Month: February 2004

And to mark the occasion of the 16th president’s birthday, here’s an offering from the Chicago Tribune on a reputedly ugly — very ugly — Lincoln memorial:

“ASHMORE, Ill. — It turns out the world’s tallest statue of the tallest U.S. president, six stories of fiberglass and steel abandoned and vandalized in a shuttered campground, has another distinction. It is probably the world’s ugliest memorial to Abraham Lincoln.”

A check of online maps shows Ashmore to be just down, or up, the road from Embarrass, sitting in the triangle of wonder outlined by Champaign, Decatur, and Terre Haute, Indiana (a lesser land of Lincoln).

Well, I’ve saved up 28,953 or so absolutely no-good spam messages just to “analyze” them. The saving’s easy. The analyzing, like about everything else in my life beyond the involuntary functions these days, is hard. But while I’m waiting for that magic moment when synapses fire and I break free of inertia and begin spam analysis — it could happen this year — I see a story from last Thursday’s The New York Times (already in the paid archives) on one of my favorite spam subjects: The names of senders:

“Yours Not So Truly, J. Goodspam
By Lisa Napoli
“PURPOSES L. XYLOPHONIST sounds like my kind of man. Unique. Creative. Focused, with a hint of formality. … There is no way to be certain that Mr. Xylophonist is, in fact, a mister. Actually, it is a pretty safe bet he is not a person at all. …”

[Later, much later: Well, here it is at the end of October, and the spam analysis never happened. When TechTV shut down earlier this year, and I got booted out with almost everyone else, I simply deleted that wonderful storehouse of spam. On the other hand, I get plenty of new junk messages to ponder each and every day.]

On February 10, 1897, The New York Times adopted its new slogan: “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” thus launching 107 years of ever-intensifying nitpicking by everyone who doesn’t toil for the Times. A relatively old example:  Lies of Our Times; shockingly, it’s a print publication. And a much newer one: the Wilgoren Watch; it’s dedicated to the pursuit of sloppiness and half-truths committed to print by the Times reporter covering the Howard Dean fiasco.

It’s not too late to say “happy birthday” to James Joyce, who would have turned 122 today had he not died at the age of 59. As he once wrote:

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked fried mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

There is, of course, more where that came from.

When Iraq wasn’t a threat

The way Colin Powell told it in February 2001, a while before the Bush administration decided the United Nations had done nothing to reduce the menace of Saddam, the U.N. sanctions had pretty much taken care of the big bad dictator:

“… Frankly they [the sanctions] have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq. …”

Link by way of a colleague.