
I screwed up big time today. I got hoist by my own petard. Huh? I got what? What exactly does that mean?
Well, a “petard” is a small bomb, a container full of gunpowder used to blow open locked gates or fortified doors or walls. If you are “hoist by your own petard,” you get blown up — lifted off your feet, or hoist — by your own bomb, and you have no one to blame but yourself.
So what did I do to get hoist by my own petard? My Fandango’s One-Word Challenge today was “essay.” All well and good, right? Well, not so much, actually. I checked my spam and trash folders a few minutes ago and much to my chagrin, all comments and pingbacks to my FOWC with Fandango post today went directly into my trash folder!
Why was that happening? Simple. Late last year I started receiving tons of spam from people offering to write essays that I could buy. I ended up adding the word “essay” in my blocked comments list. Thus, anytime the word “essay” appeared in a comment on one of my posts, it bypassed spam and went directly to trash. So when I used the word “essay” as my prompt word today, all of your comments containing that word went to trash.
And that’s the sad story of how I was hoist by my own petard today.
I have tried to go through my trash folder and restore and approve all of those wrongly trashed comments and pingbacks, but I may have missed some. Sorry about that.
By the way, a lot of spam has showed up today containing the word “kratom.” Does anybody know what that is?