Inventory: several tins of luncheon meat

[j4]

Two adjacent subject lines in my inbox today were "invite beret" and "incant yalta". Should I be worried that my immediate reaction to those was along the lines of "YOU CAN'T DO THAT HERE"?

Comments

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Nah.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

> DISCO BADGER
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT

[senji.livejournal.com]

What now?
invite beret
[taking beret]
The beret doesn't seem to be interested.
What now?
incant yalta
You speak out loud in a sonorous voice, but nothing happens

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

I'm beginning to suspect that spam is actually an important way of getting extra surrealism into people's lives. Yesterday, for instance, I saw:

Subject: Get Thick Hair--rustproof

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I had one with a fantastic subject line the other day that I almost wish I had kept. I'll misremember the exact details, but it was along the lines of

"My brother has found a method for great happiness! solipsism"

with no indication whether the last word was deliberately chosen or merely plucked at random from a dictionary and almost appropriate by happy accident. If the latter, which I suspect, the first half of the line (up to the !) is an excellent set-up and there are very many nouns which come after it that would be amusing.

I look forward to spam with automatic-random-jumble-of-letter subject lines of XYZZY or PLUGH, but I could be waiting some time.

[nja.livejournal.com]

I had one with a fantastic subject line the other day that I almost wish I had kept.

I've just had one from Elba Barajas with the subject "koran". It came through the leaky spam filter, so on the offchance that it was from one of the overseas students whose name I didn't recognise, I opened it.

                             _____                          
(  _`\                      (_   _)                         
| (_(_)_ __   __     __       | |   __     __    ___    ___ 
|  _) ( '__)/'__`\ /'__`\     | | /'__`\ /'__`\/' _ `\/',__)
| |   | |  (  ___/(  ___/     | |(  ___/(  ___/| ( ) |\__, \
(_)   (_)  `\____)`\____)     (_)`\____)`\____)(_) (_)(____/

(etc...)

[imc.livejournal.com]

I've just junked four of those. My spam filter can't see graphical-handwriting (or whatever you call it). But I'll get it to junk anything that mentions a URL from voila.fr and that'll sort it. (About 50% of the spam that it does junk also mentions URLs from there. It's owned by Wanadoo. And they seem to want us to believe it's a good thing that they are taking over Freeserve. Bah.)

Anyway, the four messages claimed to come from:
Minnie Ramirez (Subject: perceive)
Rosalind Gutierrez (Subject: food)
Bonnie Bland (Subject: Hot Freee Teen Fu|< Videos discriminant)
Priscilla Hearn (Subject: harrow buenos).

Invented names seem to be the in thing at the moment. Yesterday I had a spam that was addressed to "randal hooten", CC: "hayden osawa", "shannon mccants", "elroy dickhaut", "dennis lima", "berry danesh", "evan schrott", "lazaro bula", "jasper raymond" - all with different email addresses on our ECS system (most of which used to be valid but haven't existed for years). And "evan schrott" was me.

[nja.livejournal.com]

Actually, thinking about it, "free teens" probably is relevant to the Koran, given what suicide bombers apparently believe about their fate in the afterlife.

I've had a lot of the graphical writing stuff slipping through, too, but then I have to set the filter at a pretty low level, otherwise the Head of Department and his secretary get caught (lots of Word documents forwarded without comment, messages that consist only of comments from a previous message, etc).