Well, starting out, let me just say that I no longer have a "catch-all" e-mail address at JayceLand.com.

When I first signed up with my hosting provider Dreamhost they offered this as a feature: any e-mail addressed "@jayceland.com" would go to the catch-all account. It was a great thing and I used it a lot. Every time I'd buy something online or sign up on a band's e-mail list I'd create a unique address (based on a pattern using the name of the store or band.)

It's no secret to programmers that you can create e-mail message that has a false return-address header. It's kind of like putting a fake return-address on a postal letter. However, there was this illusion of authority about it — every e-mail program provided correct information, and why would you ever send someone a message that they couldn't reply to? Postal mail also has a cancellation stamp that indicates from where the message originated, and as far as the analogy goes, electronic messages have a similar mark. When you send an e-mail, it goes to a computer at the other end of your phone/DSL/cable-modem/Internet connection. A header is added that says "Received:" and the name of your service provider, then the message gets sent along a route to the next computer toward the destination and that machine does the same ... sort of like the way international mail gets stamped.

It's possible that advertisers could use the postal system to send messages — paper messages could be sent for impotency drugs and small-cap stocks that increase in price when hammered with arbitrary activity. Such senders would not want their real address to be known because a tiny percentage of people would be interested in the offer but many more would never want a message again, so they could simply leave off the return address information, or falsify it. Regardless, this never happened because the cost of sending such advertising would be prohibitive.

Enter electronic mail, and the cost suddenly drops from 15 cents each to 15 cents for a hundred-thousand messages. However, it's easy to filter messages with no return address and throw them away. So spammers started making up e-mail addresses: asdf@foodoosoo.com for instance. However, it's easy then to determine that there's no such address as "foodoosoo.com" and filter based on that. So now they go after legitimate domain names — jayceland.com, for instance, and make up "dave@jayceland.com" or "aaaa@jayceland.com" as the return address. Then they send out a million messages to people all over the world and of those, say 1% are invalid and for each invalid address, 1% of those machines are dumb enough to try and return the message to the sender — dave@jayceland.com — even though the "Received" trail doesn't add up.

So for several weeks, I was getting something like 30 legitimate e-mails a day mixed in with 2,000 bounced messages that I never sent. The trouble was the catch-all address would forward them all to me, so my mail program was trying to sift through and figure out which were junk, leaving me about 200 a day that it thought were legitimate.

I finally went through and wrote a script to cull the 634 e-mail addresses I've used so I could turn off the catch-all but forward all 634 correct addresses to me. Suddenly my spam-count has dropped to about 200 a day with 1 that doesn't get caught in the junk-mail filter.

So that's what I did on Wednesday ... in between shopping, baking, preparing food, and preparing the house for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving, by the way, went perfectly — quite a feat considering this was the first time I had it at my house. I got up around 7 and prepared the turkey. I set up a stock to cook the wings and neck for a stock for gravy and got the bird cooking. When chopping up the giblets for the gravy, I thought the liver looked healthier than others I'd seen — maybe that free-range, farm-raised, antibiotic-free bird I paid $4/pound for from Stonewood Farm (105 Griswold Ln., Orwell, VT) actually was better, meat-wise, than a cheaper cage-raised, antibiotic-loaded bird. It definitely helped flavor-wise that it was shipped refrigerated rather than frozen and was less salty than turkeys I've had.

Ali came over with her greens-and-artichoke casserole. We got going preparing broccoli, potatoes, gravy, rolls, cranberry sauce. My parents arrived with stuffing [dressing, if you prefer] just as I was about to start making cheese sauce for the broccoli. We ate right away and everything came out perfect. Afterward my Mom and Dad headed back home and my friend Perette "Peri" Barella came over for the after-supper get-together. Considering how well everything went, I might even do the whole thing again.

Friday night I met up with Ali and her friend Stacie to see The Lobster Quadrille perform their last show before hiatus at The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) The show was quite impressive — one of their best — and I dusted off the camera and got some pictures. Of course, this was a doubly-unusual show in that it was on a Friday night and just after Thanksgiving, so the house music was blaring in the bar (like on Fridays) and the place was full of people returned-home gawking (like around the holidays.)

On Monday I found Jazz@Rochester which is a blog written by a guy named Gregory Bell. It was one of my hopes about JayceLand that someone else would start a website where they listed events based on their own tastes and made commentary about it as well — exactly what Jazz@Rochester purports to be. I added a link to it on the right side but had to remove a couple: the great resource Monroe County Bars is apparently gone as is the Flickr page for Rochester Music Photos.

Anyway, that night my old friend Sondra Carr came to town with her kids. She took a break from them and we went to Lux Lounge (666 South Ave.) for a few drinks. On Tuesday we took her kids and went to her old home in Palmyra to clean up some of the things she left (determining what to sell, what to keep, and what to throw away) then returned to a home-cooked meal by my sweetheart Ali. We watched some movies; Ali left to get some sleep, but the rest of us stayed up late. Wednesday we all got up around 4:30 a.m. to get to the airport by 5 so they could catch their flight back home.

On an unrelated note, I think I've been mistaken about my philosophies. Let me start with an example: my essays on this website will never be published by any mass-media outlet. That is, the way I write about events like The High Falls Film Festival and fail to cover the fundraising, or that I openly dislike Milestones (170 East Ave.) will prevent me from ever being directly published in a media outlet that relies on advertising. It may seem simple to change just a "few minor things here and there" to make it palatable to such publications, but I find that unacceptable because if the changes are so minor, then they should be permitted rather than removed. It's my theory that there is a closed system that maintains itself by deliberately sanitizing media output to encourage maximum advertising effectiveness to ensure its survival. This "system" works by subtly influencing people's decisions — for instance, I highly doubt I could find a single publisher that would fire a writer because they fail to adequately cover fundraising, yet somehow every event has a formulaic coverage that includes the names of the sponsors.

Common usage of one's "own self-interest" imply that people will act in a manner that is amoral — they will kill someone for money if the bullet is cheaper than their potential gain. What I'm talking about, though, is total self-interest: that a society that kills for money is no society at all and therefore undesirable to any individual. But more importantly [and I'm running out of well-worn theory here, so bear with me] is that in times of abundance, it is unnatural to harm others. It is simply a hardwired, primitive part of our brain that is the very thing that allowed us to live in societies in the first place. That is, how could we have tolerated one another in cities if our instincts said to bash someone's head in to steal their food?

I am going out on a limb (but with confidence) that everyone who reads this, when encountering someone they don't already know, gives the benefit of the doubt and would initially treat the stranger in a civil manner rather than in a vicious one. It's not because you think you should behave that way, but because it's at the core of your nature to do so. If we truly believe that, then selfishness isn't evil. Any individual living selfishly is happier than someone living selflessly, so I can only conclude that a society that respects the selfish desires of the individual is better than one that doesn't.

• Qian li zou dan qi (Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, at The Little) - A father tries to reunite with his dying son but his son refuses to see him, so instead he works to complete the documentary his son was working on.
• Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (at The Little) - A woman from a wealthy family becomes a respected photojournalist by seeking images of marginalized people. A nearly fictional account of a real photographer.