Happy F%#ing Valentine’s Day
Christmas can often be painfully upbeat: the nauseating repetition of the same 10 Christmas songs played in every store and business, the same 10 cherished Christmas movies playing on a continuous loop on television for 3 weeks solid, and cheerful dingbats wearing Santa hats in public as early as mid-November.
Last year, friend, Blogadilla reader, and Finnish goddess Elina sent me this fine quote from novelist Neil Gaiman, which helps to balance the equation:
“Nicholas was… older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.
The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own twittering tongue, and conducted incomprehensible rituals when they were not actually working in the factories.
Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, and leave one of the dwarves’ invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.
He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.
Ho. Ho. Ho.”
Here on Blogadilla, and on most blogs I’m sure, we’re flooded with comment spam. Fortunately, we have Akismet to handle it, which usually does a great job. Nevertheless, a few spam comments slip through to moderation here and there, and a few legitimate comments make it into the spam filter, so I have to check it periodically.
Most spam comments are relatively standard in appearance, with links to sites where you can buy prescription drugs illegally, or enlarge your penis, etc. I’ve always thought these looked all goofy, and for someone to click on them, they’d have to be somewhat of a halfwit. I’m not sure of the exact economics of spam, but one can be sure that it must be effective on some level, or else spam would cease to exist.
Just today, however, my attitude toward spam changed, as I found a new spam derivative: ‘witty-quote spam.’ Sure, the email addresses and sites linked to are similar to the aforementioned spam comments, but at least in this case, the spammers are giving me something: witty quotes. I’ll spare you the link for pirated software or val1um, but here are a few of the good ones I got, just today:
“To the Honourable Member opposite I say, when he goes home tonight, may his mother run out from under the porch and bark at him” — John G Diefenbaker
“A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree” — Spike Milligan
“Why don’t they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff” — Steven Wright
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” — Philip K Dick
“I would have made a good Pope” — Richard Nixon
