The Destiny of the Universe

Posted on August 24, 2014 by elkement

… not what the title implies but Spam Poetry, harvested from about 530 spam comments on this blog. I keep to my usually dystopian-postmodern genre. Imagine somebody with a British accent reading it, and mentally insert black and white images inspired by Philip K. Dick‘s short stories. Don’t expect to understand it, it is like those highly refined artistic movies – wrapped in several layers of increasingly sophisticated interpretations.

Every line is cut out of a spam comment, no editing allowed except truncating at the beginning or end. For more background and the history of my search term and spam poetry see here.

This time I owe to spammers trying to promote games that obviously involve the violent killing of aliens.

the destiny of the universe

my honest, preconceived thoughts

a great unreal dream
actual irony
when you con the destiny with your artistry

gloomy and cynical futurism
that any mortal should avoid

you arrive from the Victorian England
in the known galaxy

dark and cynical sci-fi
forces an illusion
of that time gone by
When skyscrapers were first built

you are not understanding anything

what if i told you
There are undoubtedly more color options nearby

paradigmatic coal-black
started to be repetitive
one of the big deterrents to me

your deprecating coherence
is a potpourri

this type of despicable hypocirite
it will be the future of the human race

handing more control over
lets us progress even deeper into this sci-fi nightmare

armor and weapon
usually do not adhere to regulations
The glare of the goblin sparks partially blinded him.

player in cyberspace
heed your call of duty

I’ll certainly come back
through the dust
or snipe the undead beasts

talk with other mentors
emotionally distraught

men and women dressed in cartoon costumes

The cartoon is attractive
corporate, regal, or fair-minded

these crooks
reported to have ghost activity

space zombies
called Glass Collective
never publicly dated anyone

Put your prowess to evaluation
removing their skin

rapidly rose the reputation
conditional upon the execution

Disgrace on Google
the cosmic horror
We do know these people analyze

Numerous aliens in space will traumatize you
with the fantasy stars
Your toddlers shall like it

none of the visions has borne fruit
as a matter of fact

unsubstantiated distortions
completely ridiculous.

in public areas nevertheless

This cue
the echo
The spring of 24
most is inconsistent

the web
becomes a virtual community
something that we are hoping

i could truthfully do something to be able

Slowly return your head to the original position

Uhmm..

Will there be a part 2?

the last sentence of the page

Search Term Poetry – Spring Edition

Posted on April 4, 2014 by elkement

Dear Google,

you do still encrypt your search results. As a security enthusiast I should like this but I rather suspect you want me to use your AdWords tools. Please stop showing me ads for your “starter package” on all social networks, and give me the raw material for my poetry back.

For now I will penalize you by displaying the logo of your competitor although, admittedly, I would find yours more appealing.

Now here is the poem.

As usual, every line corresponds to a search term from WordPress Stats covering the first quarter of 2014. Truncation of search terms at the beginning or the end is permitted, other editing is not.

The images are very much like the search terms – blurry, stored accidentally, and I try to compress and truncate them to serve a purpose.

And yes: the title really was a search term.

the theory and practice of combining just about anything
quality assurance poem
funny ways to combine 2 cliches

hoops smoke effect
response to existentialism

intuitive understanding
shallow and deep reading

non linear art
describes the tendency of the force

polarize antifragile
what is the measure

blank sheet
trusted certificate

google on my heat
myzen engineering

build einstein refrigerator
steampunk heat sink

call center puzzle
automatic clock

chinese wall
scrapyard combines

geonometric art
intersecting lines

sitting gyroscope
entropy and no momentum/energy

upward communication
i need to remember this

elastic glancing collisions
least action

center of mass
snippet shooting

fringe science theories
intuitive symbols

which is more important
to just roll over bump

Intelligent Life-Forms in the Blogosphere – Again!

Posted on January 29, 2014 by elkement

This post might baffle readers that come here for: science / physics / book reviews / corporate world dark satire / search term poetry / navel-gazing / self-destruction … and the other genres I have forgotten.

However, I’d argue that this post covers all of those – in a subtle way.

