Author Archives: Ben

Comment spam

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“I was very pleased to find this site. I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.”

I shouldn’t let it get to me but still I do. Comment spam. WHY??

Courtesy of “Oxygen Plant”, the above little gem popped up suddenly in the comments on my recent Wytham Woods post, at the end of a brief exchange on the virtues of the late Robert Holdstock. It’s not hard to spot the slightly bogus aura of the safely neutral praise, even for a conversation not about Robert Holdstock. And sure enough a quick Google search on the exact text produces a lot of results.

I have no intention of revealing where Oxygen Plant comes from – you can do your own Googling, if you like – but suffice it to say it really is from an oxygen plant: in fact, according to its site, “a Family owned professionally managed company incorporated in 1963 for manufacturing industrial gases.”

So I say again, WHY??

Their chairman “is considered as the pioneer and founder of air separation plant manufacturing in India. All other Companies manufacturing similar products like oxygen plant are using Designs & Technology Pioneered by him.”

But despite his obvious business and scientific acuity, he thinks the best way of drumming up business is to spam as many blogs as he can? Does anyone really think, well, I was going to hold fire on ordering that oxygen plant but now, goodness gracious me, I do believe I’ll splash out?

Gaaaaaaah.

10% off

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Looking for a good read to while away the summer break? The lovely folk at Lulu.com are offering 10% off Jeapes Japes, the collected short works of y.t. with added value editorial. They advise:
“Use coupon code SUMMERREAD305 at checkout and receive 10% off Jeapes Japes. Maximum savings with this promotion is $10. You can only use the code once per account, and you can’t use this coupon in combination with other coupon codes.”
I have no way of confirming this because self-purchases aren’t eligible but I have no reason to doubt it works …

Ben & the Saint in St Tropez

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I have a Google Alert set for my own name (there, I said it) which usually just provides a daily summary of eBay links to my books. Until yesterday:

http://www.saint-tropezimmobilier.com/news/Ben-Jeapes.html

“They’re talking about me in St Tropez?” I thought. Strangely … no.


What you get is page with the opening blurb from my Wikipedia page (yup, got one of those too) followed by a lot of guff about finding property in St Tropez. You can see from the URL that this is a specific web page named after me. So, someone – or more accurately, I suspect, something – has created it.

I would guess, without too much thought, that a hapless webbot roams Wikipedia, picking out the entries of individual people and creating a St Tropez page for them. At least, that was initial theory. However, that would suggest there must be a lot of them and when I did a web search based on this hunch I could only find one other Wikipedia entry that has had the same treatment:

http://saint-tropezimmobilier.com/news/Simon-Templar.html

Yes indeed, if my theory is true then the two people with Wikipedia entries judged most worthy of this treatment by our friend the webbot are Ben Jeapes and the Saint. To be quite honest, the bot may be out of a job soon.

Alternatively, I suppose it could be the work of a fan with similar taste to mine: I mean, I’m a fan of Ben Jeapes and Simon Templar, so why shouldn’t someone else be? The test of this theory will be whether pages like this appear dedicated to C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, Miles Vorkosigan, Terry Pratchett, the Doctor, Rumpole …

I hope it’s the George Sanders Saint because he was the best.