abstractmachine

I’m getting swamped with Spam, and the WordPress filters can’t seem to stop it anymore. So I’m changing the rules for posting comments. I don’t want to close comments, and I don’t want to moderate everything, so if you’ve already posted a comment, you’ll pass automatically. But if you haven’t, you’ll have to wait for moderation. Sorry, but as anyone who has a blog knows, there’s a lot of spam. It’s insane.

One thing I have say about spam though, is that I’ve been reading it for years and I find it more and more poetic. Here are some recent examples:

“He went into the street and hailed a cab. He told the driver to go to stalker to fall into the meatgrinder and live. He was lucky. The fool…”

“Brendan said he was going to teach me how to be a judge someday. God help the boy, interjected Mrs. Cooper. That man dresses like a peacock flowering to mate. You may go into our room and watch television, overrode Marie quickly. But only for a half hour — Aww!”

Sometimes, it’s almost a simple haiku:

“in letitia see formaldehyde it place try istanbul , medford try caracas it breadfruit on goldwater the petrify or prince not merlin , stormbound try monsieur not tum”

Let’s try formatting that for a little more style:

in letitia
see formaldehyde

it place
try istanbul ,

medford
try caracas

it breadfruit
on goldwater
the petrify
or prince
not merlin ,

stormbound
try monsieur

not tum

It’s only a matter of time before some smart-ass contemporary artist strikes gold with this powerful new world of spam. If you’ve ever lived in North America, you know that spam has been a viable medium for years — long before it discovered the Internet. In fact the american economy, it might be argued, depends on it. It’s not going away anytime soon.

Whatever the case, we’ve got to get Jean-Pierre Balpe involved. He could finally have a forum for his brilliant poetic generators, and could probably teach a thing or two to these two-bit automatic poets.