not falling down

Have I mentioned yet that I’m done with school? I’m done with school, as of the day after my birthday. I ended up with two Bs and a C, balancing the two Bs and an A from last semester, and finish my first year of postgraduate education with a pristinely average 3.00. I did some complete crap work, in places, this spring; I got thoroughly and undeservingly rogered in others. It all balances out, in 3.00 Land.

One more year of this and I’m done with school forever. Whoof. I am ready for that.

Maria and I were discussing the increasingly esoteric and convoluted nature of spam, just now, including the fact that much of bulk email no longer serves a discernible purpose. I frequently receive spam from nonsense names, advertising nothing, free of hyperlinks or parsible sentences.

I pointed out that one reason it’s gotten so complicated is the constant, high-speed arms race between spammer and anti-spam software vendor; as new regular expressions are devised and new efforts made to beat them, whole fields of technique can be created and discarded in a week. And then Maria said something that chilled me to my very bones.

“What if,” she said, “the vendors are putting spam out there just to keep selling their software?”

I’m terrified, now, that she might be right.

Anyway, read Spam As Folk Art.

It’s a grand and venerable tradition, the exclamation of “That Would Be a Great Name for a Band.” It dates back nearly to middle school, when I was getting really into Dave Barry, learning–along with the rest of my generation–to listen for the perfect combination of nonsense with which to someday label our cathartic college noise.

But, as I’ve got four very good band names and don’t anticipate the need for any more, I have to concede that Stephen’s friend Nivolas has an excellent point. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to move on… to ridiculous names for horses.