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Ack! Who puts cashews on Hawaiian pizza?

Apparently Red Brick Pizza does. They kindly made a replacement without them.

*whew*

Constant Vigilance!

It was listed on the menu, and I should have looked more closely…but who expects nuts of any kind on Hawaiian pizza? It’s standard: crust, tomato sauce, cheese, ham, and pineapple. Checking for nuts on that would be like checking for strawberry jam on a cheeseburger.

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Smoke Cuts San Gabriel Mountains in Two.

The wind’s changed, the weather’s cooled off, and firefighters are starting to get the Station Fire under control. For the first time in days, we’ve been able to see the San Gabriel Mountains.

The eastern part of the range was clearly visible this afternoon — more visible than it usually is during the summer, with LA’s famous smog. The middle was completely shrouded in smoke. Interestingly, while it looks like the plume is being blown east, visibility seems to be worse toward the western end. Maybe wind near the ground is blowing west, and wind higher up is blowing east?

Compare to this shot of the mountains covered in snow last December:

San Gabriel Snow Panorama

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lol_spamSometimes you’ve just got to laugh, you know?

I remember getting my first piece of spam in college, in the days before anyone bothered with filters because spam was so rare, and thinking, “this could get bad.” Talk about the understatement of the decade! Since the mid-1990s, recipients and sysadmins have come up with more and more elaborate ways to block the annoyance, and the spammers have developed ever more convoluted ways to get around our filters.

And sometimes, those convolutions are frakking hilarious.

Weird word substitutions, funny misspellings (deliberate and otherwise), utter nonsense, creative euphemisms and more lurk in the world’s junk mail folders. Half of the spam category on this blog isn’t serious commentary — it’s examples of clueless or unintentionally funny quotes from actual spam.

All-New Spams Just For You!

These are all quotes (mostly subjects) from spam I’ve seen:

  • Pirate spam: first ten picks of the day in the marrrrrket
  • Ghost spam: Reeeeeeegaiiin your yooooouth with Humaaaaaaan Grooooowth Hoormooooooone!
  • Crazy spam: I’m looking for a good trans_universal transportation unit.
  • Recipe spam: The Zucchini Loaf recipe is not for me
  • Auto-spam: Sincerely, Random Name
  • Euphemism spam: Make your love torpedo drive all the way to her tanker.
  • Word Salad spam: Dear me, that evil car sensibly stung out of this suspicious slot tipps.
  • Not-What-They-Meant spam: The way to her heart is through her wrist
  • Random Star Trek spam: trill boxing
  • Book Quote spam: Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken. [Believe it or not, this is not the only The Wheel of Time spam I’ve seen!]

A few weeks ago I realized most of these were really short, and I’d been posting them to Twitter. Why not set up a dedicated account for spam humor? So I set up @lol_spam and started posting the funnier subjects I came across, usually with a comment.

I was definitely inspired by the webcomic Spamusement, but I can’t draw worth beans. A line of snarky commentary? That I can do! And I was almost certainly influenced by artist Linzie Hunter’s Spam one-liner postcards, though I’d somehow forgotten about them until someone posted a link to the set yesterday.

How I Got 6 Followers on Twitter! (And You Can Too!)

Where am I getting the spam quotes?

  • Spam sent to me (most of it in the discards, fortunately).
  • Spam sent to the postmaster/admin accounts where I work.
  • Spam sent to our spamtraps.

I see a lot of spam, and I don’t want to simply flood people’s Twitter streams with, well, more of it, so I’m using FutureTweets to spread things out to a more manageable 1 or 2 posts per day. At the moment I’m almost 3 weeks ahead.

I’m also keeping an eye on a twitter search for “spam subject” and retweeting the funniest ones.

Bringing the Funny

So if you use Twitter, take a look at @lol_spam. Who knows? You just might laugh!

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How an outdoor mall dealt with a lunchtime power outage. And some Apple observations.

Power’s out at the mall. No teriyaki bowl for me. Subway it is! (Hmm, and no iced coffee either. *sigh*)

Near as I can tell, the Apple store is just completely shut down. Hazards of making checkout depend on computer network, I guess. For contrast, Subway just dug out a pad of paper credit card slips and did texture rubbings w/ a pen.

Odd: muzak is so omnipresent I didn’t notice it was still playing. Speakers must be on another circuit from the stores.

Turns out only some buildings have lost power. Including all the coffee except Starbucks. But Jamba Juice has power!

Was weird walking through mall at lunch seeing lighted stores on right and dark on left. Some stayed open, some closed, some adapted.

Coffee Bean was mostly closed during the power outage, but they set an employee out front with two urns of coffee. No ice, though.