floorpie

Dorf on Gol… I mean: SPAM on SPAM

From: Spammy Spammerton@SpamSpam.Spam
To: chosen few
Subject: Live and Work Like a RockStar

The hardest part of your job will be taking checks to your bank and depositing them and I’ve even made that easier.

You’ve probably heard stories about people making whopping huge money online, but you thought they were the big corporate execs, famous programmers, or boy-geniuses. That’s the furthest from the truth as you can get! It’s people like you and me that are making the real money. Yep, people like YOU AND ME!

I can make you $3,000 to $5,000 a week without leaving your home, in your spare time, with my plan called “Mailbox Money” and you can achieve complete financial freedom by learning the most profitable marketing technique ever created – it’s called bulk email, or SPAM. All you have to do is convince ONE PERSON OUT OF A THOUSAND to buy your stuff and you’re FILTHY RICH. insert questionable mathematics

I’m going to ask you four simple questions. If you answer YES to all of them, then I can almost promise that you will make at least $100,000 using bulk email this year:
Do you have basic experience with the web?
Do you have a computer and an Internet connection?
Do you have a few hours each day of free time?
Do you want to earn some extra money with an eye towards complete financial freedom?

If you answer YES to these questions, you could be making $5,000 – $20,000 per week working from your home. Here’s the deal. You give me $19.99. I give you ALL THE TOOLS YOU NEED to become a successful, high profit email bulk emailer! etc, etc, send me your money now, SUCKA! Despite the fact that this come-on is a thinly-veiled example of exactly what you are spamming about

It’s a wide road, four lanes to a direction, and crossing it on a left turn means crossing a lot of real estate. To it’s merit, the intersection is fairly well-lit in the evening, bathed in the gangrenous glow of those sodium lights purported to be cheaper and longer-lasting than the clean pure white-lights of my childhood. Sitting int the pole position while waiting for the light to change to comforting green can often be an exercise in frustration. Somehow, the wait is always roughly 3 hours too long at this particular light…but at least there are plenty of things to look at. Gas station on my left, high-end apartment complex far over on the right, a small plaza area at 10 o’clock with the requisite McDonald’s, hair and nail salons, and video stores, and then, of course, the cars cars cars.

One such car is passing in front of me, executing one of the aforementioned left turns that can leave you vulnerable for interminable lengths. It’s a small white car with no name, made in the mid-whenevers, that will forever and ever, never dazzling anyone, simply plodding along through its immortal life, and always having at least two emptied fast food bags crumpled in the passenger seat foot-well.

There is another car in this scene, a taupe station wagon of some kind. Its travels begin in the extreme right corner of my vision, continue into the previously empty lane beside me, and then rush to meet the small white car in the middle of the intersection. I assume they are good friends.

I am mistaken, they are horrible horrible enemies. Taupe station wagon greets white no-name with a horrific shove, spinning it around two full rotations until it slams into a signal pole, all the while flinging tiny shards of itself every which way. I have a feeling that white no-name may have cheated on taupe station wagon to have illicited such a response, seeing as TSW never even flashed it’s happy red lights in greeting and instead met WNN with full force.

I pull over to survey the damage and check for injuries. The drivers of TSW and WNN are shaken, not stirred, but that seems to be all. It would appear that neither one of them had the ability to control the avid yearnings for confrontation of their machines. I leave them to their gentle coo-ings and lamentations of their injured partners.

The Bard doth speak!

Dear Applicant:

Thank you for the interest you have shown in employment with Precision Dynamics. Your experience and achievements are quite impressive; however, your qualifications do not meet our current requirements. We will keep your application/resume active for 60 days after the date it was received for future consideration.

Again, thanks you for your interest in Precision Dynamics and we wish you success in your future career endeavors.

Human Resources

HA! That kind of rejection always cracks me up. So many sincere personal touches to solace me with.

It’s September 12th.
I’ve updated my resume and if you, or someone you know, is in a hiring-type position, feel free to take a look…oh please do! If you’re interested, I most want to be a Product Designer. And so it goes.