My blog has a long tradition of dealing with blogging award nominations in a very very weird way. Still exhausted from our mad hatter’s tea party of a nomination (I also call it award crowd-sourcing) I had decided to found an award myself. Rules related to it should be bullet-proof, unassailable for logicians and corporate policy nitpickers. Above all, they should prevent exponential inflation.

Now is the time to bestow it upon a fellow blogger victim again!

I herewith nominate for the ILFB award – Intelligent Life-Forms in the Blogosphere:

Judy blogging at Raising the Curtain.

This is the description and the rules. Standards aficionados MAY recognize the format and SHOULD smile now.

The ILFB Award (Intelligent Life-Forms in the Blogosphere) rewards bloggers who are able to cover diverse subjects in a thoughtful and entertaining way. There are no other constraints such as a maximum number of followers.

You are bestowed upon this award no matter what you do. You MAY deny passing on the award, the award will die out – as many life-forms did. You SHOULD nominate at least one blogger, you MAY nominate two bloggers. There is no deadline – you MAY wait for years if you pass on the award, but you MUST NOT nominate somebody if you haven’t been nominated. The founder of the award is exempt from the latter.

You MAY nominate the blogger who has nominated you – the award MAY bounce back and forth between two bloggers forever. However, you MUST change the reason for the nomination every time.

You MUST explain in more than one full sentence why you have nominated the nominee. You SHOULD reward bloggers who are able to write about at least two seemingly diverse subjects.

You SHOULD reblog or pingback one of the nominee’s posts that has been published within the past year. The linked post SHOULD reflect key characteristics of the nominated blog.

You MUST display the award’s logo, and you MAY change the title of the award as well as the logo. They would mutate anyway.

If you find any inconsistency or loophole you SHOULD amend these rules to fix them.

If the award title results in copyright infringements or any violation of any rights you MAY modify it. You MUST NOT hold the award’s founder liable.

You MAY modify and amend rules 1.-7. to your liking as long as the changes
– reflect your being an intelligent life-form in the blogosphere
– are in line with the Prime Directive of this award – item no.0.

Include this set of rules 0.-9. in your nomination speech post.

Compliance with the three MUST conditions as stated in 1., 2., and 5. will be checked by the founder of this award using his/her infamous googling skills at random. Any violation will be prosecuted and punished by a making the guilty party subject to a satirical blog post. Any blogger who had once been bestowed the award and who has proved to be compliant with the rules is entitled and encouraged to do the same (Google for non-compliant nominees and ridicule them)

This is the logo.

ILFB-Award-Intelligent-Life-Forms-in-the Blogosphere

As an homage to both Douglas Adams and Douglas Coupland I describe it as: Intelligent Life-Forms in the Blogosphere. The intelligent black life-form in his/her black ship is exploring a new blue world while the innocuous, white blogosphere is rising in the background. Nominees MAY omit that description but SHOULD add an interpretation of their own. (Image credit: The spaceship is from a black-and-white Microsoft Office Clipart – I hope this does not put anybody off. I added the blogosphere and the colors)

I think it is more than obvious why Judy is an intelligent life-form in the blogosphere. But in order to comply with my own rules I herewith state:

Judy writes about Life, the Universe and Everything so it is very easy to find posts on diverse subjects. She mulls about existential deep questions of life – see here Existential Guide to What I Am Doing Here – as wells as tracks down the illogicity of corporate animals’ behaviours – see her analysis of e-mail politics: Stop Using The “CC” As A Weapon.

Her writing shows a qualities that I admire most, especially when combined with sharp analysis – self-irony and humor.

But of course I have decided on that nomination intuitively. Off-the-records I tell you:

Judy has been the first person who has ever dared to comment on my blog. That point of time was several months after the blog went public, so commenting must have felt like entering an eerie ghost ship.

I also have a strong gut feeling that her professional self MAY appreciate the legal lingo of the rules. (On proof-reading I misread now: lethal lingo)

This post is also a subversive attempt of mine to deal with her – still ‘open’ – nomination of myself. So, thanks again, Judy!

And finally: Judy is from Australia, that means she is my blogging antipode, we are separated by 12 time zones and our countries are linguistically entangled by the Austrian-Australian confusion.

