Spam As Folk Art for 2006 September

Permalink [No comments] Fri Sep 01 2006 07:01 Spam!: The Musical:

In a world of fragmented pop culture, spam is the only mass media left. Everyone gets spam; more importantly, everyone gets everyone's spam. It's a completely shared experience, mediated only by the quality of your filter.

Shared experiences filter out into the larger culture. Faithful readers are familiar with Outside the Inbox and other examples of music inspired by spam. I think it's time to take it a step further and make spam into a big-budget Broadway musical. I was inspired by a spam I got today ("rufous is strabismus but ibm", which has a Singing in the Rain feel to it), which started out:

M0RTGGAGE
We make it happen everyday.

With a little work this turns into the opening song:

M0RTGGAGE!
We make it happen everyday!
M0RTGGAGE!
You want a house, you got to pay!
M0RTGGAGE!
Come on and sign your life away!
M0RTGGAGE!

After I came up with this idea Sumana was reading her morning websites:

"Wait, why am I reading Websnark?"
"M0RTGGAGE! We make it--"
"What are you doing?"
"See, Spam!: The Musical is not like other musicals..."

Permalink [No comments] Thu Sep 07 2006 17:26 George Bernard Spam:

It may surprise no one to learn that I'm interested in reshuffling public domain texts into new texts. But I've never actually tried my hand at it. I see shuffled public domain texts all the time in spam and it's pretty lousy. It constantly changes tone, lurching from dialogue to description to exposition in one incredibly long unbroken sentence, moving from topic to topic. The most prominent example was the "Master Key" spam series, popular a couple years back, which took as its text an L. Frank Baum book about electricity. I always thought that book must have come preinstalled with spamming software, because the results were only interesting until you did a little detective work and found the source.

But today I got a shuffled spam that was actually pretty good. Here it is, reformatted slightly as a story:

"I can excuse you, Bill, because it's your first day in the Cabinet. That is why I do not feelbound to accept this ultimatum. If you could see a joke, Bill, you wouldn't be the great popular orator you are."

"May we not make a historical reference to the corpse? You can see as much of her as you like when we are married."

"Between you and that tyranny stands the throne. It was not I who bungled the Factory Bill. That is a rather desirable extension of their interests, in my opinion. I only mention it to shew that the Prime Minister does not really wish to kill the veto."

"That can apply to both sides, if you like. He is settling the whole business with the King behind our backs. If I do not stand above them there is no longer any reason for my existence at all."

"Nothing that you can say will make any difference. It is what I am, not what I do, that you must worship in me. I demand an explanation of the words bungling and squabbling."

"They would hardly have ventured on that without a hint from somebody. 'It is what I am, not what I do, that you must worship in me.' And I can keep you to the point, sir, whether it suits you or not."

"If you provoke me, Bill, I'll drive you out of your constituency inside of two months. They sang it under the windows of his hotel next time he came. Thank Heaven, I am not a silly giggler like some I could mention."

"The King enters and waits on the threshold. And when the King is not setting me off, you are. The name you pretended to invent specially for me, the only women in the world for you. And even they can talk of nothing but the servants and the baby."

"My civil list leaves me a poor man among multi-millionaires. Yet we find enough to say to one another when we are alone together. It is looked down on by our men of genius as dirty work."

What's this spam's secret? It's taken from a play, and plays are almost all dialogue (note, though, that even the one stage direction, "The King enters and waits on the threshold", fits in with the dialogue here). More precisely, it's taken from a Shaw play, which inevitably consists of dialogue about one specific topic, and in which any line could come from any character. (More precisely still, it's taken from The Apple Cart.) The result is a text that's tantalizingly close to making sense. Others have noted the pure beauty of this Shavian spam, and I intend to apply its lesson in the future.

Permalink [No comments] Thu Sep 07 2006 20:46 It Pays to Increase Your Spam Power:

Why is "Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases" the top-downloaded ebook at Project Gutenberg, beating out Sherlock Holmes and the Kama Sutra? It's unlikely to be some thoughtless whim of the Internet zeitgeist. Someone at clickolinko speculates it's a popular download for spammers, who crave its piquant and palatable early-20th-century cliches for their subject lines. Indeed, "architectural grandeur" and "indwelling delight" sound just like the subjects of spam we've received; though, in fairness to the memory of 15KUP compiler Grenville Kaiser (author of numerous public speaking books), so do any two words picked at random and stuck next to each other.

As the Transcriber's Note says, "The blandness of contemporary (2006) speech would be relieved by the injection of some of these gems." I'm sure spammers would be only too happy to oblige. The appointed function of 15KUP is to allow the lowest of pitchmen to simulate the trite and commonplace cant of his social betters. This mummery of words, hollowest of hollow shams, need last only long enough for its perpetrator to meet some grovelling goal. Like spam filter-baffle, 15KUP glibly condones the elevation of syntax over semantics, a twisting of the English language in order to sneak past a filter.

Permalink [No comments] Fri Sep 08 2006 05:49 Multiple Explosions:

Permalink [No comments] Sat Sep 09 2006 06:48 Spam For Me, But Not For Thee:

At the bottom of a spam:
NEVER SEND SPAM. IT IS BAD.

Permalink [No comments] Tue Sep 19 2006 07:49 Your coat, mustache monkey:

There's a new spam subject genre in town. I've only seen it used to advertise Cialis (more precisely, CIA9LIS), but Kevan's posted about it before and it's time it got its due. This subject follows a familiar pattern: a trite advertising phrase followed by a randomly selected string. But where other, similar subjects use random words or sequences of letters, these subjects use short phrases.

Random phrases are no strangers to spam (their source is the web2a dictionary, and possibly Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases), but this is the first time they've figured so prominently in the subject. Plus, there's the comma. Other random strings were just tacked on to the end of their come-ons. The SAFA archives bring up some quick examples: People Laugh at You? HWElb and It`s time to Refill agrarian. We spam-mockers could make the two parts fit together for comedic purposes but we kind of had to work at it. These subjects helpfully connect the two parts with a comma, yielding bizarre glimpses into surreal realities without us having to do any work at all: