Below, in its entirely, the header of a piece of spam I just received:
malfeasant trichinella
I am apprised of what's going on here, of course. Spammers have lately taken to filling their e-mails with random words in an attempt to get around the way spam filters look for particular words that tend to appear in spam and nowhere else. But it makes me worry that a spam like this will cause someone to think that "malfeasant trichinella" means "penis enlargement", and not "a wrongdoing genus of parasitic nematodes that causes trichinosis in man and carnivores, especially a wrongdoing genus of parasitic nematodes that has been elected to public office".
So as most of you know, I got married two months ago, and we registered with Amazon, since that seemed like the easiest way to get appliances and a complete set of Sandman comics. We did have some difficulties, though, largely involving the fact that we moved a week after the wedding. So there were packages that got delivered to our old apartment, even though we changed the address in our wedding registry. Silly us, we assumed that an address change would apply to any unshipped items. Apparently not.
One of the items which was delivered to our old address was one of Rose's selections, a Wusthof knife, which she adores. And while we appreciated Amazon's commitment to making sure the knife arrived at the wrong address in the best possible condition, we did think they had possibly gone a little overboard, packaging-wise.
The knife came inside a plastic sleeve. That plastic sleeve came prepackaged inside a cardboard box that was already a little large for it. That cardboard box was then placed inside another cardboard box, which by this time was comically large compared to the knife. Here's a picture of all the nesting boxes in question.
That basically captures the overkill, but here is a corroborating picture of the knife and the outermost box.
Impressive. And yet every DVD box set I order from them arrives with a dented corner.
Boy, people just love to take Dr. Seuss and have their way with him, don't they? If it's not Mike Myers, it's John J. Miller in the National Review.
One thing Dr. Seuss and I have in common (besides our rakishly good-looking beards) is a deep-seated liberalism. But Miller believes he has found a secret conservative message hidden in the liberal thickets of the Seuss oeuvre, in the lesser-known I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew:
The unnamed narrator — one of Seuss's typical cat-like creatures — joins an odd fellow on his way to the City of Solla Sollew, which isOn the banks of the beautiful River Wah-Hoo,
Where they never have troubles! At least, very few.It is, in short, Utopia. ... Ultimately, he arrives at the outskirts of Solla Sollew — but he can't get inside. It seems that a key has been lost. Everybody's locked out. Frustrated, the city's gatekeeper declares that he's had enough:
And I'm off to the city of Boola Boo Ball
On the banks of the beautiful River Woo-Wall,
Where they never have troubles! No troubles at all!Ah, yes: a place that's even better than Utopia. By this time, of course, the narrator has caught on. He goes back home to confront his troubles rather than avoid them.
It's a wonderful book with a beautiful message — and in Seuss's liberal universe, perhaps even a subversive one.
Ah, I see. Liberals never confront problems and try to solve them, is that what you're trying to say, Mr. Miller? Way to be patronizing. Liberalism is, at heart, an activist political philosophy; it's not passive. Whether or not you agree with its goals, you can't seriously argue that liberalism doesn't entail working for change.
I mean, instead of Seuss having written a conservative book, maybe Mr. Miller is secretly a liberal? Hmm, I guess not.
Hey! We're All Dead got a very nice, if brief, review in today's New York Times. In my daydreams, of course, the review was a little more extensive and also went on at great length about the brilliant songwriting, but I'm not complaining!
Okay, I thought I was obsessive about spoilers until I heard about the guy who reads every issue of the New York Times...in order...and is about a year and a half behind:
"He keeps up with current events by listening to the radio while he drives to work. If he thinks he might be about to learn the ending to a particular story he’s following, he will turn it off. He doesn’t want to spoil the suspense."
(Pointed out by Jon Delfin, who saw it on Romenesko.)
I enjoy movie reviews, but I almost never read reviews of movies I'm intending to see. I always feel, well, I'm already convinced it's a movie I want to see, I don't want to have any surprises spoiled for me. I mean, yes, most reviewers will avoid giving away major surprises, but they'll still pretty much tell you the whole plot, and honestly, I just don't want to know. I read those reviews after I see the movie, to see how my opinions match up with reviewers'.