We should try to make an earth sandwich! (I did not check co-ordinates – hopefully I will be forced to travel to the Canary Islands.) Here is the obligatory education youtube video about the Earth Sandwich!

Cyber Security Satire?

Posted on May 19, 2013 by elkement

I am a science fiction fan. In particular, I am a fan of movies featuring Those Lonesome Nerds who are capable of controlling this planet’s critical infrastructure – from their gloomy basements.

But is it science fiction? In the year Die Hard 4.0 has been released a classified video – showing an electrical generator dying from a cyber attack. Fortunately, “Aurora” was just a test attack against a replica of a power plant.

Now some of you know that the Subversive El(k)ement calls herself a Dilettante Science Blogger on Twitter.

But here is an epic story to be unearthed, and it would take a novelist to do that. I can imagine the long-winded narrative unfolding – of people who cannot use their showers or toilets any more after the blackout. Of sinister hackers sending their evil commands into the command centers of the intricate blood circulation of our society we call The Power Grid. Of course they use smart meters to start their attack.

Unfortunately my feeble attempts of tipping my toes into novel writing have been crashed before I even got started: This novel does exist already – in German. I will inform you if is has been translated – either to a novel or directly into a Hollywood movie script.

As I am probably not capable of writing a serious thriller anyway I would rather go for dark satire.

Douglas Adams did cover so many technologies in The Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy – existing and imagined ones – but he did not elaborate much on intergalactic power transmission. So here is room for satire.

What if our Most Critical Infrastructure would not be attacked by sinister hacker nerds but by our smart systems’ ~~smartness~~ dumbness? (Or their operators’ ?)

To all you silent readers and idea grabbers out there: Don’t underestimate the cyber technology I had built into that mostly harmless wordpress.com blog: I know all of you who are reading this and if you are going to exploit this idea on behalf of me I will time-travel back and forth and ruin your online reputation.

That being said I start crafting the plot:

As Adams probably drew his inspiration from encounters with corporations and bureaucracy when describing the Vogons and InfiniDim enterprises I will extrapolate my cyber security nightmare from an anecdote – one that actually happenend!

Consider a programmer – a geek – trying to test his code. Sorry for the gender stereotype. As a geekess I am allowed to do this. It could be female geek also!

The geek’s code should send messages to other computers in a Windows domain. “Domain” is a technical term, not some geeky reference to Dominion or the like. He is using net send. Info for Generation Y-ers and other tablet and smartphone freak: This is like social media status message junk lacking images.

But our geek protagonist makes a small mistake: He does not send the test command to his test computer only – but to “EUROPE”. This does nearly refer to the whole continent, actually it addresses all computers in all European subsidiaries of a true Virtual Cyber Empire.

Fortunately modern IT networks are built on nearly AI powered devices called switches which make the cyber attack petering out at the borders of That Large City.

How could we turn this into a story about an attack on the power grid, adding your typical ignorant non-tech sensationalist writer’s cliched ideas:

A humanoid life-form (or flawed android that tests his emotions chip) is tinkering with sort of a Hello World! command – sent to The Whole World literally.
The attack that is just a glitch, an unfortunate concatenation of events, that is been launched in an unrelated part of the cyber space. E.g. by a command displayed on a hacker’s screen in a Youtube video. Or it was launched from the gas grid.
The Command of Death spreads pandemically over the continent, replicating itself more efficiently than cute cat videos on social networks.

I contacted my agent immediately.

Shattering my enthusiasm she told me:

This is not science-fiction – this is simply boring. Something like that happened recently in a small country in the middle of Europe.

According to this country’s news a major power blackout had barely been avoided in May 2013. Engineers needed to control the delicate balance of power supply and demand manually as the power grid’s control system has been flooded with gibberish – data that could not be interpreted.

The alleged originator of these commands was a gas transmission system operator in the neighboring country. This company tested a new control system and tried to poll all of its meters for a status update. Somehow the command found its way from the gas grid to the European power grid and has been replicated.

_________________________

Update – Bonus material – making of: For the first time I felt the need to tell this story twice – in German and in English. This is not a translation, rather different versions in parallel universes. German-speaking readers – this is the German instance of the post.

