Hello everyone! It's Sunday morning. My sister told me yesterday that she is engaged to her boyfriend. Rather ironic, since both sisters-in-law have been dating their boyfriends longer than Rebecca and I have been dating -- and Abby and John got married last year and now Dave and Jennifer will get married, probably this fall.

My wife and I are going to go out to eat before going to church and I figured it was time to check my email. No legitimate emails, of course. But 30 pieces of spam since I last posted and that makes for 72 total.

I had to add a new category, completely blank, since two spammers were so completely incompetent they could not send even an advertisement. Also, there was one piece of spam that was porn as it had a picture of some girl's cleavage, but the ISO coding was so munged that I couldn't figure if it was Japanese or Chinese. I can usually tell the two apart by seeing the hiragana or katakana symbols in Japanese.

I've got a little side project, too. If any of the two souls reading this blog (I don't even think my mom reads it) can figure out anything about the French singer Danièle Dupré, let me know. I saw her singing on Youtube a few weeks ago. I thought she was attractive. My wife didn't have an opinion on that, but she (like me) loved the voice. I have another pic of her taken scanned from an EP cover I found for sale on Priceminister and will put it up as soon as I figure out how to post images.

Don't look on Wikipedia, I wrote that after a few hours of Googling. Yes, that's all I could find, even pages in French.) And the magazine cover on there? Yes, I spent $17 to get that (it was something like $16.50 when I placed the order. By the time the order cleared all the hoops, it was $17. Stupid exchange rates...) I ordered another magazine that claims to have an interview with her; it should be arriving any day now. It'll be interesting to see, basically, "what happened" to her. As far as the Interweb is concerned, she fell off the face of the Earth.

Now, she obviously wasn't a superstar on the level of the Platters (multiple #1 hits, etc.), but certainly a Eurovision performance would count as a Top Ten hit, warranting some page somewhere dedicated to her. (Look, for instance, what comes up when I look for the Bobbettes, who had essentially one big hit "Mr. Lee" and a few minor hits.) From what I can dig up, it seems she released several EPs on Polydor -- at least five -- so I figure she probably had a couple of songs reach the bottom of the French Top 40.

But my point is that I am slowly translating the article. It's a nice piece of fluff you'd expect from a radio/TV weekly (La Semaine Radiophonique, to be exact) from 11/19/1957.

I got about halfway through when I realized I probably should just type it all up in French first and save *THAT* as a file. Then, I can enlist the help of French scholars to understand idioms and alternate meanings of words ... and quickly cut and paste any references. BTW, Babelfish alone is useless, but I'm sure you already knew that. Wordreference seems potentially useful.

On to the spam count.

Free products 10 (21)
Male performance 3 (10)
Mortgage/loans 4 (8)
Low cost products 2 (8)
Porn 4 (6)
Stock tips 3 (5)
Other self-improvement 0 (4)
Meet women 1 (3)
Entirely blank 2 (2)
Casino/gambling 1 (2)
PayPal/eBay scams 0 (1)
419/money-based scams 0 (1)
Political spam 0 (1)

Sub-categories
Chinese 1 (2)
Japanese 1 (2)
Spanish 0 (2)
Undetermined Asian 1 (1)
Gender-inappropriate 0 (0)