Beautiful Spam IV: “Your hideous wrinkles”

The Rhizome mailing list’s utter failure to filter spam is the gift that keeps on giving. There’s so much to love, so many accidentally inspiring turns of phrase, in this latest unsolicited missive to nobody in particular. For a moment I’d like you to try imagining exactly how facially ravaged a person would have to be (or how pathologically in hate with their own body’s natural processes and projecting those issues onto somebody else an observer would have to be) in order for “wrinkles and fine lines” to enter the realm of “hideous”.

The notion of being “ready” to stop ageing- of deciding that there is a way out of ageing- is dystopian and weird. So is “celebrate your eighteenth birthday even in your aging phase.” Logan’s Run. The part about “age spots and wrinkles triggering you all day long” evokes the image of some crazed, raddled, geriatric Narcissus constantly scrutinising themselves in ever-proliferating shards of broken mirror that they rage against and smash anew every time they catch sight of their own face.

The whole thing reminds me of Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard’s She, burning away her two thousand years in the magic fire of Life, melodramatically announcing “Bygone are the wrinkled days! Ageing has to spare me!”

As usual, I have thwarted the sender-bot’s masters by replacing every instance of the original product name with the word SPAM. Errors and typos have not been corrected.

“If your target is to attain sensuous glowing and supple skin then use only SPAM. This solution is an ultimate method to reduce your hideous wrinkles and fine lines. You can say it is a revolutionary product in the cosmetic industries.

 ‘Aging’, something that won’t spare you even if you are ready to do so. Why feel like, there is no way out with this problem? SPAM that would act as your personal guard to fight out your aging problem. Don’t worry this time aging has to spare you.

When you have age spots and wrinkles triggering you all day long, facial care from SPAM is the lone answer. This new age defying supplement will reduce all the aging signs with enhanced flow of skin protein aiding you with a young and radiant skin.

Bygone are the wrinkled days, courtesy SPAM, a canned precooked meat product that can always make you celebrate your eighteenth birthday even in your aging phase is now at your doorstep and you just need to befriend this product early as possible.”

Flattery will get you nowhere

I know it’s perverse, but occasionally I enjoy perusing all the spam comments that get caught in the filter. I also like the fact that the previous sentence sounds quite repulsive, akin to a sentence such as: “occasionally I like to eat all the dead insects stuck in the radiator of my car.”

Nowadays, many of these spam comments seem to be playing upon the inherent vanity and egotism of bloggers by sending generically positive words of encouragement that just happen to have spammy links attached to them. Here are some of my favourites.

Weird flattery

“Normally I do not read article on blogs, but I would like to say that this write-up very forced me to try and do so! Your writing style has been surprised me. Thanks, very nice article.”

“Hi, after reading this awesome paragraph i am as well happy to share my experience here with friends.”

“Hi there, just turned into alert.”

“It’s fantastic. grow lethargic this a bitter pill (for someone) to swallow Can better? ;)”

NOTES: I wish I could think of a scenario in which I could announce bombastically “you, sir/madam, have very forced me to try and do so!” although I fear this is dangerously close to one of Catherine Tate’s catchphrases. Since I wouldn’t be caught dead watching one of Tate’s TV shows- I mean, life’s too short, isn’t it?- perhaps somebody can tell me if I’m wrong.

Because of the random capitalisation I’m choosing to imagine that the fourth comment refers to swallowing the Krautrock band of the 1970s. At least our spammer got it’s (abbreviation of “it is”) versus its (possessive) correct, something that many legit bloggers and commenters aren’t capable of.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the NHS

British bureaucracy: it came, it saw, it founded an empire, it ripped off other people’s stuff and it made Europeans, Asians and Africans alike fill in stupid bloody forms. Not all of our bureaucracy is horrible though. Some of it is magnificent, even, and the National Health Service is one of those magnificent bureaucracies. The attacks on it by American plutocrats who think a government looking after its citizens is socialism (and that socialism is an insult), and the UK’s own traitorous Tory/Liberal Democrat government’s sly attempts to cut our hard-won NHS off at the knees are both the kinds of assault that perversely underline its value. If those selfish, silver spoon arseholes hate it so vehemently and feel threatened by it then it’s got to be a good thing.

