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Originally published at An Island Where No One Lives. Adapted and edited for inclusion here.
Just got a spam email in one of my accounts; normally I just delete
without reading (which is the best thing to do) but I was curious who it was
addressed to, so I opened it up.
Inside was the usual promise that I could start my own business and earn
money. Well, thanks, I never realized I could do that. But then, after the
pitch (and the "Click here to be removed from our mailing list"
link, which you should never, ever click on), there was this curious
addition:
As he spoke he felt himself gently but firmly pushed from behind and,
losing his balance, he plunged headforemost from the roof and whirled
through the intervening space toward the sidewalk far below. Terrified
though he was by the sudden disaster, the boy had still wit enough remaining
to reach out his right hand and move the indicator of the machine upon his
left wrist to the zero mark
Immediately he paused in his fearful flight and presently came to a stop at
a distance of less than fifteen feet from the flagstones which had
threatened to crush out his life
Strange, huh? To me, it looks like whoever is cranking this stuff out is
bored our of his or her mind, and is trying to write short stories (or movie
treatments, maybe) just to keep from going nuts.
I wonder how widespread this sort of thing is. As I said, I don't read spam,
and I'm not tempted to start because of this, but it is a kind of weird
glimpse into some unknown realm.
January 4, 2005
Not much on the spam front lately, which is pretty nice to be quite honest. This is the only thing of recent note:Not a lot of interesting spam stories lately, here's a roundup of some of
the miscellaneous notions, bits of stories, turns of phrase, and such from
spam writers. As always, I ignore the main body of the spam and just skip to
the end, where the interesting flotsam accumulates. Here and there I have
separated scrunched words and made the paragraph formatting a bit easier to
follow, but otherwise these are presented as is.
First of all, a rather confused list:
backtraces 7 bath soap 8 depots drug pulverizing editorials
...[singing] five Golden rings...
He then continues in a more sensationalistic vein:
killings have stunned Exeland, a village of 219 people about 135 miles
northeast of Minneapolis. top managers. Two months later, Watkins was
banished to an empty office without a telephone line, according
Well, if Watkins was responsible for those killings, I should hope his
punishment would have been a bit more severe, but you can't have everything,
can you? I sure hope Exeland isn't surprised when the killings continue.
Our next spammer decides to be slightly topical, in sort of addled way.
Even in the distant Caribbean, one of the region's largest New Year's
Eve celebrations on the British territory [we need a concluding verbal
phrase, like "was under way" or something.]
He also admitted he was fairly worried about the potential for Iranian
influences in the Iraqi election, now set for Jan. 30. on the campaign
trail. "You catch colds," he said, "you catch the flu, you
catch this, you chancellor of the exchequer
From worrying about international events to worrying about personal health,
to worrying about whether he is addressing the Chancellor of the
Exchequer--this guy lets worry run his life.
Our third spammer returns to fiction with this brief extract.
He climbed up the stairs and the ladders again and looked out the little
window in the belfry. Then he examined his map of Europe.
I believe I'll take a run over to Paris, he thought.
This could be an interesting story about an international playboy. I bet in
Paris, he encounters some kind of baffling, terrifying force which makes him
assume the mantle of a dark avenger of the night. This could be a rough
draft of the new Batman film! That reference to a "belfry"
clinches it. You read it here first!
Spammer number four also wants to work on short stories, but can't seem to
decide whether it's an action-adventure yarn or a continuation of L. Frank
Baum's "Oz" books:
He was just falling asleep when a tremendous din and clatter nearly
deafened him, and set the whole tower trembling
So, if you can find a way to fix it, we'll be much obliged to you
Ozma can do it, easily, replied Dorothy
It was the midnight chime Rob clutched his ears tightly, and when the
vibrations had died away descended by the ladder to a lower platform
Make up your mind, Number Four!
Number five spammer seems to have economic and cultural incentives on his
mind.
raise them instead. Higher prices may make some Americans think twice
about how much to spend over the
Just like Finnegans Wake, he drops that thought and immediately
picks up another, but watch out! There is another thought on biology heading
toward this one and the collision makes them fuse into something a bit less
comprehensible:
Although meat is a source of protein, it has very low levels of calcium,
in blood clotting, muscle contraction and transmission of nerve impulses.
This could be educational, if we could figure it out. Actually, I
suspect that between "Calcium" and "in blood clotting"
it is supposed to read something like "calcium; calcium is used "
etc. However, I don't want to put words in this guy's, er, mouth, so next
time he sends us the thrilling conclusion I'll try to post it here.
Oh, and by the way, I have read Finnegans Wake, from beginning to
end [sticks tongue out].
Our final spammer is an older example, and I apologize if I've posted this
earlier, but heck, if they can't check their spelling, grammar and sentence structure, why the heck should I check my own archives? A man has to eat,
and sometimes he has to eat hot lead!
man had apparently been hunting, gotten lost and stopped a couple of
hunters to ask for directions.
