Antique & Classic Cars Blog

When we were kids, my mother would sometimes say as she walked out of an unusual movie with my brother and me, “whoever wrote that must have been on drugs.”

She never learned to use a computer, but if she were around using one today, I’m sure she’d have that comment for most of the spam that plagues our inboxes. I’ve spoken of this before.

The one that caught my eye today says, “Your guestbook is example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulation!” (no “s”).

I think more than drugs is at work here.

These words do form a sentence but they communicate no intelligible thought. They convey no meaning. Either they have been typed and propagated by a person heckling us from some remote country where no English is spoken and the words are just jumbled together from English internet content, or it’s randomly generated by a computer.

Either way, someone is responsible for it, which is incomprehensible. Those advertising something, OK, you’re just annoying me and I’m going to delete your post like every other living being who receives it without even considering opening it.

But these scores of messages that communicate nothing really top the list for fruitless human behavior. Some artists, like Yeats, for example, and a meaningful percentage of the rock ‘n’ roll catalog, were in fact on drugs. Saying that of spam writers gives them too much credit. They’re on a campaign to squander human productivity.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.