If you're like me (and why wouldn't you be?) you get a lot of spam. In fact, you're probably not like me—my non-Tensor, non-school email address is probably on just about every spammer's list of addresses because I've had it since 1996 and used to post to Usenet from it. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.) In any case, I get a bunch of those spam messages with randomly-generated text in them, some of which I find amusingly nonsensical, so I've included a selection.
- "polka the permissible atrocity" (Is that a command, or should there be a comma between the first two words?)
- "arrival is embroider housebroken" (It sure is!)
- "deliquesce yet coleridge confirmation" (I guess somebody's been reading Samuel Delaney (scroll down)—the frequency of the verb deliquesce in English literature has to be pretty low.)
- "flashlight the uranium rhododendron" (Wasn't Glen Philips in that band?)
- "Horse both, you wind develop, numeral." (This one may not be randomly generated—it sort of sounds like they took some poetry and ran it back and forth through Babelfish a few times.)
- "Bank appear, say found, value cool." (This one seems to almost mean something, if only I could parse it a little bit harder. The bank said what now?)
- "bushmaster nor bimolecular comparator" (Sounds like a piece of exposition from ST:TNG: "Captain, I think I can realign the polarities on the bushmaster using the bimolecular comparator...")
- "Have cloud home copy pull." ("doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise")
- "Cow protect moon sugar." (My favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers album!)
- "Been been form, sand front reason." (Oh, come now, that's just slopping coding. "Been been"? How hard would it be to prevent the same word from appearing consecutively?)
Best of all, though, one spammer seems to be using snippets of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood as spoof text. I've always to get around to Sabatini (I gather there's lots of fencing), so here's my chance to read it in scrambled, out-of-context five-sentence fragments. Joy.
Sabatini well rewards your reading, especially if you eschew the spam.
Posted by: Pious Agnostic | August 04, 2005 at 07:33 AM
On a not unrelated note, I thought your headline meant that you were entertaining the gibberish, not that the gibberish was entertaining you.
"Moon sugar" sounds delicious. (Is that a euphemism for cocaine?)
Posted by: polyglot conspiracy | August 04, 2005 at 12:46 PM
hmmmm...double seventy wonder, over the hill juice lover want to get play the xylophone!
Posted by: Alistair | August 08, 2005 at 11:22 AM
The names in the From: header can be amusing too - I recently got one from a "Bradley Phoneme".
Posted by: Tim May | August 09, 2005 at 09:27 AM
The best one I ever got was from "Circumcision V. Batman".
Posted by: Chris | October 10, 2005 at 06:03 PM
Wasn't that the famous Supreme Court case where the court voted 5-4 to extend constitutional protection to the foreskins of superheroes? Or am I thinking of The Tick vs. Circumcision?
Posted by: The Tensor | October 10, 2005 at 06:48 PM