A perceptive fellow on the Google Webmasters forum noticed the following bit of fun in my source code that looked like this: Thinking it was a result of an injection exploit like this person found, I went over all my WP files (plus my theme directory) with a fine-toothed comb, but found nothing. A further bit of digging turned up other Wordpress users who were encountering the exact same problem. The iframe code was inserted directly into posts, but by what means, nobody seems to be sure. I will—shamefully—admit that both my WordPress admin and FTP passwords were pretty weak, and could have been brute-forced pretty easily. They’re much stronger now, and I’ve updated to WordPress 2.8, and the three posts here that contained the offending code have been cleaned. I haven’t seen any new malicious insertions since taking those steps, but I remain suspicious. If you see anything even remotely weird in the next couple of weeks here, let me know.
Argentine ants and gnats don’t bore into healthy fruit, and there was no trace of any larvae that might account for the beetles being the culprit (the mature ones being far too large to make the holes). I had no idea what was causing those initial punctures, until I saw this bug I’d never encountered before:
I took a few pictures and a short video over to the very helpful senior scientist Steve Heydon at the Bohart Museum of Entomology and he had the answer for me almost instantly: the “leaffooted bug”, or Leptoglossus, most likely to be specificically either L. clypealis or L. occidentalis, which apparently has very wide tastes and has arrived in my yard (or, perhaps, is simply in larger numbers this year; when I worriedly told Mr. Heydon I’d never seen the pest before he just shrugged and said, “it’s around”). Working at the University has its unique perks every so often. Now all I have to do is figure out how to keep the bastards out of the upcoming plum and apricot crops.
Granted, when a nation-state starts issuing threats of war, it is newsworthy. On the other hand, Kim Jong Il’s Glorious People’s Unicorn Fantasy Playland does this every week. The ultraparanoid DPRK sees everything that happens outside its borders as a “warlike act”, “hostile”, or otherwise unwarranted belligerency that their army is supposedly poised to smash at a moment’s notice. Ho hum. An American President could mention he’s switching his morning routine by putting his pants on his right leg first instead of his left, and North Korea would pitch a hissy fit over it. I’m not saying that they should be ignored militarily—U.S. and South Korean forces should definitely be on constant alert—but I’m tired of the press treating North Korean tantrums as politically meaningful. In that vein, just once I’d like to see the President, Secretary of State, or some foreign equivalent stand up in response to the latest bluster from Pyongyang and say “whatever, man. Either throw down or shut the fuck up. Seriously.”
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