The BLAHS #4–Geek of the Year

Posted on May 17, 2013 by elkement

Earthlings, bow to me. I am famous. The Elkement has been bestowed upon the most prestigious blog award in the universe – non-propagate-able, handed out exclusively by the founder: The BLAHS – BLog Awards Handed out by Sackler. Yes, this is THE Mark Sackler – serial innovator in Search Term Haiku Art and discerning commenter on The Ridiculous and The Sublime. EDIT: Remove [s] from [https] in the links to Mark’s blog to get rid of the false security warnings. See my comment on this alleged bug below.

The Millennium Conjectures™

“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”–Warren Buffett

I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t I give the Geek of the Year BLAHS to myself? Short answer: I almost won an award like that in my youth, but lost out to the guy in the picture above. It was no fair really; I look far cooler in a leopard skin toga than he does. Anyway, I am only half geek. In my ancient past I was both a sportscaster and a classical music radio announcer. How is that for a cognitive dissonance?

Jokes aside, let’s get down to the serious satire. It’s time to give out another BLAHS (BLog Awards Handed out by Sackler). A quick review of the rules is in order:

Unlike the various chain-letters going around that masquerade as awards, this one is given out only one at a time–by me.
The only thing the winner has to…

View original post 1,058 more words

I Screwed It up – I Feel Stupid

Posted on May 14, 2013 by elkement

I had mistyped the title of the previous blog post.

I failed to get a complicated word right the first time: En-tre-pre-neur-ship. And WordPress doesn’t spell-check titles (and I didn’t paste it into Word and spell-check, as usual).

So there is one more reason to ridicule me (<– this is an allusion to the intro of the post you might have missed due to the typo and WordPress Reader probably not able to cope with it).

I have fixed it now, and I also changed the PermaLink to that e-mail subscribers won’t find this post of mine:

So-Called Zen Capitalism and Random Thoughts on Entrepreneurship

This is probably as stupid as watching a 3D HD movie and not snatching free 3D glasses at the cinema’s check-out before. Just to illustrate stupidity utilizing a random example – that may or may not be related to Star Trek – Into the Darkness released in Austria.

Yours truly,

Elkement

…. a person with a very big brain in a normal sized head and a brain working on some sort of TARDIS principle for said head to contain said brain according to this reblog.

PS / Edit: I have now checked a follower’s WordPress reader: The previous post was listed – despite the correction. Now I feel even more stupid.

PPS / Edit 2: And now I liked my own post – deliberately expecting WP to send me this infamous e-mail saying:
You liked your own post. You’re so vain. You probably think I Screwed It up – I Feel Stupid is about you. In this case the assumption is correct!

Remarks Written by Brain-Dead Visitors

Posted on May 7, 2013 by elkement

Dear reader, enclosed you find my latest spam poem. Each line is verbatim from a spam comment (including typos). The meme pool had comprised about 400 spam comments collected in the past three weeks.

This time I forced myself to compile the poem extremely fast, scrolling through these comments in Data-from-Star-Trek-style and letting my subconsciousness decide. Therefore I call that sub-genre Postmodern Science Fiction Inspired Spam Poetry Devoid of Meaning.

I did not select phrases with less than 4 words. This rule is optional, not part of the Rules of the Cult – see historical information below – and I did not make up the last sentence of the poem, even the emoticon is genuine!

searching for sanskrit tattoos

too enforced a Political platform
that roam across the surface over periods of numerous millions of years

Your house is valueble for me
Good luck for the next!

Use your music or television as a continuous background noise
Are you sure concerning the supply?

Teeth are not made of bone
Will there be a part 2?

If you are inside the horizontal scenery
The caribbean have an infinitely more elementary reach

The instruments that lag in real life, lag correctly
I lost track of what I had been performing

A creative bent of mind and an eye for detail
to a great extent kind of free in bizarre grades of refinement

Such is the case, you must purchase tokens
but eventually you have to deliver

Could it be only me or does it look like a few of these remarks come across like they are written by brain dead visitors? :-P

Historical context for new readers:

I crafted my first search term poems and spam poems some months ago in my Mad Scientist’s Garage – MacGyver-style, typical engineer’s poetry.

I have also been the chronicler of the Early Spam Poetry Community. This was my write-up of the dawn of Spam Poetry and Search Term Poetry and I had the honor to review the first on spam poetry recently.

