Kafka-esque tire credit card

I get a lot of emails that aren’t for me. Dozens every day. I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill spam but rather emails where someone has either deliberately or accidentally entered my email address instead of their own when signing up for a product or service.

Predictably, most of these are X-rated dating sites where the person in question doesn’t want to use their real identity. In the same category are car sales signups (the people selling these cars don’t give up easily, I can tell you).

More baffling are those when it’s a personal financial thing. These people seem to genuinely think my email is their email.

The great majority of these sites allow me to unsubscribe, but a few just won’t.  These tend to be the ones with the greatest volume of follow-up emails.  The logic of these applications is obviously flawed: any unverified email address can be used to sign up; yet in order to unsign-up this email, you have to prove you are the person who erroneously entered your email address (which you obviously can’t do!).

In a few cases I’ve had to log in to the person’s account on the porno site and change the email address. But until today, even the worst offenders have at least had a contact email so I can manually ask someone to sort it out.

The email below from Good Year credit cards offers me nothing!

The links all ask me to log in. I can’t reset the password without the full credit card number and the last four digits of the person’s social security number. All contact has to take place by phone. I bravely called the international number. I was told ‘Call back during normal office hours’. They didn’t say what these were.  Agonisingly, there’s one link in the email that does take me to an options page where I don’t have to log in. But the only option is to remove certain information from the emails.

Inevitably I just have to mark these emails as spam.

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Hey companies – how about you do a simple confirm opt-in before taking someone’s email address as gospel!

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Sound of the summer

Great instrumental break around 1:30…

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Swinging

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Telstar in German by Camillo

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Off Shore

I never knew this existed. I always wanted to write lyrics myself so the credit could be Diamond/Perl.

This is a really lovely version.  Other favourites are below (note – the Santo and Johnny clip here has a ton of compression and is inferior to my crackly vinyl!)

Here’s what’s apparently the original – from 1953. I had wrongly taken the sound-effects version from 1959 (from the LP Subliminal Sounds on ABC) to be the original. This one is really lovely.

There’s just something pleasantly winsome about the tune that pleases me.

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Sad song

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Slowdive

Saw Slowdive two nights running with my old friend Mark.

They still had it!  Really lovely feelgood factor in the room. Delighted for them and all that.

The second show at the Village Underground was rammed with people and slightly less fun. Sounded great though.

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Marathon -no

I hurt my knee and couldn’t do it.  Next year though.

Doing the Hackney Half next month instead.

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Julia Brightly

I wrote this piece to commemorate our work with Julia as a producer.

Terrible shock. We won’t forget her.

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The London Marathon 2014

Let’s do this!

(I’m over-reaching slightly, yes, but if I don’t do it now I probably never will…)

I’m running in aid of Health Poverty Action
http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/JonnyPerl

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