Bring out yer dead

Thanks for checking in on me, United Nation. I haven't been very actively blogging these past few months, but I'm not dead yet. And if I were, would you stop sending out your spam my way?

Many of you will have noticed the title of this post is a line from a well-known Monty Python movie — and you may well have been lured to this page by it, who knows. Fear not, I will not leave your expectations unfulfilled. This video clip should make your visit worth it. Here's the scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Oh, and it's OK if you've already got one, you can still watch it.

Redundant objects

This post has very little to do with spam, but I couldn't possibly let this news pass without a comment.

Fans of Kaamelott (a French parodic series about the knights of the round table, which I already mentioned here) certainly remember the series of episodes named Unagi, in which Perceval and Caradoc come up with new fighting techniques. In Unagi IV, the two knights explain to King Arthur that they are perfecting a new technique that makes use of objects found in their immediate environment – which usually is the local tavern. The trick, they say, is to look for "redundant" objects (they really mean "objets contondants" in French, i.e. blunt instruments). In this hilarious episode, you can see them train with such improbable weapons as loaves of bread, a fennel bulb, dry sausage links, a recorder, a hair brush and leeks. Watch it here.

Who knew their technique would be so effective against wild animals in real life?

Mont. woman fends off bear attack with zucchini

Read this story for details of how the 200-pound black bear ran away from a 12-inch zucchini! Now, if the story proves that zucchini are "redundant", it does not reveal which end the woman was holding (does a zucchini even have a "sporadic" end??), and whether she made "perimetric" use of it, or if she actually developed her own technique...

Potpourri

Don't you love it when spammers try new tricks? The following emails stood out among the usual ones about male enhancement pills or winning lottery tickets that make up the bulk of my spam folder these days: Surely spammers couldn't care less if they passed for name-dropping poseurs? Yet they didn't even bother signaling the quotations as such, let alone giving their sources. So I thought I would.

"Tis past that melancholy dream"

from "I Travelled Among Unknown Men" by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807.

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"And your head so large doth grow"

from "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo" by Edward Lear, first published in 1877.

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"Hither come thou back straightway"
"He is come to claim his right"

both from "The Horn of Egremont Castle" by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807.

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"Still she weeps and daily moans"

from "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo" by Edward Lear again.

"In a beautiful pea green boat"

from "The Owl and the Pussy Cat" by Edward Lear, first published in 1871.

This literary hodgepodge is nothing more than lipstick on a pig, but I am somewhat grateful to my spammer friends for giving me the chance to actually read the poems they borrowed from. I am also amused to see how poetry has its place in insensitive mass communication (although apparently you have to either be Wordsworth or Lear to get such massive exposure).

I guess my soul didn't get transported (or confused) enough to let my earthly fingers click on the links at the end of these messages. This potpourri (which literally means "rotten pot" in French) didn't bode too well...

"Be the Tasmanian Lovemaking Devil..."

To be honest, I didn't know Tasmanian devils made the ideal lover.

Judging from real world pictures (see above) and from the general features of the animal's incarnation in the Looney Tunes cartoon (see below), I am tempted to believe that they are to be avoided at all costs. In fact, "lovemaking" and "Tasmanian devil" sound so far apart that combining them in a single noun phrase should normally be considered oxymoronic — unless of course the attributes of the ideal lover (or even the basic traits commonly expected in a tolerable partner) dramatically changed with the most recent partial lunar eclipse.

Viciousness and aggressivity on the one hand, tornado-style destruction and utter stupidity on the other — is this really something to be looking forward to???

Synaesthetic

Last week, Zimbolli sent me a message entitled "synaesthetic", which Thunderbird classified as Junk. Attracted by the unusually learned subject line, I did open the message body, only to find the not-so-unusual male enhancement promises and the following URL:

www[dot]pill22[dot]com

Isn't it ironic that a spammer would try to make it difficult for a robot (and to some extent for a human being) to figure out the website they are rooting for? Usually, it's email addresses you disguise by spelling out the dots, not URLs.

Anyway, while idly looking around for examples of synesthesia in poetry (Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire first came to my mind, but I was looking for examples in English), I stumbled upon something I had never heard about in all those years I spent studying/playing early music: the "ocular harpsichord" and the "color organ". It turns out that sound and light shows are not a 20th century invention at all! Jean-Michel Jarre's musical family tree includes people like Telemann or Rameau (late 17th-18th centuries), who wrote pieces for keyboard instruments capable of producing sound and light to go with the sound. Of course, it's not like musicians until then had ignored the emotional power of simultaneous sensory perceptions from different sources (auditory and visual in this case), but I thought it was interesting that it would be synthesized in a single instrument.

Something that I surely must have heard about in all the years I spent studying literary theory and cultural history but just "re-"discovered is Newton's theory of color and music. The theory compares the vibrations resulting in the different color shades on the spectrum and the vibrations resulting in the different musical notes in Western scales. It is schematized in the color wheel, published in Opticks in 1704, on which you can see letters corresponding to a Dorian mode scale starting on D separating the sectors displaying the spectral colors.

Many thanks to Zimbolli (or whoever that was) for piquing my interest and for reminding me that Google, YouTube and Wikipedia are my friends.

Dangling legs and stomachs

Another puzzling email subject line sent my mind wandering the other day: "jambes et ventres qui pendent" (literally, legs and stomachs that dangle).

Mm, what an exciting image... I tried to erase it from my mind, but somehow it lingered long enough to find an embodiment in Dali's melting watches in The Persistence of Memory.

Thank God, Doisneau's Two Brothers came next and the dangling legs took on a playful dimension.

The evocative power of words is everywhere, even in spam. Diets and rejuvenation programs, be gone!

"Sire, sire, on en a gros"

I have a .fr email address on which I receive a fair share of spam written in French. I very rarely open the messages, but my attention is sometimes caught by intriguing or outright funny subject lines.

I thought I might share the latest one I got, which somehow made it through my various spam filters. The title reads: "l'avoir gros" (literally, "to have it big"). Here you may ask: what on earth could the pronoun refer to? Something with the masculine gender and in the singular. Your nose, your butt, your stomach??? Look no further. No need to pretend you don't know what the pronoun stands for here...

If I had opened the message before tossing it with the rest, I would probably have stripped it of much of its intriguing quality. As it is, the title brings to my mind two "cultural" references.

The first one is Hamlet. Is this email by a secret admirer of Shakespeare's character. Is s/he thinking out loud and reaching out to share with me an introspective soliloquy on what it means to have it big, whatever it is. On a lighter note, the second reference, which inspired this post's title, is Kaamelott, a spoof of the tales of the knights of the round table. In one episode (season 2, episode 3), two of the dumbest knights knock on King Arthur's door in the middle of the night. They want to voice their discontent and tell the king they think they are being exploited. Their protest slogan is the following: "on en a gros !". This literally does not mean much, other than something like "we have it big" or simply "it is big", maybe. The phrase appears to be a truncated version of "on en a gros sur la patate" (literally something like "we have it big on the potato", the potato figuratively referring to the speaker's face), possibly merged with "on en a marre" (we've had enough). The video of the episode has unfortunately been taken off youtube, but you can still find it legally on wideo.fr (from France only, though, apparently) or less legally in many other places I'm sure.

Which reference is closest to the content of that message? Who knows...