More recently spam poets entered the stage who really know how to handle languages made spam poetry real poetry (Voice from the future – both links offline now – spam poetry is ethereal and fleeting.)

The Nasty Commenter Spam Poem: A comment that haunted many bloggers – now dissected and disarmed. You can also see how the spammosphere reacts to the poem!

An Android Girl Coming of Age or a Conversation With God: The first poem I am aware of that contains a story, a dialogue. I have also learned how spam poetry works from the analysis in this article: Like regular poetry, the words already exist; they are just waiting to be put together in the right order.

Androids (Wikimedia). Probably the Android girl coming of age needs a drink after her spiritual experience?

Missing Policies for the Mad Tea Party and What to Learn from The Jabberwocky

Posted on May 2, 2013 by elkement

I am trying to re-gain control over the blog award nomination process, or I pretend to do so. postmoderndonkey had called it a Mad Tea Party of a nomination process – and right he was.

You may accuse me of making this blog the strange attractor of a self-referential loop of weird referrals to itself and to blogs of like-minded subversive elements – and right you are as well.

Mad Hatters Tea Party as they celebrate it in Sydney today or probably all over the world (Wikimedia). Pardon my ignorance, but I had always figured the Tea Party being related to US politics?

For the first time on this blog, or the first ever, The Subversive El(k)ment has played by the rules when accepting an award. But I am not a role model, obviously, as the report of the Global Blog Award Acceptance Policies Enforcement Task Force Initiative proves in the most shocking way.

There are philosophers and writers nominating each other back and forth, breaking the non-tag-back-rule and putting the causal structure of spacetime at risk.
Some nominees start out promising, applying a paragraph numbering scheme that Wittgenstein might have loved, but they stop at item x with [x < (Items demanded as per award rules)]
Others simply say they will ‘add more items later’ – as if this were an option!
Or they post their – not even fully compliant – reply to the comments’ section of your well-craft nomination post.
And on and on.
Until some postmodern writer decides to nominate the whole galaxy and to declare the ellipsis a trophy.
(I knew what Ellipsis is without googling!)
The most subversive blogger was compliant with the rules, but found a loophole in the non-tag-back directive which made this response probably the most subversive.

I do not disclose the identities of the subversive bloggers for confidentiality reasons. I am just adding some random collection of links. Google shuns spammy pages containing too many links, so chances are this post of mine will not be indexed by search engines and your online reputation is not damaged (even more). And nearly half of them don’t work anymore ⛔, in 2019.

Geeky philosopher ⛔ – philosophical spam poet ⛔ – poetic broom closet ⛔ – close to madness or whatever – whatever postmodern means – meaningful points of view

If this link does not point to a specific post it might be due to a non-existent acceptance post as the reply has been posted to the nominator’s comments section.

But all this is not your fault.

It is the lack of policies and processes as we use to say in The Corporate World. The originators of blog awards obviously don’t have any training in quality management and writing Those Important Guidelines. You should have hired overpriced management consultants instead. They would have written five volumes of seemingly great formal content on behalf of you, even if they just cut&pasted half of it from Wikipedia. I am speaking from experience here, but I cannot give you the details, otherwise I would be Liable and Doomed According to This Agreement On Confidentiality.

What I would expect from a well-written Blog Award Process Specification Protocol:

Define terminology: If you are nominated by somebody nominated by somebody else you have just nominated – is this tag-backing? Or should we call it tag-tag-backing? Tag-backing to the power of two? Or does the strength of the tag-back decay exponentially with the distance from the tagging person (distance as to be defined as the metric in the blogosphere hyper-dimensional vector space).
Define overall goals: There will be inconsistencies in the rules created by inexperienced Junior Consultants. Stipulate that Alignment with the Prime Directive or whatever you call these goals will help to sort these out
Define deadlines: There is no ‘adding items later’! You need to be assigned a task in The Corporate Resource Management Tool, report on your non-progress daily by checking red / amber / green of an iconized traffic light. The status as such does not result in any consequences, but not reporting on it does.
Define responsibilities unambiguously: Even if this (1) counts a tag-backing – are you as the nominee accountable for tracing the chain of nominations back? Back over how many hops? How are you going to document this for future reference (Documentation = proof of this being Someone Else’s Fault).
Define your org chart: Committees, working groups, regular meetings. You need controls! The award logo must not mutate – as any change (“change” as to be defined in the Change Management Guidelines) needs to be approved by The Blog Award Corporate Identity Group.

