Our devoted reader writes:
I must send you one more lovely spam subject from "Tonya Kessler":
Re: Go swim he scent frivolity
A classic indeed.
I'm getting quite fond of this algorithm; here are
some recent keepers:
"Edmund Samuel": Re: his have a hereinafter
"Wendi Buck": With have by club
"Kaitlin Wong": Re: With drink do handball
"Kelsey Oliver": Be want of sartorial conspiratorial
"Tracy Marks": On eat of greengage giant
"Lakeisha Cano" : He turnon by telephotography downstairs
The contributions from Kaitlin and Lakeisha are my
favorites (although I think Tracy's has the most
hidden depths).
So I got some email from the Human Right Campaign about their
"How Out Are You?" quiz.
So I went over to take it ("But, um," said the little daughter when
I told this story at dinner, "you're not gay?"; I said "yeah, I just
thought it'd be fun to take the quiz"; my kids think I'm strange),
and it turns out that if you don't fill in all the information on
the quiz form, it says:
Ooops! You didn't complete all the fields!:
First Name is required.
Last Name is required
Zip Code is required.
Email is required.
I thought that was hysterically funny; I wonder if the
next page says "Well, you're at least out enough to give
your name and zip code and email to random Web pages!".
Maybe it's some satirical postmodern thing.
Speaking of postmodern, a reader suggests
this
odd little film
("Therefore a small victory on my part").
Game Over Dept:
The
hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a
teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts
of the Bible are not actually true.
Nice to get that cleared up.
Do You
Play Sims 2? Have Great Stories about Your Sims Game?
Hey, if MTV is interested, it must be important!
(You're spared Sims news today, because the site that I've been
posting stories to is down for maintenance.)
Updates here may continue to be sparse for the next week or so;
lots of deadlines and things coming up ("dated material enclosed").
More extreme
need.
I think "this is the kind of thing that armies should be trained to
deal with, rather than that war and killing stuff."
And I think "we need to make those people better off, so their houses
and schools are harder to collapse".
And I think "we have to stop being so vulnerable to atom-things."
And I think about my kids.
So there's this guy?
And he has this extremely rockin' website,
and he like does radio
commentaries on NPR and stuff, and now he's written
a novel
that's actually being published on atoms and stuff,
and I've talked to him sometimes and actually met him once,
and I now have a copy of this novel that he's signed
and in the front of which he's written (inter alia):
Enough with the Sims already!
Is that cool, or what?
An actual radio talking-person and published novelist and generally
rad person complaining about my weblog!
I'm so proud.
So I mentioned the other day this online plague that I'd logged
previously, but it actually looks like I didn't log it previously
(I'd just talked about it in "email"), so here we are:
Plague in World of Warcraft.
Apparently
there's a plague spreading in World of Warcraft.
Heres the skinny:
Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul'Gurub.
Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a
debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers
and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have
brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside
of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population
including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have
gotten so bad that you can't go into the major cities without getting
the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die).
GM's even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players
kept escaping the quarentine and infect other players.
("Debuff" is WoW jargon for a kind of spell, and "instance" is
WoW jargon for (basically) a place in the virtual world.)
Wild.
Talks broke down today between the International Atomic
Energy Agency, the United Nations Nanotechnology Commission,
and the Turing Agency.
(I've also got this idea for a story where the universe is suddenly
replaced by basically a text BBS; but I'm thinking of saving it for
November.)
Listening to Amos's "The Beekeeper"
again,
I wondered if there was a story behind the bizarre "Drivin' in my Saab"
lyric, so of course I went to the Web and while I didn't find any
explanations in terms of underhand co-op advertising details or
anything, I did find
a
good review of the album (and of Amos's career in general), with which
my main disagreement is that I like "Hoochie Woman"
(as did another
review I found); and here's
another useful one.
I also found at least
one
review that didn't really like her previous albums, but did have some
nice (if condescending) stuff to say about this one.
And that was fun.
From here,
a Quote o' the Day:
"The discovery
of the moon Gabrielle means Xena has at least
enough mass to keep a satellite".
And from
nearby,
some interesting
historical
and ideological background on Wonder Woman.
(One of the most interesting things being that there is historical
and ideological background on Wonder Woman).
From Mini-AIR:
Several bottles
of the suspect shampoo were provided by
the manufacturer for study. The first time a bottle was
opened resulted in a discharge approximately 1.5 inches in
length from the shampoo to the metallized film cap seal.
A reader writes:
Herewith, my faves from this week so far:
from Annukka Salcido: "re: Narcissa diversiform"
from Rene Koenig: "that type it parsnip"
*8) My favorite spam name this week was
"Shripati Strong".
We should send all these names to Maxis for TS2 (Hi, Paul!).
We recorded lots and lots of spam subjects from this algorithm:
Re: Maredudd misanthropical
Re: Ljubica sightless
Re: Tiziana fivefold
Re: Sindre prosthesis
Re: Akseli uncritical
Re: Sanjit misconstruction
Re: Laurinda matrix
Re: Sergius nearsightedness
Re: Yolanda bicycling
Re: Armelle straining
Re: Heulog besiege
Re: Philadelphia grouser
Re: Genoveffa assure
Re: Yolanda bicycling
Which isn't bad.
We also got a few that looks like other algorithms:
Of explain go burgess
Re: In use in airmail
blqzon caycerous lqjm
My read no lachrymose
Of dance as establish closed
Re: Or accept he sector concertina
Re: Albert Beaubien Mqeds
Constanta Suiter Medks
I go do yew
I suspect that "In use in airmail" and "I go do yew" (I go, do you?)
are just delightful accidents.
