Irvine is a strange town.
More Targeted Advertising
While catching up with IMDB info on the various actors in Revenge of the Sith, I noticed an appropriate set of ads on Ewan McGregor’s profile:
For those who haven’t heard of it, Ewan is the male lead in The Island.
(At the moment, Natalie Portman gets a Windows XP ad, and Hayden Christensen gets… Amazon.com. I assume they’re on the standard rotation.)
Self-Promotion Tip
If you want to advertise a new social networking service (or anything else, for that matter), do not spam the tech support and abuse contacts for an ISP with your “invitation!”
Alternate title?
Spotted on a movie theater marquee:
STAR WARS EPISODE III
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Sorry, no photo, though if it’s still there the next time I drive by, I might be able to get one.
Hare Krishna Spam
I received an odd email today which consisted solely of:
Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ….
That which brings the highest happiness!!
A little Googling, and apparently gouranga is a Hare Krishna term for happiness, also used in the sense of “be happy” and is mysteriously scrawled on bridges in the UK. (Hmm, reminds me of the “Anzel is Love” signs someone plastered all over UCI for a few weeks in the mid-1990s.)
It also seems that the gouranga spam has been around a while.
WordPress takes over Browse Happy
I didn’t see that one coming:
BrowseHappy Now Part of WordPress as WaSP Refocuses Mission.
Apparently the Web Standards Project decided they’d be better off remaining neutral. So they’ve handed it off to WordPress, who has been promoting Firefox on their website and in the admin interface for months.
It’s an odd fit, but who knows? Maybe the new management will be insterested in adding some more varied testimonials (they’re almost all Firefox right now).
Update: WordPress has posted their own announcement.
Update 2: MacManX has pointed out that lead WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg is a WaSP member, which helps explain the “Why WordPress?” question.
Update 3: I imagine the WaSP/Microsoft collaboration was probably a factor.
Spamanagram
Subject line (slightly expurgated) from a spam this morning:
Wow MILFS can f*** like mhrotefucesrk!
My first thought was, “like what?” Then I realized it was an anagram. Not unlike the naked sushi spammers, just taken a bit further to the point where it took a few seconds to realize it wasn’t just gibberish. And of course, if you think about it, the statement isn’t entirely logical.
Actually, the rest of the message is rather bizarre. I’m not sure how much I want to actually paste here, though. The footer is safe enough, if odd:
Showing us the beautiful light,
The chalice holds what quenches thirst
Not for me, while I stare at the cold moon
They missed the chance to make the last line an unsubscribe link, and the text is different in the plaintext part, so it’s clearly just random poetry bits.
The website clearly uses a wildcard name, and one of the links is to horrible.bl******.com (with a few extra letters)—not exactly enticing.