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I love seeing it when spam software doesn’t quite work. Sometimes it’s just schadenfreude, and sometimes it’s interesting to see how the templates are structured.

Here’s one that showed up in a comment spam on Speed Force:

{Hi|Hello|Hey there|Thanks}, {very|really|truly|genuinely} {cool|nice|good|interesting} {post|article|stuff}. Such {insighful|entertaining} writing is rare these days. I’ll {surely|certainly} be looking in on {this|your} {blog|site} again {soon|in the nea

It’s cut off because they managed to plug it in as the commenter name instead of the comment itself (oops!)

I haven’t decided whether to call this “flattery spam,” or “kiss-ass spam,” but my general reaction when I see these (and I’ve seen a lot of them) is, “Nice try.”

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My calendar lists last Tuesday as “Election Patch Day.” (We had a state primary election, which fell on Microsoft’s second-Tuesday-of-the month schedule for releasing software updates.)

I guess you could consider elections to be patches keeping the government up to date.

Edit: On the other hand, there are usually two or more competing “patches” that disagree on how to fix the problems, and even what needs to be fixed.

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Last night I noticed @BadAstronomer posting ideas for a Twitter meme, #fishpopstars. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: take a singer or band name and make a pun with the name of a fish.

Katie and I came up with these:

  • Death Crab for Cutie
  • Chum-bawamba
  • Flounders of Wayne
  • Vienna Tang
  • Betta than Ezra
  • Dace of Base (or Ace of Bass)

Some favorites from the event:

  • beano76: Sushi and the Banshees
  • shinkaide: Squid Vicious
  • MisterElGuapo: No Trout
  • ebrown2112: Fleetwood Mackerel
  • Caissie: Sharkira
  • dominichamon: Kylie Minnow
  • ethanwc: Crash Test Guppies
  • ThisModernDeath: Ling Cod Park
  • earlkabong: Herman’s Hermit Crabs
  • znmeb: Pike and Tuna Turner
  • AndyJukes: Smelton John
  • KenPlume: Mackerel Jackson
  • notgiamatti: Jefferson Starfish

It looks like it’s still going on if you’re in the mood for fish puns.

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If you went out to the movies in the US during 2009, there’s a good chance you saw a turn-off-your-phone PSA in which a movie about “robots from space” tries to negotiate blowing up Mount Rushmore.

In a case of life imitating art, the National Park Service is currently battling Transformers 3 — a movie about robots from space — over just what they can and can’t do with a national monument!

Okay, you can’t blow up a national monument, but…

Bill Line, Park Service spokesman, said the producers “have asked to do some things that simply are not done on the National Mall,” among them staging a “car race” along the Mall’s gravel paths and flooding it with artificial light in order to shoot at night.

Apparently it’s not unique to Transformers 3, but a fairly frequent battle between the park service and film producers, which means Sprint’s video isn’t just a funny story, but a bit of an in-joke to those familiar with the industry.

Hmm, any chance the new movie will have a chorus singing “Robots from space!” in the background?