Being Mr. Kenny

I’m talking about spam of course! What else could possibly produce such wonderful phrases as that below, and yet be such mindless drivel.

(The title of this post comes from the closing words of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and is applied here frivolously and irrelevantly.)

Anti-spam defences have very effectively wiped out 99% or more of all spam. I receive about 30 spam emails a day, and only once every two months does Gmail let one slip into my inbox. I also get about ten spam comments on this very blog every week, and Akismet has never let me down, not once.

So spammers have had to adapt, and one of their techniques, it seems, is to string together meaningless sentences of random words. Just as it is certain that if you put monkeys to work in front of typewriters for millions of years they will eventually produce Shakespeare, so it is that spammers will once in a while come up with such literary brilliance as this:

Pumpkins cowardice? Fleas bridle askew!

I tell you now, this shall be the new way of asking people how they are. I shall greet my friends with a concerned, “Pupmkins cowardice?” And they shall reply with a hearty, “Fleas bridle askew!”