You get the idea! Also the Internet would not work without proper definitions of protocols! These are protocols for machines mainly, but don’t we act like Turing machines on social networks anyway? Do you know if I am human really? (I digress.)

Internet standards are defined in the so-called Request for Comments (RFC), a set of publicly available documents compiled by The Internet Community <– This is a technical term!). The RFC 2026 on the standardization process (very meta!) states:

   This memo documents the process used by the Internet community for
   the standardization of protocols and procedures.  It defines the
   stages in the standardization process, the requirements for moving a
   document between stages and the types of documents used during this
   process.  It also addresses the intellectual property rights and
   copyright issues associated with the standards process.

The blogosphere should take a closer look at these noble internet standards, designed for simplicity, clarity, but yet utmost precision and stability in communications. The overall Prime Directive had once been put forward by Jon Postel and it is called the Robustness Principle:

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

The standardisation process does not need to be as tedious as it sounds. In contrast to management consultants, internet engineers are subversive. If any management consultant has ever followed this blog, he/she might unfollow now – but as a disclaimer I’d like to add: I have been a consultant, so I speak – as usual! – from experience.

The internet architects created the spam poetry equivalents of standards such as the

Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) defined in RFC 2324:

...
   There is coffee all over the world. Increasingly, in a world in which
   computing is ubiquitous, the computists want to make coffee. Coffee
   brewing is an art, but the distributed intelligence of the web-
   connected world transcends art.  Thus, there is a strong, dark, rich
   requirement for a protocol designed espressoly for the brewing of
   coffee. 
...
   The web is world-wide.  HTCPCP is based on HTTP.
   This is because HTTP is everywhere. It could not be so pervasive
   without being good. Therefore, HTTP is good. If you want good coffee,
   HTCPCP needs to be good. To make HTCPCP good, it is good to base
   HTCPCP on HTTP.

And so finally and automagically, we are back to the Mad Tea Party and Lewis Carroll’s creatures:

The ARPAWocky was featured in RFC 527:

                    Twas brillig, and the Protocols
                         Did USER-SERVER in the wabe.
                    All mimsey was the FTP,
                         And the RJE outgrabe,
...

Reviewing the history of the original Jabberwocky poem in Wikipedia again I believe Lewis Carroll would have been a subversive spam poet today:

According to Chesterton and Green and others, the original purpose of “Jabberwocky” was to satirize both pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics. It was designed as verse showing how not to write verse, but eventually became the subject of pedestrian translation or explanation and incorporated into classroom learning.

There is no conclusion! Feel free to start reading at the top again – the structure of this post is an isomorphism to the endless tag-backing loops closing on itself.

But I think it is obvious that I am pondering about founding a new blog award myself, isn’t it?

Liebster Blog Award: This Time I Try to Respond in a More Normal Way

Posted on April 30, 2013 by elkement

It happened again – I have been bestowed a blog award despite the way I handled my last nomination.

This time I will respond in a different way. I – the Subversive El(k)ement – will adhere to the rules!

Geeks, please bear with me though! I still think that blog awards are just ridiculous chain letter Ponzi schemes. But I found a loophole I am going to exploit.

I am using the standard template although I abhor templates in general (in particular faulty, nearly corrupt MS Winword templates migrated from platform to platform since MS Office 2.0. But I digress).

Information to my nominees: The template text is formatted as bold.

What is it?
The Liebster Award is designed to bring recognition to smaller blogs–that is, blogs with 200 or fewer followers.

And this is related to the attack vector as we hackers say, or the loophole: I have discovered many blogs, followed them enthusiastically, and lost them again. Blogs ran dry and faded away. People simply stop blogging. We need more new blogs with few followers to compensate for that.

Thus the rough estimate on exponential growth – incomplete it was. <– This is Yoda speak, I am trying to geek-up this post, compensating for following the rules so strictly.