But if there's a movie that I never plan to see, come hell or high water, because it looks terrible, and I see that there is what's clearly a terrible review of that movie, well, I have to read that. How can I resist a review that calls The Cat in the Hat (a movie which I constantly worry I will be forced to sit through another preview of) "a vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy"?
But although I am a religious avoider of spoilers of movies I want to see, I sometimes wish reviewers weren't so circumspect about not revealing spoilers of movies they have just spent many paragraphs convincing me not to see. Take Gothika. In the Times, A.O. Scott writes:
And I certainly will not spell out for you what you will, before too long, figure out for yourself, at which point all suspense and intrigue will evaporate. About two-thirds of the way through the screening I attended, the startled gasps were replaced by laughter, as "Gothika" began its headlong descent into incoherence.
No, seriously, spell it out! Let me rewrite that for you, A.O. (boy, "A.O." taken out of context sounds like one of those nonsense noises Sting was always sticking into Police songs, or something one of the Teletubbies would say): "Those of you who, despite all my advice, are still interested in seeing this movie, should stop reading now as I reveal the stupid (and blatantly telegraphed) twist ending to this crappy movie."
And, alas, Gothika hasn't yet been posted to The Movie Spoiler, so no luck there. Ah well. I can wait.
So I bought a new toothbrush yesterday, and I was resting it upon the thingy above the sink that has a cup holder and six little rectangular holes in it, I wondered: given that the average girth of toothbrushes seems to be steadily increasing, do new bathrooms have bigger holes in those little ledges? Because for probably a decade now, I have never lived anywhere in which my toothbrushes fit in the toothbrush holders. The toothbrushes lay across the cup holder, and the cup sits on the edge of the sink. And then there are six vestigial holes that serve no purpose. I picture many confused conversations with the next generation of children: "Daddy, why are there six holes on the toothbrush ledge?" "Well, Timmy, it's a sad story..."
Won't someone think of the children?
Michael Jackson's father, Joe (not related to the somewhat reactionary homophobe who used to be able to write catchy songs), recently delivered a fascinating symposium on semantics:
Michael Jackson's father says he never beat his son but admits in a TV interview to be broadcast Sunday that he whipped him.Joe Jackson told the British Broadcasting Corp. that he whipped Michael with a switch and a belt but says he never dealt out a beating.
"You beat someone with a stick," the BBC quoted him as saying in a story on its Web site Friday.
And if you want to pound someone, you use a mallet. Also note that this BBC interview was overseen by "Majestik Magnificent...Michael Jackson's personal magician." That's the guy I really want to hear interviewed, honestly. I also love that Majestik threatens to call off the interview. Like Michael Jackson's father cares one tiny bit for the opinions of his son's personal magician.
That is correct, I have more to say on the subject of crayons. Firstly, I just realized what the relentless overnaming of Crayola colors reminds me of: lipstick and nail polish names. (What can I say, my mom was an Avon lady.) In fact, here's a little quiz. Crayola crayon or Avon nail polish? Go!
1) Mango Tango
2) Cherry Jubilee
3) Desert Sand
4) Vivid Violet
5) Tangerine Dream
6) Juicy Plum
7) Razzle Dazzle Rose
8) Ballerina Pink
9) Cotton Candy
10) Tickle Me Pink
Answers in the comments for this entry.
But mostly what I've been obsessing about this time around is the Crayola store. Did you know you can make your own custom box of 64 crayons? Sounds good, right? I mean, maybe you're the sort of person who just doesn't understand why anyone would want a white crayon, and now you finally have your chance to get yourself a box of crayons without that accursed albino abomination. Well, sorry to be the bearer of tidings that seem good at first but then turn out to be bad after all, but that custom box of 64 crayons? You can only get up to four different colors in it. So if you like to draw one thing over and over again, this is the perfect product for you. You can even just get 64 of the same crayon if that's your bag.
