Tetherd Cow Ahead

Spam Observations #47

You may remember some suggestions previously here on The Cow for methods by which spammers might… hmmm… let’s say elevate… their craft, a concept inspired originally by a shining example from one of the Masters of Literature at how it could conceivably be done.

Well, this morning I had a communication from one Carmelo Butcher*, who is pitching what I assume to be some kind of health tonic in the following verse:

The more you think
The more stars blink
They are young today
But were elder yesterday
Want to live free and become a star
Get a good health and be the best by far

Oh someone pluck out mine eyes and feed them to the crows.

Carmelo manages, in one fell swoop, to demonstrate that he is challenged in literature, physics, philosophy and salesmanship.

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*Interestingly, a qualified Google search turns up only two results for a ‘Carmelo Butcher’ (and I suppose I’m adding another one with this post). One Carmelo appears to be a randomly generated name in something called ‘The Nashville Guide’ and the other a spammer.

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Spam Observations #46

Ah, dear Cowmrades. This morning, quite out of the blue I had an email from the lovely Mrs Shirley Oswald, who, as I’m sure you can’t fail to know, is the Presidential Library & Museum Former Director International Online Lottery Co-coordinator.*

Attention: Dear Prominent User Of The Internet

– she begins, momentarily staying my hand from punching the ‘Junk’ button. ‘Cause the Internet is BIG, right, and being a prominent user is important, surely!

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and your family? I hope
this mail meets you in a perfect condition.

Well, Shirl, there was a little rain damage and some teeth marks, but it’s mostly perfectly readable if somewhat grammatically innovative.

This is from a total cash prize of US$600,000.00 dollars, given to the first FIFTY (50) people who will be compensated in this world internet programs. All participants were selected randomly from World Wide Web site Through computer draw system and extracted from over 700.000 companies we are using this opportunity to thank you for using the internet daily.

Sadly, Mrs O, that paragraph is completely incomprehensible in a linguistic sense, but ignoring the sentence structure and just trying to extract some approximate meaning from the words themselves indicates to me that you’re offering me some money for merely using the internet on a daily basis. How novel! And furthermore, how entirely stupid!

Due to your effort, using internet programs indoor and in your office, We want to compensate you…

Ah, Shirley, I see! You have made the mistake of thinking I use Microsoft products! No, no, no Mrs O! I’m a loyal Mac user! I don’t need any compensation for using my internet programs, they work fine! In fact, mostly I even enjoy using them! And it matters not a jot whether I use them indoor or in my open-air office among the lantana and serrated tussock (my goodness, how did you know that?). That being said, I can entirely understand your error in thinking I might be an unfortunate PC user, and how a kind-hearted person such as yourself, backed by the generosity and philanthropy of the Presidential Library & Museum, might be overcome with grief and remorse for those sad and disadvantaged persons who have been driven to the edge of madness by attempting to get Vista to do anything useful. I doff my hat to your magnanimous and empathetic spirit!

…and show our gratitude to you with the sum of $500,000.00 United States Of America Dollars

Now hang on a tic, Mrs O, you lost me there. Wasn’t that a TOTAL cash prize of $600,000 divided among 50 lucky Prominent Users of the Internet? By my reckoning that’s $12,000 per credulous chump lucky winner. Where did the $500k come into the picture? That figurin’ is more confusing than The Monty Hall Problem.

Please I will like you to accept this token with good faith as this is from the bottom of my heart.

Dear Mrs Oswald, there’s nothing I’d like better than to accept your ‘bottom-of-your-heart’ offer of 500,000 US dollars, only, something tells me that if I showed even the slightest interest in your proposal, I’d find you reaching your hand over your kindly, bespectacled, grandmotherly visage and tearing your face off Mission-Impossible-style to reveal a swarthy, unshaven, cigar-chomping spammer.

Call me cynical, but that’s what becomes of being a Prominent User of the Internet.

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*I’ve never encountered a co-coordinator before, but guess this is entirely possible, if, for instance, there are two coordinators working together. Although I’m not convinced that the extra ‘co’ is entirely necessary even in that circumstance.

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Spam Observations #46

I notice that it’s been quite some while since I’ve posted up one of my Spam Observations. This is not for a want of actual spam, you understand – I get bucketloads of that every day. No, it’s mostly because the quality of the spam I’ve been getting has plateaued out into a banal greyish phlegm with nothing at all to distinguish it from the efforts of a million monkeys at typewriters. Gone is the time when spammers actually tried to sell their useless gimcrackery. Their efforts now seem to have degenerated into a kind of indifferent spew aimed at… well, who can say what it is they hope to achieve? I certainly can’t see how a one line email apathetically suggesting the purchase of watch-that-looks-like-a-Rolex-but-isn’t can be even remotely persuasive as a sales pitch. But hey, it must work in some way or another or I guess they’d stop doing it.

So while my new best buddy Evan Eva* doesn’t reach the poetic or literate heights that we’ve seen in the past from Landon Flanagan, Rhonda K or Raymondo, he at least got a laugh out of me with his email this morning:

From: siredd@fr-kristiansen.no
Subject: Interesting mp3 Demi Moore
Date: 11 April 2008 7:33:09 PM

Jennifer Lopez Full video without cowards. The dvd is Interesting! Only 1 day trial – get this Shocking photo now!

w00t! I’ve only got the JLo video that comes with the cowards, so I can’t wait to see the one that’s coward-free! And most Demi Moore recordings I’ve heard are less than interesting. Oh how I love the internets!!

