Semi-Clever Title/Allusion: Expanded Description to Explain Semi-Clever Title/Allusion

I just wanted to write something like that as a title. It’s such a popular format for essays, theses, and conferences.

All I wanted to say today was that I have reached a new plateau in office spam. Because my spam box at the office is so enormous, I don’t trust my skimming skills so I skim the spam box, then move everything to another folder for a couple of weeks before I delete anything forever. I like to keep my deleted items around for a long time just in case I need something, but I don’t want a massive spam buildup in there. My spam-to-actual-mail ratio is about 3,720 to 1 or thereabouts [1].

So here’s how I know I’m truly on the spam frontier. I have about 1300 spam messages in the box right now, and I wanted to fish out some nice spam poetry because I haven’t posted any in awhile. Trouble is, the good stuff is hard to find and I’m not about to go dumpster diving in the spam box. You never know what might get lodged in your system down there. So I did the next best thing: I thought of the first word that popped into my head and did a search on it.

The word? “Wombat.”

Two results. Here was the better of the two:

see broomcorn try peaceful , bibb some albuquerque it’s collimate it’s insane ! homemake may scalar in captor a bodice but glenn it hindu ! elisha and intrusion in woodland a since or picojoule and prance be mutter a barre may echo it’s wombat it’s despite be biennium but diebold or pair the audience it federate on magistrate but irreplaceable but assent and fate try trestle the brock not desegregate it unital in dryden see shamrock it candidate , tuberculin see autopsy , courtesan some camera in scat a blat Naw email hier

So then I tried to stump the spam box. The next few words that popped into my head were “equestrian,” “circumvent”, “reindeer,” “semaphore,” “lozenge,” and “doorstop.” Only “doorstop” produced no results. My spam box is 1 for 7. But obviously if I choose to I can get super weird (factotum, blepharospasm, treacle, simulacrum) so the game starts to lose its appeal. So I asked Quentin, the graphic designer in my office, to say the first word that popped into his head. He said “corks.” This brought 1 result, which turned out to be taken from The Hobbit:

dwarves only started to sing:
Chip the glasses and crack the plates!
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
Thats what Bilbo Baggins hates-
Smash the bottles and burn the corks!
Cut the cloth and tread on the fat!

This fascinated us for several minutes before we gave up and went back to work.

1.) If you know why I used that particular ratio, you’re as big a nerd as I am. Congratulations.

6 thoughts on “Semi-Clever Title/Allusion: Expanded Description to Explain Semi-Clever Title/Allusion”

  1. I saw a student wearing a Superflux t-shirt in the Hendrix cafeteria today. I was taken aback.

  2. 3,720 to 1?

    so your spam-to-mail ratio is the same as one’s chances for successfully navigating an asteroid field?

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