Oh, but what if you want 64 of one of the retired colors? Aren't you then screwed? Well, that shows what you know. Yes, Crayola is offering limited edition boxes of recently retired colors. That's right, boys and girls, Mulberry is no more, so you better get enough crayons of that color to last you the rest of your life. Geez, man, I already had mixed feelings about Crayola retiring colors. Now I'm starting to wonder if they retire colors just to manipulate supply and demand! Like, are they hoping to grab a little corner of the obsessive collector market? I feel all dirty now. Give me my childhood back, Crayola!
Well, but why single out John Kerry? Why not John Edwards, too? And most of the other Democratic nominees? I mean, they all piled on Howard Dean for his ostensibly controversial "Confederate flag" comment. (Try this link if you're not registered at the New York Times.) And right on to Dean for not being a wuss and sticking to his guns, instead of trotting out the usual pro forma mea culpas. (Ooh, aren't I the smart one, with my two Latin phrases in a row.)
But that's old news. Now I have a new reason to be pissed off at (most of) the other Democratic nominees, and that's their entirely predictable reaction to Howard Dean's decision to opt out of public financing. I mean, getting all "Dean abandoned his earlier pledge never to bypass the public financing system" (from Lieberman, who can drop out of this race any time he wants) conveniently ignores that Dean's supporters voted on whether this was something he should do or not, and that Dean wasn't the guy who screwed the system up by opting out in the first place -- that would be Bush, who is the guy we're all trying to beat, remember? I would like every candidate to repeat after me: "It doesn't matter if I'm nominated; it only matters that Bush loses."
Oh, but John Kerry. "It's disappointing that Howard Dean so conveniently abandoned a long-held position of principle out of mere political expediency," he says. I guess Kerry would know about that, what with voting yes on going to war with Iraq and then acting like he knew all along it was a bad idea. Hey, Kerry, maybe if you "preferred that the United States pursue more diplomacy before the war", you should have waited until that happened before voting to give a crazy man a loaded gun.
It's also galling that Kerry is taking another desperate opportunity to bring Dean down over the campaign finance thing when he's considering doing the same thing himself. Come on, man. You've run for president plenty of times. Don't you think if anyone was actually the least bit enthused about you as a presidential candidate, you would have been nominated by now?
I do enjoy spammers' sad little attempts to get their ads past spam filters, or at least to get my attention in that brief window of time when I open my bulk mail folder to make sure that nothing important actually got stuck in it.
Now, you may or may not know that one thing spam filters do is look for words that commonly appear in spam, so one way spammers attempt to get around that is by deliberately misspelling words. This means that instead of having a subject line of "humongous breasts" setting off the spam filters, you'll have, say, a subject line of "hugHm0ngggus br3aSt5", which I would naturally assume is an e-mail from one of my relatives. As for the other tactics, a common technique to try to catch my attention is to stick my name in the subject line ("FRANCIS get 7 complimentary panties"). So if you combine these techniques in a really ham-handed way, here is the subject line you might come up with:
EUGENE , Gët ä largër Pënis!
I love their blind faith that my name is Eugene, and the way "Get a larger Penis" suddenly seems like the name of an '80s hair metal band once you add all the umlauts. Classic. Kudos to you, ggewg@netscape.net!
Hey, thanks to my pal Daniel for plugging me in his blog today. I do take exception to the part about me being unemployed, though. I'm semi-employed.
One of the many things I spend a lot of time on that doesn't make me much money (though one hopes that it will at some point) is my musical, We're All Dead, which opens in a week, and has been occupying every square inch of my brain for, like, a month now. Seriously, all my short term memory is occupied with bits and pieces of the musical, or of lists of things I need to do for the musical, you name it.
For instance, this has been a frequent occurence lately: Rose will tell me something in a tone of voice that suggests it's something I should be able to follow, I will look blankly at her, she will point out that understanding what she's telling me is contingent upon a bit of backstory she told me about the day before, and I will have no memory of being told this information. I have no doubt she actually did tell me said information; I also suspect that, at the time, I probably had the optimistic but mistaken belief that I was actually absorbing that information.
