Spotted this on a street near the corner.
Underground cable maintenance markings, or political statement? You decide! š
Spotted this on a street near the corner.
Underground cable maintenance markings, or political statement? You decide! š
Sometimes you’ve just got to laugh, you know?
I remember getting my first piece of spam in college, in the days before anyone bothered with filters because spam was so rare, and thinking, “this could get bad.” Talk about the understatement of the decade! Since the mid-1990s, recipients and sysadmins have come up with more and more elaborate ways to block the annoyance, and the spammers have developed ever more convoluted ways to get around our filters.
And sometimes, those convolutions are frakking hilarious.
Weird word substitutions, funny misspellings (deliberate and otherwise), utter nonsense, creative euphemisms and more lurk in the world’s junk mail folders. Half of the spam category on this blog isn’t serious commentary — it’s examples of clueless or unintentionally funny quotes from actual spam.
These are all quotes (mostly subjects) from spam I’ve seen:
A few weeks ago I realized most of these were really short, and I’d been posting them to Twitter. Why not set up a dedicated account for spam humor? So I set up @lol_spam and started posting the funnier subjects I came across, usually with a comment.
I was definitely inspired by the webcomic Spamusement, but I can’t draw worth beans. A line of snarky commentary? That I can do! And I was almost certainly influenced by artist Linzie Hunter’s Spam one-liner postcards, though I’d somehow forgotten about them until someone posted a link to the set yesterday.
Where am I getting the spam quotes?
I see a lot of spam, and I don’t want to simply flood people’s Twitter streams with, well, more of it, so I’m using FutureTweets to spread things out to a more manageable 1 or 2 posts per day. At the moment I’m almost 3 weeks ahead.
I’m also keeping an eye on a twitter search for “spam subject” and retweeting the funniest ones.
So if you use Twitter, take a look at @lol_spam. Who knows? You just might laugh!
Pushing Daisies: “The Complete 2 Second Season.” I know it was short, but I’d swear it was longer than that!
ELF STORAGE, originally uploaded by conradh.
A decade ago, Katie saw a self storage place with the first S missing from the sign. She didn’t get a picture, and has been looking for another sign with the same failing ever since.
Last summer we spotted a sign with the S broken. It turns out that the S eventually did fall off the rest of the way.
Hah! “the only advantage of living forever is having the time to read all of TV Tropes.”
We’ve started watching the first season of Leverage on Netflix instant. Last night we watched the second episode. At one point the “good guy” character explains that yes, he really did give away most of the money he got from the last job, after buying a couple of things. Like a new car. Electric. Just being responsible. He then gets into his car, the camera pulls away, and you see that it’s a Tesla Roadster — an all-electric, high performance (and very expensive at $128,000+) sportscar.
I made some remark about how the Tesla was intended to make people rethink the electric car.
Katie’s response: “Every time a Prius gets pulled over for speeding, people rethink the electric car.”
After posting these today, I’ve decided to set up a Twitter account dedicated to posting funny spam subjects & commentary. I plan to keep the traffic low – 1 or 2 posts a day. Please check out @lol_spam!