26 Jan 2008
Yet More SPAM from the Insane Asylum
SPAM

Once more the efficacy of my SPAM blockers has been called into question, and I have received SPAM From the Insane Asylum. This one did have a dead link somewhere it in - not reproduced here, but otherwise no sales pitch.

At 7am, this was nearly enough to short circuit my brain.

Goedendag,

Of course, is that his is that pure felicity of it was not for fame, nor for wealth, nor from handed the two dollar note and the three ones by means of that tree, a hundred and five of them pacify thyself. having said this, o lord of men, nearly human. Through the underbrush the trunk tell him that aswatthaman has been slain in battle form. The evidence should be whether the defendant fire (called bhrig) and hence he came to be called friend who is of a righteous disposition, when.

07:45 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

25 Feb 2007
More SPAM from the Insane Asylum

SPAMIn the process of checking out the renewed efficacy of my SPAM blockers, I happened across another for my (sort of) series I call SPAM From the Insane Asylum. No sales pitch of any sort - just random "musings". And this one's a dilly:

Archive, nipple slip laquo illegal farewell Stacy, Keibler.

English deutsch espaol franais. Wordall wordsexact phrase main, videophoto essayrent duestars.

Chests stomachs rearends take pick!

Dennis Quaid after few, break career.

Mail registrar sga directory viking code vikingweb general alumni. Personal only rights reserved copyright, sign.

Puke smack celluloid vinyl rag concrete.

Steven Spielberg Sylvester Stallone. Rolled, yorkphoto essaystars fill, potters, madonna, maggie lined potter?

Gets, Viacom shows auctions feuds justice fall fashions?

Guru preview sing goodbye wrapup, opens at. Logan, Lerman Virginia Madsen Karel, Roden Billy. Begins Mr., online Alexander?

Add centre, topics shear madness mane, issue identified. Digan quiero verte solo te vete!

Kinda like Walt Whitman meets Allen Ginsberg over a steaming cup of LSD...

11:06 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

28 Oct 2006
SPAM Chatter
SPAMEvery once in a while I scan my SPAM traps to make sure that I've not caught a live one, so to speak. I hardly ever find legit emails in there, but every once in a while I run across a piece of junk that's, well, interesting.

This one isn't from Planet Dyslexia, because the grammar, spelling and word order are all correct. It seems to be from the insane asylum but it's a lot more cogent than other such missives, and it included an inline image that was pitching Viagra so it was in fact trying to sell something.

So I'm inventing a new category - Chatter SPAM. It greatly resembles the output of a chatterbot - it can certainly make you look twice, but there's no way this would pass a Turing Test. Here's the bit that piqued my interest:

When a statesmanlike eggplant hibernates, an inferiority complex of a warranty trembles. The hairy crank case dances with an alleged sheriff. Sometimes the nearest anomaly leaves, but an anomaly near the spider always usually caricatures a garbage can! Most people believe that a line dancer seeks a temporal hydrogen atom, but they need to remember how ridiculously a smelly cashier daydreams.

In fact, given the format, I'd wager a guess that this was generated by something akin to Racter, which was an absolutely fascinating bit of code. I worked with one of the authors of Racter in the late 80's, adapting it for use on a bulletin board system as "entertainment", going so far as to pipe it's output into a variation of Eliza, the "AI" program that aped a psychologist. That was interesting - the good doctor crashed and burned in short order!

But of course, all of that was long before the Curse of SPAM swamped the Net - when you could still use Usenet, and new emails were placed directly into your inbox. The good old days, indeed.

11:33 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

05 Mar 2006
SPAM from Planet Dyslexia

SPAMOne of my least favorite topics is SPAM - but sometimes it's so weird that you just have to say something back. Or about. If you don't, you'll just run screaming from the room in abject terror of the mental powers, or rather, the lack thereof, of the folks that craft this crap. Are they really human?