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*There’s that hint of Spammer Gender Confusion again…

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Faithful Acowlytes,

Some shithead spammer has found a way to invade my posts, appending all kinds of rubbish to the actual post content (usually in the form of hundreds of smutty URLs). As near as I can tell, all the stuff is actually invisible to readers, although I can see it in the post edit code (they’ve evidently done this on purpose – the code renders all the smutty URLs unviewable). I haven’t the foggiest why they would do that, but then I have no inkling of the cretinous thought processes of spammers. In the process they have somehow also interfered with the commenting structure, so you may or may not be able to comment.The damage is vast and I need to investigate how this has happened but I don’t have the time just now. I’ll get onto it as soon as I can. Can I ask anyone who’s reading just to leave a comment so I can check that things are normal from your side? Also, if anything looks peculiar (well, more peculiar than usual) please let me know. I don’t know what these fuckwits have done, and I have no idea of the scope of the damage at this moment.

Man I hate these morons.

~Reverend.

UPDATE: I think I’ve rectified the problem and cleaned up most of the mess. I never lock Comments on my posts, so if any of you find that you can’t leave a comment on Cow posts, please email me [reverend-AT-tetherdcow.com] and let me know. I have no way of knowing if Comments are locked (other than investigating settings on individual posts) since for me the Comment field is always available in this particular scam (Mr Spam Shithead has been very crafty in this respect).

We now (hopefully) return to normal programming.

Well, colour me impressed! I must admit, I had rather low expectations for the outcome of this particular mêlée but once again my loyal readers have dazzled me with their wit and their prowess in the literary arena. The task was to write a piece of Sildenafil Spam in the style of your favourite poet. The Cownoscenti rose to the challenge like they’d been popping the little blue numbers all night.

It was a tough call to sift out a winner.

Universal Head set the tone early by channelling Ted Hughes as his muse, and he held the field for quite a few days in front of a good many contenders. Jedimacfan completely missed the point and showed that he is probably already employed by could easily rival the spammers, with an effort that would undoubtedly cause Joyce Kilmer to writhe in horror. And later topped it with something even more gag-worthy. Cissy Strutt managed an awesomely impressive e. e. cummings-style creation and it has to be said that if spamming was around in his day and nominative determinism has anything in it, I’m sure cummings would have been right in the spammy fray.

Casey‘s muse, Thomas Spams Eliot, shows us why his initials anagrammatize handily into ‘toilets’ with some verse that doesn’t stray altogether too far from something the real T. S. might have penned. A very worthy effort in two parts, and very nearly the winner.

Sagacious Hillbilly managed to persuade Tennyson to ring in a whole cast of reprobates to dance a spammy jig and Tequila Mockingbird fired right back, but alas, The Reverend was quite unable to work out who she was riffing on. My bad, TMock!

A guest visit from Spam Ayres* cements her position as the person you’d most like to avoid at a party, and Phoebe Fay‘s re-interpretation of Ozymandias gives new meaning to the term ‘rock hard erection’.

But the person who I have chosen to be the Tetherd Cow Ahead Literary Ambassador to SpamCon 08† is…

Tastes Like Chicken!

Yes, TLC managed almost to reach the lofty heights of The Cow’s own Laureate Rupert Brookes’ wonderful creation, with a William Cullen Bryant-style ode that is at once tragic and hopeful. If ever there was a romantic paean to the powers of Viagra, this is it.

Tastes Like Chicken, The Cow Salutes you. I will need a mailing address where I can send you your prize. Write to me at [reverend-at-tetherdcow.com] with your PO Box or park bench number.

Thank you everyone! Once again, I doff my bone-clad top-hat to yez all!

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*US readers should probably go here to understand the humour in this. (The entry would have had a much greater chance of winning had it been an audio recording, btw)

†There is no such thing, alas. The reason for this is fairly obvious – if all the world’s spammers were to meet in one place at the same time, then I believe that not a single person on the entire planet would object to the deployment of a small nuclear device at that location.

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Spam Observations #45

Terrapraeta, longtime Cow reader and sometime commenter, earlier this week had a cheery howdy-doody from her new-found friend Rhonda K Lugo. With her well-honed Cow sensibilities, TP instantly knew I would need to bring Rhonda’s musings to the attention of the Cownoscenti.

Those of you with keen memories will recall that a little while back I suggested to Fabron Jenkins and his spammy pals that their ham-fisted wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach could do with some re-imagining (as they like to say in the ad business) and that they therefore might like to consider waxing a little more poetic with their paeans to Sildenafil.

Sure enough, with the sophistication of Keats and Brooke and the subtlety of Yeats and Eliot, Rhonda K is first out of the starting gates:

Now that you’ve got a girl that’s hot
You wanna screw her juicy twat.
She’s full of passion, she’s so nice!
But would your penile size suffice?
Not sure she will long for more?
You need a wang she would adore!
But how to raise it long and thick?
Your only hope is MegaDik!
You’ll get so wanted super-size
And see wild craving in her eyes!
Your rod will stuff her poon so deep,
Tonight you’ll hardly fall asleep!

Ah, the passion! The yearning! The verve! The style! Not quite how Rupert would have put it, fair enough, but hey, at least Rhonda’s giving it a go!

So. You all know what the The Reverend does when he sees that the ante is desirous of upping – yes, that’s right, he holds a competition!

Namely: Write a piece of spam in the style of your favourite poet.

Now pay careful attention to The Rules:

• Your favourite poet may not be yourself.

• Your favourite poet may not be Joey Polanski.

• Your favourite poet may not be Rhonda K Lugo.

• NO references to Rasputin. Save that for January 1.

OK. Have at it Acowlytes. There will be a prize. If Joey wins he can nominate to whom his prize is delivered.