I live in an apartment complex around which the main internal driveway snakes. Mini-driveways shoot off from this main driveway in a sub-arterial fashion, off which are a multitude of covered parking spaces for the appropriate tenants. Each of these little alcoves form a virtual car-neighborhood, where you see the same inhabitants day after day, and turnover is limited by the turnover the actual, human owners.

Nevertheless, three to four times a month, a yellow and blue tow-truck backs in to the end of my particular artery, and presumably picks up an expired auto. This usually happens in the early morning where it’s back-up beeping admirably drives me to distraction and loathing, and, effectively ruins my mood for the rest of the day.

My question to you is: what the huh? Is this the same car exploding several times a year, or different cars that are perhaps born periodically in the back corner of my little alcove, unfortunately misshapen and doomed to clogged fuel injectors and cracked flywheels from the get-go. These poor monstrosities appear in this world, mewling pathetically, and no only pain from the first headlight ignition. I pity them really, each brother and sister being dragged unceremoniously to a scrap heap burial, mere moments after their birth. Poor poor autos.

PS It seems to me that cars and trucks large enough to need the back-up beeping to announce their presence…don’t

It’s hot today, so a Slurpee seemed in order. So, off to 7-Eleven I went, to create a masterpiece of frozen-ish Coke and Wild Cherry. I love 7-11 as much as the next guy, no doubt, but does this ever happen to you?

Dude #1: Hey bro, you know what I’m in the mood for?
Dude #2: What’s that, brah?
D1: A little taste of The Orient, ba-BEE!
D2: You mean a little delight from The Far East?
D1: You know it, boy-EEE!
D2: I know just the place…

Seriously, who buys sushi from 7-Eleven?

This weekend, among other things, ADG and I wandered into an ill-organized garage sale that, despite it’s disarray, had a fairly fascinating collection of books for sale. Many of them were political or historical in nature, some in the original Russian, some from what was probably a student of psychology’s bookshelf, several “classics”, and then a large stack of children’s books…though there was no sign, either in person or in the rest of the sale’s contents, that a child ever actually existed.

Books were a dollar a piece for paperback, two for hardcover, and offers welcome if the prices were somehow too steep. I bought five books for five dollars, four of which went home with me, and one with ADG… strangely being one she had been looking for in real bookstores but never found.

Of my new to me books, I just read Camus’ The Stranger, and upon reaching the back page, I found a note scrawled in cheap ballpoint-blue, bracketing the typical author’s biography like this:

4/19/79

ALBERT CAMUS was born in Mondovi,
Algeria in 1913. After winning a degree in
philosophy, he worked at various jobs…
…Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
He was killed in an automobile acci-
dent on January 4th, 1960.

To Andrew:
A. Camus
I hope my letter of recommendation
helps you attain the college ofyour choice!

It hardly seems possible that Camus could have written this in 1979 when he died in 1960. The ink of the date being slightly darker than the ink of the inscription, however, suggests that it’s possible. This particular book was published in 1954, so there was still time for Albert to love and laugh and sign books for his friends before his death. Strange also, was a similarly scrawled note on the title page of the book; this time in red felt pen and in a different hand:

Andrew
Michael
Carp….

Harvard
University
Class of 1983
[and then in blue] (Transfer student)

It would seem that the mysterious recommendation alluded to was successful, but would the possessor have really held on to both the letter and this book before using either 20 years later, and then inscribing their old book with their current college? Interesting, huh? Any theories?

Big ideas come from small people

I was motivated, today, to think about the nature of self, and, the innate potential of humanity. So many times (at least personally), we (or I) have ideas or thoughts that pop into our heads, or come through long deliberation. Thoughts that make us stop and say , “huh…wait, what?”… thoughts that, to us, seem profound, possibly revolutionary; and, at the very least, worth some good, hard, exploration. We dismiss those thoughts, nine times out of ten, with phrases like, “Well, if it was that clever, someone would have thought of it by now,” or, “I’m just a _____ what would I know about ____?”. Then, we laugh at ourselves, and shrug our ideas off, assuming our own plain-ness and stupidity, and continuing instead to remain in our allotted boxes. Hopefully, we were smart enough not to share our pie-in-the-sky with friends or coworkers, where we are sure we would have been ridiculed for our creativity.

