Like any blog, I get a bunch of spam in the comments. The following sample slipped through the very excellent Akismet spam filter and I’m so glad that it did. I thought it was just delightful and wanted to share it. Not quite delightful enough to “approve” it or share the links that this bot wishes to promote, just charming enough to post here, on a slow and rainy day.

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Isn’t that awesome? I am pleased for their harmonic feelings on the matter and grateful for their their wishes for success in my business dealings. Thanks SpamBot! You brought a smile to my day.

I’m about to expel a baby from myself, so I have decided to cut me some slack when I get totally obsessed with a notion for no reason. And so, with that in mind, I proudly present my latest fit:

Cute or HR?

We’ve all been there – in the office. And then someone says something that makes everyone kind of pause and think for a moment. You do the rapid calculation – weighing your relationship against both immediate context and overall environment. Then rub that up against your future prospects, workload, aversion to paperwork.

Maybe “rub up against” isn’t the phrase I want to use here.

But either way, this new site is an enormous amount of fun, and I’m just tickled by the response so far.

Please share your own Cute or HR moments, and/or vote on others already published. I strongly suggest that no identifying details be used.

Because a bad gift can be a beautiful thing, but doesn’t have to be,  here are a couple of sites I found that celebrate gifts that simply shouldn’t be.

Extremely festive shrunken head.

My family has one gift story that really shines. My great-uncle Irving owned a successful fruit importing business that required him to travel to South America frequently. When he returned from one of his trips, he gave my grandfather a wrinkled paper bag with something “for the girls.” Just picture their little faces when they opened up and found a couple of shrunken heads. I’m not sure if my aunts have yet fully recovered. You know, because there’s nothing a young girl wants more than grotesquely disfigured mummified human remains. Tell your uncle thanks, girls!

It’s the thought that counts, right?

Speaking of thoughts, my own include the hope that everyone’s having a warm and wonderful holiday, whether you’re celebrating or just relaxing at home because everything’s closed. You are welcome to share your holiday thoughts and tales of gifts gone bad (or very very right) below.

Bad Gift Emporium
This site lets users submit or even trade their worst-of gifts. Some of my favorites included the dead goldfish,

Regretsy
With thanks to Toxic for telling me about this little gem, this site is a collection of handmade horrors, and a great blend of the psychiatrically suspicious and the simply lazy.

Zazzle
The custom-printed gear shop gets in on the action, with a section of awful merchandise that someone thought was worth creating. Surely some of these joyless, cringe-inducing items were lovingly wrapped for friends and relatives. Practice shifting your “stunned disbelief’ face into one of pleasant surprise.

The Museum of Bad Art
It comes from the Boston suburbs, so you know it’s bad. I feel like they could have taken this farther, but I’m kind of a little bit in love with the Circus of Despair. Make sure you check out their gift shop, for some truly bad ideas.

Glitter Gone Bad
It’s kind of like occupational therapy, but somehow in the wrong order. From the hoof boots to the plush puke… I’d ask “why,” but am not sure that I really want to know.

Craftastrophe
When crafts go wrong on Craftastrophe, they go very, very wrong. Exhibit A: A felt recreation of Bella’s womb and fetus from the Twilight series. No, I’m not kidding. And yes, I wish I was. And that’s a fun one. Some of these other treasures will haunt your dreams.

The Ugly Sweater Store
As advertised, this site boasts a lot of ugly sweaters.

Mookie Gifts
When you don’t want to wait til after the holidays for your post-holiday letdown, there’s a whole lot of useless going on over at Mookie. If you need a senselessly elaborate contraption to keep you from accessing that bottle of wine Aunt Penelope gave you, this is the place.

Wonderfully Wacky
Nothing to see here. Nothing redeemable, anyway.

Now, let’s be clear here: The Slanket/Snuggie test was not my idea.

Exhibit A: Gizmodo
Jason here did a much more thorough investigation than I ever had any intention of suggesting to my fine testers, J&J. It’s a great review – and the fine folks over at Slanket liked it so much they put it on their homepage. Rock on.

And now people have been sending me things like the following:

• Snuggie Pub Crawl
• Warming to the Cult of the Snuggie
• “Cult” again, but now with more photo gallery…
• Snuggie to the Test
• Snuggish thing for two that makes me die a little inside
• Slanket vs Snuggie Grudge Match
• And on
• And on
• Good Lord, it Tweets

And honestly, I’m kind of mystified. I don’t know why all of this fleece devotion is being sent my way. Did I inadvertently give the impression that I lounge about the house all day swaddled in fleece from head to toe? Do I look cold to you? Would it be an improvement over my usual work attire? What are you all trying to say?

I gotta say, I still don’t get the appeal. But maybe that’s because testers J&J haven’t explained it to me yet.

And also, why is all of this press focused on the Snuggie? The Slanket seems to have been the first on the scene, and the reviews give the Slanket a firm lead. So I’m going to harass the fine Slanket people and see if their fearless leader would be kind enough to answer 7 Questions to run approximately concurrently with the Nutgraf review.

What would you like me to ask? Submissions welcome via e-mail and the comments field below.

Okay, it’s not quite game time. But I had to get the petri dishes off of my netvibes page; they were making me sick.

As promised a couple of weeks ago, I’ve awarded the Snuggie to a lovely reader who prevented a grisly tattoo misquote. Lovely reader (we’ll figure out a good nom-de-blogue later) has consented to review the Snuggie for posterity! So, in the name of scientific rigor, I’m ordering a Slanket for comparison purposes. Methodology will be discussed over cocktails next week, and then Battle Snuggie vs Slanket will commence.

A couple of startups (and a couple of layoffs) ago, Spouse worked with a lovely guy. Since they share a motherland, they had a couple of things in common. Recently, Andrey sent a link to this video about a little something he built in his spare time. Probably as a means of introducing his kids to the wonders of modern technology and how daddy brings home the bacon. Or borscht. Depending on how you look at it.

One of the reasons that I totally love the interwebs is because sometimes it drops, like little rays of productivity-killing sunshine, gems like this in your lap:

Thrillseekers hiJack-son train

And then, if you’ve been ever so good, and have cultivated wonderful friends who live hither and yon, one of them may come back to you with a fluffy cuddly bunny rabbit of love like this:

“Thriller” by 1,500-plus CPDRC inmates

Life is good.

Every so often, as a part of my day job, I have to run something through the very fine Google Language Tools translation to find out what the heck is happening on a particular Web page. I deal with language for a living, and it is such a fluid medium fraught with nuance (not often that you get to use nuance in a sentence… or in a parenthetical), that I cannot fathom what must go into that kind of translation software. But still, the results are usually just good enough for me to get a gist of content, enough to know if I need to go for a more formal translation. And sometimes you get a little gem like this:

Did you know how many there your clone?
It is time for revenge frigging broom …

The ellipsis were a part of the translation. I do love how it trails off ominously.