For all of its many faults and failures, the NHS even makes an attempt to fit the most disenfranchised and disconnected members of our society into its bureaucratic framework with a view to getting them the free medical treatment that they’re (arguably) morally entitled to and definitely (in the UK, anyway) legally entitled to. How? Pretend postcodes.

Japanese onomatopoeia II: Please enjoy Nihon style pedantry update

Ongoing cogitation with regard to the Japanese language compels me to point out that my previous post on the subject of Japanese onomatopoeia was lacking some nuance. As I pointed out previously, not only does Japanese have words imitative of actions or the sounds that various entities make when engaged in those actions (such as “plop”, or a gun going BANG) but the language also has “imitative” words relating to things that can’t be heard at all, such as feelings or certain ways of visualising a situation. Most languages that I know of have the first sort of onomatopoeia to some extent, but as far as I know very few languages have words in the latter two categories.

What I didn’t mention is that the Japanese have words for these categories of words, too. English doesn’t have these words really, except via adopted Greek-  Greek being one of the world’s other great languages for specificity/pedantry. So what we call in English (via Greek) “onomatopoeia”  or a phonomime is in Japanese either 擬声語 giseigo or 擬音語 giongo depending upon whether the sound originates from a living or inanimate object. This is in line with other fine distinctions the Japanese language makes between words used for referring to or counting objects depending upon whether they are alive or not, between humans and other animals, and in some cases depending upon their shape, length or other fundamental properties. But that’s a whole other dissertation.

The go at the end of all these words is 語, a language, “speech” or “tongue”. 日本語, for example, is Nihongo: the Japanese language. That’s an interesting nuance as well, the underlying assumption that objects have a language, and these objects all have their own ways of talking to us.

Words that imitate sensory elements that can’t physically be heard are phenomimes, gitaigo (擬態語), like JIIIII ジーーーー, staring at somebody. Written sound effects created to express states of the body or mind are psychomimes, gijōgo 擬情語, like SURARI スラリ: the sound of being slender.

That will be all for now, you may now carry on with your life certain that your store of useless knowledge grew just a little bit today.

The Development of Psychic Powers

Acceptable in the 80s... The Development of Psychic Powers

“THIS IS WHERE YOU BEGIN TO ESTABLISH A NEW AND SUPREMELY IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UNCONSCIOUS LEVELS OF YOUR PSYCHE.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have a library- I wish, I wish, I wish I had the money or the space for a proper library of defiantly non-digital knowledge in printed form- but I do have a lot of books. A sufficient number, in any case, to occasionally wonder WTF some of them are doing on my book shelves and how they got there.

‘The Development of Psychic Powers’ is one of these books. Although I would buy it from a second-hand book shop, I know that I didn’t.

A sticker on the back reveals that it was originally bought from Magis Books in Loughborough (who are still in business) and I’ve definitely never been to Loughborough or to anywhere else in Leicestershire. The copy I have is the ninth (!) printing of a 1981 publication.

The content is fairly laughable and also surfing the fringes of the Trade Descriptions Act, since it’s not really about developing psychic powers. Most of the activities involve Zener cards, pendulums, dowsing and similar activities that might have given stoned teenage girls a giggle in their bedrooms during the late 70s or early 80s. We’re not talking about The Exorcist or any Scanners-type activity here.

2011: The year of sci-fi spam, Assyrian tearaways and sexy robot talk

Thanks to the incredibly garish, possibly seizure-inducing end of year report sent out to bloggers by WordPress, I know that the most viewed posts since the blog started a year ago are:

• 1 Beautiful Spam II
• 2 Fμckbird and Jim: James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle
• 3 The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Groping: Japanese Onomatopoeia
• 4 Smutty Letters of James Joyce: Stephen Hawking Version
• 5 Kids today… (in the Assyrian Empire, 2800 BC)

At first it may seem strange that a post about spam was more widely read than a bunch of pornographic letters by a famous author and full of search engine red flag obscenities, but the explanation is that a famous living author (William Gibson) linked to the spam post, and his thousands of followers did the rest.  Otherwise Fμckbird and Jim: James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle would be by far the most visited and linked page on the site, you dirty little brown-arsed blackguards. It’s funny that #4 is merely a suggestion that one has the aforementioned letters read out by speech synthesis software for comedic, de-sexying effect. You never know what’s going to tickle people. Unless you’re James Joyce, in which case the thing tickling people will probably be your fat purple mickey.

Actually, it’s always a pretty safe bet that anything sexual will get lots of hits. I mean… duh. Combine the words “groping” and “Japanese” and you’ve got blogging gold. I didn’t do it on purpose, though. I was just interested in the fact that the Japanese have onomatopoeia for everything, including (of course) groping.

The post at #5- evidence that “things ain’t what they used to be” miserablism is eternal- had an unexpected side effect: I don’t know why it’s so, but it was revealed to me that people are constantly searching for information about the Assyrian Empire. Obviously on the vastness of the internet somebody somewhere is bound to be looking for almost anything you can think of at any given moment, but nonetheless the steady stream of “Assyrian Empire” queries seems surprising to me.

Beautiful Spam III: “This is the carrot on a stick.”

Nine months on from my previous forays into spam land, I’m still finding it far too hilarious that New York’s hub of aggressively New Yorkish, new media, too-cool-for-school digitalism Rhizome still has a feed that’s absolutely riddled with spam, like some sad old BBS from the Nineties. I hardly ever see spam anywhere else but on Rhizome, these days. Obviously they’re too busy commissioning baffling applets that break everyone’s browsers to bother with anything so mundane and uncool as preventing their RSS feed being used as a spam hose.

I’ve removed the actual product names to avoid inadvertently encouraging or attracting spammers myself, but the recent crop of messages all contain references to blatantly bogus, vaguely science-fictional creams and tablets whose provenance and purpose is always conveniently vague.  One of them made frequent references to stem cells. If what they’re trying to sell genuinely has any stem cells in it, I don’t think I want to know where they came from. While I do personally know a considerable amount on the subject of stem cells because I used to work in a place that specialised in genomics and biotechnology, most sensible people will surely not need a background in Life Sciences to know that buying alleged “stem cells” off the internet and then rubbing them on your face and/or genitals is unlikely to have much effect.

There were several other dodgy products on offer, but I’ve replaced them all here with the phrase “Soylent Green” to convey the slightly tawdry and possibly immoral sci-fi sheen of these unsolicited CG word salads.

I always knew I could count on SOYLENT GREEN and, the other day, I was right. You should understand how SOYLENT GREEN will impact your life. This is the carrot on a stick.

Play him off, Keyboard Cat… Forever. And ever. AND EVER.

What do you get if you combine Eraserhead, Bagpuss and Keyboard Cat? This:

… in which an unfortunate hamster is crammed into a sock and condemned to play the drum part of a song that will never end, a tormented rodent playing Sisyphus as if he were Ringo Starr. A cat’s thousand yard stare conveys the horror of your own fingers playing Hell’s music without your body’s permission or control, like the grafted-on hands of Orlac. And an obese kiddy fiddler with learning disabilities sings in his reedy castrato voice that Jesus loves him, not even realising that Jesus has in fact already condemned him to the blackest pit for all eternity, and that’s precisely where he is now. The souls of all the little victims he stuffed into his attic crawlspace look on.

This was a children’s TV show, apparently.

The vanity of evil

Recently I was looking at a book about the world’s most photographed people. The book was published by the National Portrait Gallery in London and is called ‘Knit Twenty Outfits for Pet Monkeys at Home’- no, not really. Obviously it’s called ‘The World’s Most Photographed’. It’s by Robin Muir.

Anyway, the inevitable chapter about Adolf Hitler had this fabulous picture of the Führer looking exactly like the totally camp and podgy old knob end he really was [left].

< “Fierce”, “work it bitch”, and so forth. Hitler in Lederhosen, Munich circa 1926, camp as Christmas.

Nihon brainwash

More mutated, hypertrophied idiot-savantism from the Galapagos of the advertising world, Japan (see also Kawaii terror). The examples below have an added level of mind mangling daftness because OCD Youtube mentalists have taken it upon themselves to collate (or curate?) them in an almost anthropological manner.

First of all, backwards time travel in terms of Pretz advertising, i.e. apparently starting with the most recent, most sane, and therefore most dull. Eventually we reach the first and arguably most demented Ur-Pretz song and dance at about 2:16. Commercial Zero, if you like.

Pretz are, as the name may or may not suggest to you, a brand of vaguely pretzel-like Japanese snacks. Japan likes your pretzels and therefore we will have them, but silly gaijin didn’t you know they could be improved by being made perfectly straight and flawlessly cylindrical instead of looking like actual food?