Better-life, wood-girl

Am I the only one getting this kind of spam? And am I the only one who can't resist the titles?

I don't have to open the email, but I love the reference/title lines. I have this feeling that one day I'm going to use one of them as the title for a book. I wonder if the writer will sue me?

Spam seems to go in cycles - right now in my bulk mail folder I'm getting mostly stock picks. I don't know why - I've never owned a share in my life except the ones that we in British Columbia got from the government in the 80s - each person in BC got 5 shares of the British Columbia Development Corporation - which, of course, are worth absolutely nothing now. But I remember that the certificates were pretty and I have a friend who has hers in a frame on her wall.

The penis enlargement and please your woman cycle seems to be slowing down, while the pharmaceutical cycle is heating up. I sometimes wonder whether the cycles are in some odd way related to me, but if so, I can't figure out why for weeks on end I got dozens of grow your penis emails a day.

And I've noticed as well that the titles change - the content doesn't, but the titles do. Right now, the pharmaceutical people are using words that remind me of the way we used to see swear words in books - R%xlsk*() - except they almost all use Ph and then go from there. But the stock promotion people are using weird double-barrelled made up titles:

Better-life, wood-girl

Tree-hunter, cold-life

River-fire, chill-tiger

I've made those up (except for the wood-girl, which I remembered) but you get the picture. It's as if someone has created a program that picks four words from the dictionary and puts them together pretty much arbitrarily, but occasionally, as with better-life wood-girl, they make a strange and interesting kind of sense. It would be a fun program to have - because titles for books and stories are often hard to create.

Just four words...

So you're a mystery writer and your book has a cat and a house and a police detective but you have no idea what to call it. So you fire up your program and you spin the bottle and you end up with (I of course don't have the program but I'll use my dictionary (I use the Concise Oxford if anybody cares), open it to any page and pick a word, and then continue it four times) -

Mellow-mythos, shuffle-discipline

Okay, so it works almost as well with a dictionary, although I bet their program, based on what I've seen, tends toward single syllable words and one two-syllable word. Better rhythm, I expect.

Anyway, that's what's been on my mind today - weird, I know, but no weirder than all those other strange things going on out there in the world.

Kate