But why should it be that way?

The world was flat until someone had the courage to intimate it wasn’t. Fire was a mystery until, for someone, it suddenly wasn’t. Why, then, can’t we be that someone? We’re not scientists you say. Perhaps not, but we’re all explorers, and no one knows the nature of at least your existence better than you do yourself. Besides, “scientist” is just a word.

Therefore, I have a suggestion. I suggest we all explore our ideas, we all take a chance on thinking of something new, we all explore our minds and feeligs and thoughts to their fruition without fear of reproach or dismissal. I think, really, that it’s our individual destinies to do so… and, even if it’s not, is it really all that bad of a thing to do anyway?

Back in High School English class, we had what we called “quick-writes”. They were basically just a blur of words on any subject vomited on to a page within a three minute time span. If we were ever stuck on what to write about, we were instructed to repeat the phrase “I don’t know what to write” until either time or inspiration caught up with us. My teacher would call them fake-spontaneously (meaning spontaneously to my classmates and me, but perfectly planned to her) and we would begrudgingly pull out a piece of paper and start writing. Many of my quick-writes were about quick-writes. At any rate, I feel like writing now, it being one of my most treasured things to do, but I have too many ideas to pick just one, and at the moment they are all tripping over themselves in my head. So, this is my quick-write:

The first time I can remember having that pit-of-your-stomach sinking feeling was when I got on the wrong bus home sometime in first grade. To be more specific, I was put on the wrong bus by my well-meaning-in-retrospect, but horrible-devil-woman-at-the-time teacher. It’s really the only memory I have from that time period, and I expect that I’ve blocked out the rest of my childhood from the sheer horror of this singular experience.

I was new in town, which is wont to happen when you’re a military brat, and I’d not yet gathered around me the protective circle of friends that I eventually would. It was my first day, after-all, or more likely my second; my mom almost surely would have at least taken me in on the first. I knew exactly what my bus number was, this being the type of thing that’s very important to me; but, as my teacher walked me out of class, her hand on the back of my right shoulder, she directed me toward what I new was not my number. I was too shy, at the time, to say anything; but, as my panic grew I did manage to mumble something and point to the left. My hand swung around and landed my pointed appendage on a beatific scene: bright yellow school bus, dazzling in the afternoon sun, a meadow filled with bunny rabbits and doe-eyed, err, doe in quiet repose behind it, children positively skipping onto number 16 where they were showered in candy and happy smiles. Alas, though, Ms. Sumthinorother *tsk-tsked* me and swung my body instead toward number 13: a charred vehicle resplendent in bloody spikes and carcasses, storm clouds gathering over it and the brimstone pits over which it swung precariously, Satan laughing hysterically as he whipped chained and beaten children aboard.

I rode that bus to the bitter end. Stop after unfamiliar stop streamed past my window as more and more strange kids went off to their happy lives. I considered getting off on a few occassions, with the idea that maybe I was just one or two streets over, and I could easily find my way home. Thankfully, I didn’t, or I’m fairly sure I’d be out there to this day. Eventually, the cheese stands alone, and the bus driver looked up in that obscenely wide mirror that only they get to have and probably order special to put in their after-hours Volvos and said, “Are you on the right bus, honey?” and I replied, grateful for having finally been understood, “No. No I am not!”

My apartment complex has installed some new washing machines. It seems that these will be slightly more resistant to my usual efforts, so that’s a drawback. They are the front-loading type, though, which I think means more clothes per wash, and less detergent for same. However, they jacked up the price 25%; and, instead of the paltry buck-a-load, it’s now the harder to get buck-and-a-quarter.

I know, you’re crying for me on the inside.