Category Archives: SuperDick

June 17, 2012, 12:39 pm

Nixon and the Historians: Watergate Anniversary Break-In Edition

The Watergate Plumbers. Photo Credit: Wally McNamee/Corbis, via History Commons

Forty years ago today five men were sitting in a District of Columbia jail. They were accused of having broken into Democratic National Committee headquarters, a suite of rented rooms in the Watergate office complex which turned out to contain little of value for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (known, incredibly, as CREEP.) But the botched burglary, and most importantly the administration’s determination to cover it up, made history. In 1974, Richard Milhouse Nixon became the first American president to resign from office.

Coordinated by former national security operatives G. Gordon Liddy and Howard E. Hunt, the event was ultimately revealed as one of many illegal operations coming out of the White House. These…

October 28, 2007, 8:41 pm

Conversations With My Spam File

By Claire Potter

When you have several different email accounts, you get different kinds of invasive email — otherwise known on the Mac as Junk, and on most commercial email servers as Spam. I have also noticed, since returning from the Sunshine State, where I did a whirlwind four day tour of relatives, that several of my posts have been hit by something I am told is a Spambot — something that trolls around looking for blogs to invade, and that leaves ambiguous posts that must be intended to entice people to click on the fake blog identity and give up their IP addresses. The spambot’s comments say things like “Wonderful post!” and “Great blog!” Little do they know that on an academic blog, this gives them away immediately — what academic do you know who can confine hirself to 3 words or less in a blog comment? Huh?

But the spam also differs from account to account. What I have noticed is that on my…