See, this is what happens when two nerds get married and have little boys.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Can you solve... The Mystery of the Tandoori Grill Spammers?

In case you've missed it, we've had a lively discussion going on in the Tandoori Grill Post. I've gotten a bit tired of it, but I think we can still have some fun with it by turning it into a mystery. Put on your detective hats fellow bloggers! Post your theories and hypothesis in the comments for that post -- we have over 40 comments so far, and lots of evidence.

We've got a few interesting characters (maybe they're the same person), and a few mysteries to solve:
Who is flooding our blog with grammatically incorrect reviews of Tandoori Grill?
Are Beautiful Southern Arizona (BSA) and Tandoori Grill the same people?
Who is 'matthew' and what does he REALLY do?

I don't really know what the whole story is, so we may never know the real truth. Get your blog readers to chime in! We might as well get some new friends out of this whole shindig. I started Google Analytics on the post yesterday afternoon, so when we're all done I'll post the map global visits, as well as and the best hypothesis.

If that's not enough to get you excited, I'll even make it a contest. I'll try to come up with a cool prize for the most exciting, interesting, elaborate explanation of who's who, and what the motives of each player are. I suppose the awesomeness of the prize probably depends on the awesomeness of the explanation, so have fun, and go crazy. I know we have some creative readers -- show us what you've got!

4 comments:

JakieWakie said...

James and Denise, I feel like I need to apologize. When I made that blog post about Indian restaurants in Provo, I included a link to your blog about it, and I guess that helped rise you to enough fame to get e-attacked by this person.

This Matthew guy is a DOUCHE. For someone completely unconnected to the Tandoori Grill, he sure is intensely concerned about their reputation. So concerned, in fact, that he'll repeatedly visit a blog that feels is "Communist" and will persist in making ad hominem attacks on you and ignore any of your attempts to have an intelligent, adult conversation about it. Clearly, he's not AT ALL connected to Tandoori Grill and BSA.

As for the connection between them all, I'll need some time for a good, contest-worthy explanation.

James said...

Jakiewakie, not your fault -- I like it when people link to our site. It happens rarely enough, but we found some new blogger pals in the process... How did you find our blog, btw?

I'm actually a MS student in Computer Science, going to work for Amazon in a couple weeks, so social networks are an interesting thing to me. The whole review/spam/matthew/BSA thing has been a great chance to poke around in a small social network; see how they grow (finding your blog), combat spammers, etc. It's actually an interesting problem, so I've used it as a chance to think about what I'd do if I was running Digg or a community forum, and how to grow blog readership. I'm a curious person, so things like this are just one big playground for me. A bit of a pain sometimes (BSA started copying comments to the rest of our blog that I have to clean up) but overall, I'm not bothered too much by it.

Perhaps we can meet you and your wife for lunch somewhere before we head out to Seattle.

JakieWakie said...

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply--- the internet at my home is down, so I only have access while at work.

I found your blog when I was writing that post about ethnic food in Provo, and I googled "Tandoori Grill Provo" and I saw a link to your "Don't Eat" post. I decided to add a link to it, and it wasn't long before our friend BSA threw in his/her two cents. And then about fifty cents on yours.

When do you leave for Seattle?

Oh btw--- on my blog, I recommended El Gallo Giro on University Avenue because I had heard good things. We went last night, and I thought I'd let you know that I'm retracting that recommendation.

Andrea said...

So, we think that Matthew and BSA are the same person with multiple personality disorder. Matthew gets really defensive when people don't like the BSA side of him - There is also a third personality, Tandoori Grill, who is the owner of the beloved restaurant. Because the "Grill" is run by the 3rd personality, BSA can claim that he is not "affiliated" with the Tandoori Grill even though it is he who owns it.

Triple P (as he will be known from here on - triple p for 3 personalities) went on a lifelong quest to find his long lost grandmother. She was the only living relative who posessed the secret recipes to his heart. When he found her in India, after searching for many moons, he was too late. He found her dying and with her last breath, she told him where the secret recipes were hidden.

In her younger years, she worked as the head chef at Helaman Halls. When they found her expressing her love for Donny Osmond through spray paint on the walls of the tunnel to Helaman Halls, she was fired and asked never to return. As she was whisked away kicking and screaming, she protested that her right to free speech had been violated. As she was being deported, she realized that she didn't even have a chance to retrieve her recipes from their hiding place in the catacombs beneath BYU.

And so the story goes, the Tandoori Grill was named after that legendary woman, Grandma Sana Tandoori. To insult her food is to insult her legacy. And Triple P has vowed never to let that happen, even if it means scouring every blog and exploiting his "right to free speech". After all, he came all the way from Arizona to build it in Provo - the place where Sana Tandoori longed to return.