Day: August 26, 2005

Okay, it was a little funnier when I read it out of context on Boing Boing:

He came up with the idea after his sister Sarah complained that Elvis was keeping her awake at night by playing for hours on his exercise wheel.

But the article’s still missing the important “his pet hamster, Elvis” part. Personally, I think it’s much more amusing to think it was Elvis Presley (or Costello…or Mitchell…or, heck, even Duran) in the exercise wheel that was keeping Peter’s sister awake at night.

No apologies. The Friday Random 10:

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole
“Feel Good Inc.” – Gorillaz
“Waterloo” – ABBA
“Stagger Lee” – Lloyd Price
“One Way or Another” – Blondie
“Muskrat Love” – America
“Right Place, Wrong Time” – Dr. John
“Ball and Chain” – Social Distortion
“The First Cut is the Deepest” – Cat Stevens
“Woodstock” – Joni Mitchell

It started out so well. I like the ABBA (we all have our guilty pleasures) and even some Cat Stevens, but that, the America and the Mitchell are only there as holdovers from my Cover Songs project.

Some more spam, this one “with love” from “monique”:

come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this property; and if anybody
my father’s great barns; and he played his part so well comes into his
hands, he will make a different sort of place of it,

Apparenly, that’s from Persuasion by Jane Austen. (Hey, I was an English major, but I’ve still only read one Austen book.) Weird. Are they hoping this filler will persuade me to click their link, even though I know it’s spam? Even though I don’t know a “monique” and, even if I did, she wouldn’t be sending me tiny chunks of Austen and clearly spam-filled links?

And this I don’t understand: why do spammers even use filler to begin with? Why do they use filler that’s just random pieces like this? Do they have such a limited grasp of the English language that they don’t realize cutting and pasting mid-sentence — mid-punctuation even — isn’t fooling anybody? Do they think, “Oh ho, if I slap in some in some random 19th-century prose, nobody will be able to resist my advertisement for Viagra rolexes! Muhahahaha!”

I just don’t get it. I mean, most spam is just garbage — a link or an advertisement. The ones that try to pretend they’re something else just tend to underline the fact that they’re spam.