearing a milk moustache, and spawned parodies like “Got fleas?”, though the board didn’t care much for PETA anti-dairy “Got pus?” campaign.

Californians will have to forgive me for knowing nothing about the two-year-old Cow Abduction campaign, which took the form of five TV spots ads. I’ve tried to make up for my ignorance with the eyewitness photo of my own, at the top of the post.

Okay, and the one below as well.

This picture pops up on a lot of websites run by people worried and/or wondering about space aliens abducting Earthlings. I came across it while researching Harry Houdini, a sidebar story that led me to Christian Chelman, the Belgian purveyor of “bizarre magic”. I was surfing UFO sites at the same time for a book review and did not come across this photo among the usual stargazer feeding grounds. It’s for Master Race from Space festishists only, you see.

The website that Chelman runs with a bunch of his friends — based around an online “museum” called the Museum of Supernatural History (the Surnateum) — seemed quite fetching at first because it’s packed with creepy old antiquities of the sort that have always fascinating me. He calls them “hauntiques” because he wraps spooky stories around them in his stage show, and storytelling is what bizarre magic (which tellingly started in the late 1960s) is all about.

It’s often also about arcane lore, so you get a lot of shamans’ spells and glib patter about necromancy, magi and grimoires. I read and read and read and then I flipped the cyberpage because it’s all so much hogwash. I started out with Houdini and ended up knee-deep in Dungeons & Dragons crap.

Chelman is possessed by “a formidable voodoo entity” and now has a split personality, the museum “closely guards the secret formula for a long-life elixir in its secret vaults, as well as a time machine [developed in 1910 by Nikola Tesla]”, numerous occultists’ names are dropped, lost civilisations raked over, and ancient curses are suggested as the reason why “mysterious killers terrorised London, Paris, Düsseldorf and Brussels [and] inexplicable shipwrecks swallowed up the titans of the sea and skies”.

These resulted from the loot stolen from ravaged temples and tombs, and the frightened owners offloaded it all on the Surnateum. They were terrified by what they’d uncovered. “Just look at what happened,” the website says, “when the Taliban, installed in power by the Americans, destroyed two giant statues of the Buddha. Before long, the Taliban disappeared. Was that just a coincidence?”

Chelman has in his collection a “bottle imp”, a “bowl of dreams” filled with coins (one from the Boxer Rebellion, pieces of eight, also casino tokens), a vampire hunter’s kit he dates to 1899, “a haunted Russian doll”, a Magic Mirror, the “cursed tobacco pouch” once owned by the skipper of the Flying Dutchman and “the Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse”.

He’s got a ghost hunter’s toolbox that contains a rare vintage camera, boxes of talcum powder, 19th-century skeleton keys, a combination hammer-cutter-screwdriver-crowbar-pliers, several tape measures for locating false walls, rope, string and copper wire, wax to seal off rooms, thermometers, a portable battery, a 1914 Corona typewriter, whistles, tongs, a stethoscope, a sundial, a prayerbook and photos of dead children.

And let’s not forget his hand of a yeti from Tibet!
There’s more!

Something else besides a toastier Earth to look forward to in 2007 comes in September when the NASA peeper Cassini has another skid past Iapetus, #17 in Saturn’s seemingly endless brood of moons (33 and counting), and at 900 miles wide its third largest.

The spacecraft was last there on New Year’s Eve 2004 and got some drunken-college-girls snapshots that whetted appetites for more among the men of science and the men of pseudo-science, because either way you look at it, there are some remarkable features on this frosty globe named after the son of Uranus and father of the fathers of mankind, Prometheus and Atlas. Iapetus is Granddad to everyone on Earth.

This story is appealing to amateur geologists like me who got their start by breaking fingernails trying to pry apart factory-built earth globes along that equatorial ridge to see what was inside. Iapetus has one of those ridges, on the equator no less, and we’ve got a guy here named Richard Hoagland who’s sure it’s as hollow as those tin classroom globes.

One busy photographer everywhere in Saturn’s neighbourhood, Cassini is on a another sentimental journey as it returns to this specific moon: Iapetus was first spotted in 1671 by Jean-Dominique Cassini, France’s chief astronomer, after whom the shutterbug was named.

The 2004 pictures were tantalising but still too remote. Next autumn’s visit will produce images 100 times better.

For NASA, it looks like a lot of unusual volcanic activity was once going on there. For Richard Hoagland, who noisily continues to insist that the infamous “Face on Mars” is man-made, it looks like a lot of construction activity took place on Iapetus. His claims are amusing almost to the point of hilarity, but it’s wonderful to see how his mind works. Only the commercial aspect of his website stops me from saying, “Okay, Rich, let’s see more.” There’s more!