All too, it would seem, according to Mary Beth Crain. She has some interesting thoughts on the origin of missives that I've described as SPAM From The Insane Asylum:

I have decided that spam is actually gibberish from the evil planet Dyslexia. The Dyslexians send cryptic, backwards and upside-down looking messages on weird, sinister sounding subjects like “arsenate disastrous madeira adrenaline fringe,” “philadelphia not matchmaker or vorticity,” “do live no bunkered autoeroticism,” “the doralynn it reek,” “it ask no tumultuous intern consult” and “was wakeup he yaw!”

And after you've stopped laughing you'll find her essay becomes rather poignant - a rarity in this day and age of grossness and slapstick passing as humor. She does the tradition of Jonathan Swift proud: she really gets the intimate connection between humor and pathos, and exploits it to the hilt in this very well done essay.

Nothing for Something: Beware the siren call of spam.

(link) [SOMA Review]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

28 Jul 2005
SPAM From The Insane Asylum

I have some pretty good SPAM filtering in place, but every once in a while something gets through that I instinctively feel should have been caught. I say "instinctively feel" because most of it has none of the characteristics of "normal" SPAM - no links to websites, phone numbers or street addresses. No hidden GIF images to track your address. Sometimes an address that looks legit: not HotMail, Yahoo! or AOL. Quite often the sales pitch is so thoroughly hidden as to be indiscernible: other times, as seen below, it's kinda obvious what they're trying sell, but it's never stated in anything resembling coherence.

I sometimes fancy that this is really inmate therapy at some hidden hideaway for the terminally weird. I know that my brain felt throughly scrambled after I read this one:

Radio 8WL News: Amusing Reading

Since around age 18 to present day, I have had dreams about being pregnant, giving birth and caring for small infants. Some are bland, yet lucid, others are surreal, half-remembered. Rooted in the knowledge that both biological clocks (for puberty, waking up, etc.) and dreams consist of electrochemical activity in the brain, I suggested that dreams about babies could be a by-product, not of a repressed subconscious desire to procreate, but of interacting impulses in a woman's grey matter. My theory requires the concession that another theory about a female reproductive biological clock actually exists - not proven as far as I know. I'm not a neuropsychologist or scientist or any other professional interested in gathering empirical data so the theory died with that paper. But I remember it every time I have a baby dream - like I did last night. Can I let you in on a secret? Remember: you never know what's around the corner until you look...

It's official.
Adobe has purchased Macromedia.
They will now be
a massive player
in the publishing software industry,
capable of competing with Microsoft.
Is this what it takes?
Fighting a humongous corporation
with a mega company?
It does make sense.
Years of protest and boycotts
by lefties, techies
and generally disgruntled users
have failed miserably
in their quest
to make Microsoft
an insignificant
(or even markedly less noticeable)
market force.

But it makes me sad -
not one week after I'd just
been so impressed by Adobe.

Enjoy a better love life
for both you and your partner.
Bring a smile to time!
Clarinet!
Let me introduce you
Barbarian -
...THE VIBRATING RING!!

It's the latest craze to sweep the world
and people just can't get enough!
It's safe, easy-to-use and so cheap,
you'll want isochronous or cumulate 10!!!
It's comfortable design means
that it's not too invasive
or awkward to use
and it will expand to
fit ANY size!
tallyho for data.

So what is this VIBRATING RING.
Well I'm back for another installment.
If you are in the media business
then you may already know
what the title means.
Arrhenius!
Vibrating tickler stimulates her!
Here is the state AP report for your reading!
hitting the RIGHT spot!
malaria!
EVERYTIME!
Not only will the firm grip
make him stay
harder
for tenured teamwork thereupon.
Longer!
It will give her
those multiple pleasures
she's only read about!

Geochemical but hacksaw ...
Bridesmaid but Don ...
Don't wait for it!
Get your VIBRATING RING today!

I did however learn the system and getting better, my legs got to working correct and my ears adjusted to the scanners once again.

All I added to the above was line breaks to fit the native cadence - every other word and punctuation mark is as received...

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link