I just can't help it

I've been an aspiring detective most of my life. As a child I thrived on Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden and The Hardy Boys.

As an adult a co-worker got me hooked on Agatha Christie and I own her entire set of paperbacks, as well as her autobiography. I was never much interested in autobiographies before, but I loved this one and now I look for autobiographies of people that I think are/were interesting. No second-hand biographies, thank you - I want to hear it from the 'horse's mouth'. Dame Agatha was one fascinating lady and I loved reading her life story.

Another group of detective stories I enjoyed was the Perry Mason series. I never liked the TV show, it was too serious and dramatic for me. I did enjoy the books, although lawyers and the courtroom really are not my preferred arena for detective stories.

I also enjoyed Bertie Wooster and Jeeves - not really detective stories, but I liked to follow along with Jeeves in order to get Bertie out of his predicaments.

I flexed my 'detective skills' in many ways. I solved logic problems by the hour. I learned computer programming which required days and nights of debugging code. Sometimes I'd solve the problem in my sleep, waking up in the middle of the night and going over to the computer to try out the 'solution', and more often than not, it was right, or it got me on the right path to the solution.

My grandparents were always calling upon my detective skills to help them find stuff in their house, or to work through a situation and put the pieces together. They claimed I was the family detective, and I wore that distinction with pride.

I still have a curious nature, and I still question things that are illogical to my way of thinking. No, it couldn't have happened that way - it's not logical - this is probably more how it happened.

This morning I was looking at a map that showed the location of my readers and up popped Japan. Hmmmm...the one spammer I've had on my site was spamming me in Japanese. So I zoomed into the location...


And I find that the spammer must be a machine just sitting out there in the mountains. I can't see a village or anything...


Probably an automated program, or someone sitting elsewhere working the computer via remote control. Seeing this lonely dot out there in the middle of nowhere brings up all kinds of questions - is it a spy station? The detective instincts just can't help being curious, but common sense tells me I probably should just drop it and leave well enough alone. Maybe I've been reading too many detective novels!