A couple interesting links culled from Kat‘s blog:

• How similar and/or compatible are you with me? Find out at SimilarMinds.com. (Incidentally, I was 91% similar to and 91% compatible with Kat. Figures. :))
• Y’know those “common bonds” categories on Jeopardy? Wanna see if artificial intelligence is any match for game show contestants? Check out Google Sets and see. ‘Tis a shame, as Kat points out, that it didn’t recognize the names or winning words of National Spelling Bee contestants– though it did recognize the Semisonic song titles and Chinese entrées that I typed in…

From an e-mail notice sent out by my ISP:

To make sure that you continue to have a high-quality experience with your [ISP] email, we will begin automatically emptying all WebMail trash folders on a daily basis, beginning July 5, 2002. Please do not place items in the WebMail trash folder that you would like to keep.

Is it just me, or does the whole premise of this warning sound like the basis for a Computer Stupidity?

Can’t get enough of President Bush’s interesting uses of the English language? Check out DubyaSpeak.com for a whole load of quotations, nicely categorized for easy browsing.

It’s official: Mozilla is no longer in the beta stage. Go get your copy of Mozilla 1.0 now!

This may be one of the most amusing articles on the National Spelling Bee that I’ve read: "Great sports any way you spell it". (Thanks to Ari Goldstein, who says he found out about the link from Bee staffer William Dolan.)

Here’s the actual text of a “medical” spam e-mail that I just received. Misused apostrophes, commas used as apostrophes, misused quotation marks, stupid misspellings…wow, this runs the whole gamut of stupid proofreading.

I guess it’s true: spammers really aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, so to speak.

Edited 2005/01/20 to add: I was sent a cease-and-desist notice by a company which shall remain unnamed, claiming that the spam snippet I had originally posted in this entry violated their trademarks. This, despite the fact that I cannot find anything even remotely resembling the trademarks mentioned in what I quoted. I’ll investigate this further, and may restore it upon further analysis…

Edited 2006/11/02 to add: I had totally forgotten about this post, but to be honest, I thought the company in question didn’t have a legal leg to stand on in the first place even when I received the C&D notice (no doubt they found the original spam with a web search for a certain product name, and didn’t do any further investigation). So I’m reposting the file with a very clear disclaimer at the beginning…and blocking search engine hits to the file in robots.txt just for good measure, so it has to be found through this post.

Redundancy of the day, heard during the play-by-play commentary for a soccer game: “He’s overjoyed with excitement!”

OK, I have to see this episode of Frasier when it comes on next week. I’ve heard from some reliable Websterian sources that it’s a good one– and it couldn’t re-air at a more appropriate time.

(Yes, I know. I don’t watch much TV. What’s wrong with that? ;-))

[Note: TVGuide now states that Frasier will not air at all this Thursday. I don’t get it. The episode that was originally scheduled to air was the one involving the Spelling Bee, naturally…]

Congratulations are due to all 250 people who participated in the National Spelling Bee over the past couple of days. And extra-special congratulations go to Pratyush Buddiga, the winner of that prestigious event. May you, and all the other spellers, lead lives full of prospicience!

OK, seriously… you all ruled. And I’m anxious to see whether JJ Goldstein (how’s it feel to have tied for third?) or Catherine Miller (that distant relative of Webster himself), among others, make it back next year…

Amusing, music-geek-oriented scientific parody (thanks to Kat for the link): Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano. Be sure to read the bibliography; some great intellectual and/or multilingual puns in there…