All well and good, eh? Sounds like part of an adventure held in the Great
Outdoors. Or perhaps the aftermath of a crime, or some such. Then things
take a turn--a more sinister turn:
He were seven times more likely to develop the problem when they were
vibrated as the burning coal entered Watkins supervisor, Tyrone Murray, was
visibly unhappy with the test results, the government
The latter part of this shows Mr. Murray unhappy with the test results, and
he starts to worry about the government before he's mysteriously cut off,
mid-sentence. They...they must have got Mr. Murray! Those fiends,
will they stop at nothing?
I should say they seem pretty unstoppable. Look at the heinous experiments
they're doing in the first part: trying to find out how likely
"Watkins' supervisor" is to develop "the problem" when
he was vibrated, while burning coal is injected into him! (Turns out the
answer is seven.) This sounds like something out of The X-Files.
Well, that's enough spam for today, after all, it is not good for you to
read spam. You should never read spam, you should just delete it. It is okay
for me to read it, as I am a professional and I am taking all due
precautions. Look, I am even wearing the gloves this time.
January 11, 2005
Little on the spam front lately, which is oddly...unsatisfying. Having spent several years dealing with spam by firm application of the Delete button, and suddenly finding something of interest in it, it's a bit weird to actually look forward to it. No, it's not just weird, it's stupid! I should stop being stupid. Note to self: stop being stupid. (I may have to work on this quite a while.)January 12, 2005
Wednesday's Spam is Full of Woe.
Well, not really "woe," but then, not much full of anything else. In addition to what's below, there were a couple of other things, but nothing terribly interesting so I forwent them to bring you this lone example. Spam writers: you need to work on your ideas if you want your submissions to be considered for publication. Simply being a novelty is...no longer enough.January 13, 2005
Like blogging, hidden spam fiction seems to so common now that it's not always interesting. Out of four messages today (good thing no one knows my email account, or it would probably be ten times that) only two were of interest. One of them, however, was extremely interesting.
Let's deal with the other, not so interesting one first.
It was not immediately clear late Saturday whether Johnson was still alive
when he was pulled from leader.
Well, what kind of shape was leader in? No one seems very concerned about
him.
The whole thing reminds me of that guy from Total Recall. Quato, I
believe his name was.
Next:
We finally set up the tables and chairs so people could get medical care
from the of workers, freeing up plenty of room.
Well, it's nice to see that people are out helping other people. But how does
setting up tables and chairs free up room? Seems to me like that would fill more
space. Of course, that's probably why my grades were so mediocre in school--I
just couldn't wrap my head around the proper use of logic.
Ultimately, the guy in charge of determining what
shippedconsultants2duckhearted6directoratescourthousescoal- fired
Well, it's a shame that the guy in charge of...of...of all that got fired.
Post holiday layoffs, I bet; it's the same everywhere. How much does it cost
to ship a consultant, I wonder. And what makes a director "duck
hearted"? (I know, I know--it's because his "bills" are so big!
Ha ha ha ow ouch ow stop hitting me, I'm sorry I said that! I won't
make jokes like that again!)
Finally, we come to today's story. This is actually intriguing. With any luck,
we'll get more chapters the way we did with the story of Rob in the clock
tower.
Finally he said: I'm afraid I couldn't support your weight long enough to
reach any other land. It's a long journey, and you'd pull my arms out of joint
before we'd been up an hour
Their faces fell at this, but one of them said: Why couldn't we swing
ourselves over your shoulders with a rope? Our two bodies would balance each
other and we are so thin and emaciated that we do not weigh very much
Now this is interesting. Who (or what) is this person who can carry people,
but not for long distances? He talks about "arms" rather than
"wings" so, is it someone who is good at jogging or what? If he's
some kind of giant, who can stride like a titan across the land, he's kind of
wimpy one if he can't carry two "emaciated" creatures for an hour.
Maybe he's a giant with really tiny arms. Maybe he's a friendly tyrannosaurus
rex! Whatever, it definitely lights a spark under the imagination.
And the other guys, who come up with this ingenious "swinging rope"
thing to help out (truth to tell, it doesn't sound like it would help much. It
sounds kind of more tiring than the other). Who are they, and why are they so
emaciated? Usually that's a result of being starved, right? So are they
escaped prisoners, creatures from a more fragile world than ours, mutants,
elves, hobbits, sea anemones, or what?
As you can see, this raises many interesting questions. It certainly paints a
vivid if hard to grasp world. I'd really like to see more.
Crap. What I am asking for is more spam! How
did I get into this mess? How does an interesting, innocent hobby result into
foaming, churning madness?
I bet Lou Reed
asked the same questions when he started writing all those drug
songs.
Shortly after this, I discovered that the story that was making its way to me in bits and spurts was a work by L. Frank Baum, called "The Master Key." That seemed to deflate a lot of my enthusiasm for this project, since what I was reading was not someone's desperate attempt to enliven his spam-churning chores, but more likely the result of some computer malware burrowing through a random work of literature on a zombie machine. Since mid-January of 2005, I have stopped reading spam and have no desire to resume.
December 2004 - January 2005.