Two disparate types of spam, united in that the supposed sender just does not make sense.

First there was a Nigerian scam purporting to be from David Hume.

Then there was the blog comment spam (alas, deleted en masse just as I read the name) apparently left by “Jessica Albas Breasts.” I mentioned this to Katie, who responded, “How do they type?” An excellent question, and one which I imagine can be answered with sufficient exploration of the internet.

I’ll always remember a line from a play I was in during college. It was an original musical, and the composer couldn’t come up with a good line by the time he had to hand out the scripts, so he filled it in with “Come around and schmoo” just to keep the rhyme in place. Oddly, I can’t remember the line he finally replaced it with.

And of course, Firefox’s cookie preferences were labeled “Cookies are delicious delicacies” for so long during the beta period that by the time they wrote a real description for 1.0, someone wrote an extension to put it back in!

Well, sometimes dummy text makes it through “rehearsals,” so to speak. Jim Heid found live sites with various kinds of filler text. Not just the ubiquitous “Untitled document” (millions of pages), but samples of “lorem ipsum” filler and even ~250 hits for “this is placeholder text” (whoops, I’m gonna skew those results a bit.)

(via Scobleizer, who recommends using “xxxxx” exclusively for placeholders.)

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