Ah, well. It's all for a good cause: attempting to make me famous. If you'd like to hear a sample song from the musical that ate my brain (or if you would have liked to have already heard the sample song that was previously posted on my blog, but for which the link died at some point), here's "Fate" (currently offline), the finale of "Oedipus Rocks".
"Oh, what a fine song!" you say. "If only there were some convenient way for me to purchase tickets for this show without ever leaving the comfort of my desk chair." Well, aha! There is.
I just can't stop reading this page about Crayola colors through the years. I suppose everyone has a point at which their knowledge of crayon arcana slows down considerably, but I had no idea just how out of touch I was with the current slate of Crayolas.
I can get behind many of the colors introduced through the '90s, like "Cranberry", "Dandelion" and "Granny Smith Apple". (Oh, I guess I have a soft spot for representationalism after all.) But some of these things are just the most shoddily stitched-together portmanteaus. I mean, "Mauvelous"? That is a travesty. And why can we not just call the banana-like color "Banana"? Why is it called "Banana Mania"? Are manic bananas a slightly different shade than their more restrained brethren?
And, you know, it always irks me when adults get really patronizing to children, and a color like "Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown" seems like an example of that. I could get behind, say, "Teddy Bear" as a color, but "Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown" feels focus-grouped out the ass. And "Brink Pink"? I mean...that rhymes, yes, but what the hell does it mean? And do not even get me started on "Jazzberry Jam". Oh, I got myself started. "Jazzberry Jam"! AAAAAAAAAAAARRRGHH.
The thing that really makes me feel like a fossil is the twinge I get when I learn one of my favorite colors has been retired (also the fact that I say "Consarn it" at these moments). "Lemon Yellow" is gone? But that was the best yellow! I mean, probably that shade of yellow is mostly covered by one of the replacement yellows (perhaps "Canary"), but still.
According to this site, "Lemon Yellow" was one of eight colors ditched in 1990 for being "too dull to appeal to children today". Among the other seven was "raw umber". So let me get this straight. We can have two different goddamn siennas, but no umber? That's weak.
This all reminds me of a dream I once had in which Crayola had introduced a box of various different flesh tones appropriate to different races (you'll recall that they changed "Flesh" to "Peach" back in 1962). This dream was based in reality, but I think I can safely say Crayola never considered naming their product what I named it in my dream: the "Flesh Box".
Am I the only person who finds the invisible people that model CafePress T-shirts a little creepy? Like, the T-shirts have a shape of a T-shirt being worn by someone, and yet you can see through that person to the little tag on the back of the collar. Weird.
It's all about my ego, remember? So I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who hates the remix of "Superpowers" on the Dismemberment Plan's farewell CD.
I'm not quite unbiased in this discussion since I did my own remix of "Superpowers" which was passed over in favor of the one on the CD, which, to be fair, some reviewers have singled out for praise, even though I like mine better. Nyah.
I'm also fond of my remix of "Following Through", but at least I like the remix of that one which appears on the CD, so I can't get too het up about mine not making the cut in that case.
So now it seems there's some question as to whether Fox really threatened to sue "The Simpsons" or not. Is Matt Groening finally taking his revenge for the mob-hit-style job Fox did on Futurama?
This hideous stereo system, according to its blurb on Amazon, "features an aggressive new design that takes its cue from the world of car audio, with fearless hot-rod styling". Because every day I rue the fact that my stereo insufficiently resembles a muscle car.
Is there any better argument for the fact that the Fox News Network is biased than that Fox threatened to break out the litigation over an episode of the Simpsons that made fun of it for being biased? A show which, the keen-eyed and the bleary-eyed alike among you will have noticed, airs on its own network.
Fox objected to a fake Fox-news-style ticker which featured headlines like "Do Democrats Cause Cancer?" Matt Groening reports, "Now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," he said.
See? Only a super-biased network could think headlines like "Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay" are believable enough that people might take them seriously.
