I rarely even click on the damn stuff, but once in a while I get bored and see what kind of crap they’re peddling now. I gotta admit, though, that the spammers’ efforts to get through the filters by using real words and grammar are ingenious.
And sometimes hilarious. Here’s one I just got, wrapped around a graphic of an ad for herbal Viagra or something. Hell, I’ve read worse poetry:
I don’t get what he has against tuba players, though.
Weird. It’s like it takes wee snippets from random eBooks and slaps them together in some sort of vaguely conjugated language form. This:
is a snippet from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, taken right after “In all the worlds inhabited by […]” and before “[…] hyper-intelligent shades of the colour blue”
I just emptied my spam box though so I won’t have any significant quantity of inbox poetry for … oh, about an hour.
Speaking of literature, I think I once got a large chunk from a Jane Austen novel, reproduced verbatim. Can’t go back and check, I never save any. I practically never look at them, either, and if it weren’t for threads like this one would have no idea of the found poetry I’ve been missing.
The piece of spam is long gone, but I got one a couple of years ago that, rather than having whole paragraphs of machine-generated text, appeared to have words randomly insterted into text that otherwise described the product.
Thus, the spam, which was promoting penis enlargement, contained some exhortation about how impressed your girlfriend would be with your “massive chinchilla.”
My sisters and I have adopted “massive chinchilla” as the euphemism of choice. It has so much more panache than “dong.”
I’m rather fond of some of the Tolkien-inspired randomness I’ve got lately. Unfortunately, I don’t have an example to hand, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
And to think Robert Anton Wilson was advocating the “cut up” method of literary composition. Take a pre-existing text. Cut it into pieces. Throw them up into the air and stick them back together in whatever random order you pick them up. It looks like someone has invented an algorithm to do this to electronic text.
He heard the kitchen screen door bang shut and eased the wheelchair close enough to the window so he could remain in an angle of shadow and still peek out.
The first sweep of the axe did no more than knock the wind from him - this was really what he thought until he landed on the carpet smelling his own blood.
I want to make sure you dont want me to go back to town and get you a tape recorder, or maybe a special pair of writing slippers, or something like that.
He had thought she was putting on an editors hat - maybe even trying on a collaborators chapeau, preparing to tell him what to write and how to write it.
It’s a very old program. The algorithm goes back to at least the early 1970s, and I can’t imagine the people who discovered it would go very long before implementing it. The most common implementation is currently called Dissociated Press.
(This has been your daily allowance of extreme geekery. Please watch for stray UUOs. If you are having problems, schedule an appointment with Doctor Memory. Let us now have a moment of silence for Markov Cheney on the MTA.)
I was gonna start a thread for one-liners from spam just today, but this one’ll do.
Recent developments:
[ul][li]Martyred and never to sleep with his ex-wife again, he was the darling of the literary community.[/li][li]And I was inclined to be such a gomeral that ye cannae tell the tane frae the tither.[/li][li]She thought the only danger of being noticed would come on Route 9, but even there the risk would be small - she only had to drive four miles of it. The open garbage can overflowed onto the floor and emitted the warm reek of spoiling food, but that wasn’t the only thing wrong, or the worst smell. There were perhaps seventy acres of open ground between the house and the edge of the forest - the snow-cover over it was a perfect and blazing white.[/li][li]In his mind he heard the voice of Ronald Reagan in King’s Raw, shrieking “Wheres the rest of me?” On it were four dishes: wedges of lemon on one, grated egg on a second, toast points on a third.[/li][li]*Paul did not need a notarised statement telegram to tell him that this was Annie’s sainted mother, along with dirty birdie and fiddle-de-foof and all the others which I’m sure will come up in time. [/li][]*Not so high as the one she’ll make you pay if you cant get this goddam door closed again, Paulie. He looked up at her, tears flowing down his cheeks, and played the absolute last card in his hand. *[/ul]
