Day: April 16, 2004

My spam email seems to be getting ever more bizarre by the minute. In what I presume is an attempt to defeat bayesian spam filters, the spamers are filling their emails with random obscure words.

I just got a mortgage approval email with the subject heading “Re: bellicose voluble”, which almost sounds like it might be a google-whack (it’s not though), and my bulk mail folder is stuffed full of messages with subject titles like “rogers augustus dysplasia narcissus stature asuncion albuquerque” (which you can almost, but not quite, sing to the tune of the King of Rock and Roll) and “sap wool pageant finale liquefaction splash camille dangle dusen”. They might get past some spam filters, but do the spammers honestly think that people are likely to open these emails?

Ah well, at least it provides a distraction–I like my Friday afternoons to be nicely surreal.

As the updated reading list on the right of the screen will testify, I’ve been buying books again, even though I haven’t finished reading the last lot. Which is odd really, as I only went out last night to go to Sainsbury’s to pick up bread rolls and toilet duck (which might in itself sound odd, but at least I knew that my shopping selections would be safe from Richard Herring-style checkout assistant scrutiny, as it wasn’t a Local Sainsbury’s for Local people). I didn’t actually need to go past Borders to get to the supermarket either, so I can’t even blame them for drawing me in with their tempting 3-for-2 offer. No, I had to make a conscious decision to go past, and THEN I got drawn in by their cunning placement of two books I wanted to buy on a table by the door with lots of little 3-for-2 stickers on them. And it would just be rude not to buy them and a third book I didn’t want, cause, like, the third one is free. And how can you turn down a free book–you can’t can you?