What would happen if the Queen of England visited a chat room? Well, we’ll never really know, but one of Eric D. Snider’s columns gives a pretty believable depiction…

Here’s the text, verbatim, from a spam e-mail I just got:

Dear asutt13 ,

Hi,

Would you like to be able to count on your celphone
Increase signal strenth
Less static
Inexpensive booster antenna
Easy to install

<mutters at spammers for being so stupid>

“I was writing ‘paper, on the PC, and it was like BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!” Let’s just be glad that, judging from the e-mail excerpt also featured on Apple’s site, this particular user writes much better than she speaks…

Interesting link spotted on Metafilter: the Language Museum. Samples of pretty much every language you can think of, along with an English translation…

Reviewuate. Medireview. Retrireview. New words in the English lexicon? No, they’re just the result of an incredibly stupid Javascript-defanging mechanism on the part of Yahoo Mail. Seems that Yahoo has since realized their mistake: though the filter is still present, it now simply adds an underscore to the seven suspect words instead of replacing them with synonyms.

I’ve ranted many times about the weird and/or stupid search requests which have led to my site in several blog entries, but I think I may have just found the first relatively disturbing search request I’ve seen in my logs: chippendale’s glee club.

So how did the depraved searcher who was looking for such an unusual all-male revue end up at my site? Well, I mentioned a hypnotist who convinced a number of people that they were Chippendale’s dancers, along with the various clubs showcased at college orientation, in my 21 August 2001 blog entry…

As I was sitting in front of the television, flipping through the channels as if I had a case of itchy remote finger, I noticed a headline staring at me through the screen as I rushed past Headline News. The results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, it said with its silent, typographical gaze, its “i”s staring right at my face, had been announced not long ago, reason enough for such an easily amused person as myself to be as elated as a geek hearing the Windows start-up sound blaring from the other room on Christmas morning…

Yet another subject line from the spam files: “Hello djoss ! YOU CAN BOOST THE RELIABILITY OF WINDOWS” Wow, they just keep getting more and more wrong each time…

Though I’m still trying to get a quiz bowl team started at Mercer (and wondering whether I’ll make it onto Jeopardy, for that matter), I still have fond memories of my high school academic team. And it turns out, there are some major quiz bowl geeks (and I use that term in the most positive sense possible!) out there on the Internet. Earlier today, for instance, I stumbled across K. Michael Wilcox’ quiz bowl page, which contains such odds and ends as unofficial quiz bowl terminology (I could’ve used quite a few of these terms myself!) and a packet of Warner Brothers animation-related quiz bowl questions (no, none of the answers involve “Bang! Zoom! Right in the kisser!”).

Fort Myers, FL: A former manager and employee of a convenience store returned to the place they met for their wedding – the 7-Eleven at 7:11 a.m. on July 11. (from the Macon Telegraph‘s Weird News page)