"When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect – but do not believe him. Never put your trust in anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair or lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel Laureate, may be wrong... So you must always be skeptical – always think for yourself." --Linus Pauling

3.26.2006

From the spam folder...

Like many of you, I regularly check my junk e-mail folder to make sure that something important is not slipping by. There is another reason though. If anyone is ever going to offer up the secrets of the universe to me (AT AN INSANELY LOW PRICE! FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY!), I know it's going to come from a seemingly disreputeable source.

Even mythically this is the way it's always been. Eve got the skinny on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil not from the Big CEO at the top, but from the lowly serpent. Who was probably an intern and not even supposed to be there that day.

When you think about it, omnipotence was probably really easy back in the day, when there was like... one dude and his gal. But then the franchise grew and grew, authority was delegated, and now even when someone really good and worthy prays the request gets caught up in a bureaucratic morass of interoffice politics and middle-management assholes.

Anyway...

Looking through the junk I noticed the sender's names on some of them are just, well, awesome. They sound like they were generated by a computer program with a mad love for Charles Dickens and maybe Damon Runyon and Will Eisner. Check it out:

Peony Burkes, Miltiades Hendershott, Sherlock Gadbois, Ethelinda Krawczyk, Coinneach Whitmarsh, Snooker S. Insists, Angrily T. Bastille, Zipporah Bevel, Odin Raimondi, Madhavi Ambrosino, Lamentation H. Keyword, Urszula Delfino, Vasanta Wease, Herring Josiah, Kaapo Fair, Lorca Verdun, Nanuk Mcquaig, Sakura Barbaro

Fun, fun, fun. For what it's worth, my fave name on the list is Angrily T. Bastille. Is five minutes is too long to speculating on what the 'T' stands for? I hope it's Tourettes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I thought I was the only one who wondered about those names.