I did not factor in a medium blog-die-out rate! We would need to run a numerical computer model to simulate the behavior of the blogosphere in order to analyze how many blogs to nominate for an award in order to compensate for the termination of others. Ignorance is bliss – therefore I simply nominate as many as required by the rules … and I don’t feel like creating an expontentially growing avalanche.

The Rules
1. Thank the blogger who nominated you and link back to their blog

Thanks a lot Kristen for the nomination! To my readers: Please go visit her blog :-) If my authoritative endorsement (remember, I reviewed the world’s first spam poetry book) does not convince you, this is how Kristen describes her blog in her acceptance speech:

“… often I feel my blog is sometimes a teenage-esque angsty diatribe bordering on diary that is only looked at by myself and other angsty people (statistics show that I’m on the first page of google results when you search ‘letter to an ex-boyfriend’) and people from all over the world who google search ’cool photoshopped pictures.’ That one’s fun because I’m apparently linked on some Russian Website for my edited picture of ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.’ Go figure.”

So Im honored that the author of these sentences picked my blog. And of course I quoted them because I hope for terrific Search Term Poetry.

2. Post 11 facts about yourself, answer the 11 questions asked of you, and create 11 new questions for the bloggers you nominate.

I add both my responses as well as the new questions for my nominees below, after the section 5.

3. Nominate 11 blogs you think deserve to be noticed, and leave comments for them letting them know they’ve been chosen.

I have picked 11 blogs that I have followed for a while and that have less than 200 followers (as this blog. More precisely, you had less than 200 when I started compiling the list a few days ago. If your number of followers has inflated since then I expect you to repent in public and return the award).

These are my nominees, in no particular order. Blogs marked with (*) had already been featured on my recent Bloggiversary.

postmoderndonkey – The carnival of instability in language, thought and audience. (*)
Poetry, stories, and other postmodern stuff entangled with a down-to-earth Zenvironmental journey.

From the Broom Closet – Broom closet: a narrow space to store lengthy items. I’ll try and keep my posts to a reasonable size though.
The broom closed is stuffed to the ceiling with sophisticated philosophy and honest, opinionated posts.

Duck? Starfish? but…23 – one rock at a time (*)
The authoritative blog on distant learning before MOOCs have become a hype – and the most beautiful images of Newfoundland.

nebusresearch – Joseph Nebus’s work in progress.
Fine mathematics and history of science. Checkout out Joseph’s Humor blog, too.

carnotcycle – the classical blog on thermodynamics (*)
Original historical papers on thermodynamics expounded in a comprehensible and entertaining way.

I really Just Pretend to Know Stuff – I digress
As weird as it sounds. I am considering to write a Weird Manifesto on Why the World Should Worship Wonderfully Weird Writing – this is my showcase!

Play – Stories and Photos from the Southern Saskachewan Prairie (*)
… and basically: The Life, the Universe and Everything, analyzed from 1000 angles: Geeky, literary, philosophical.

weeklybraindump – A quasi-weekly braindump with no particular thematic unity
Education, philosophy, ethics, and again Life, the Universe and Everything. And another denier of chain-letter style blog award propagation :-)

Many Worlds Theory – In one universe, this blog is about quantum mechanics. In another universe, it is not. (*)
In the universe the wave function is collapsing onto right now this is a first-class blog on physics. And Matt Damon. Sometimes.
(I plagiarized myself here, sorry.)

The Unemployed Philosopher’s Blog – Just because you’re unemployed, it doesn’t mean that you’re out of work (*)
The geekiest blog on philosophy. Both very entertaining and useful for graduates in the humanities.
(Is this tag-backing? Dan has once nominated me for the Reader Appreciation Award. Is is tagging others bloggers “back in the award chain that bind these bloggers to your blog”?)

Science Mentor – Step-by-step Guide to “Self-Mentoring” for the Science Professional
I wish a blog like this would have been available when I graduated. You should follow her on Twitter as well!

4. Display the Liebster Award logo.

OK – here you go! I am linking to Kristen’s image in order to avoid mutation. It looks a bit washed out already, doesn’t it?

An image search for Liebster Award brings up a lot of images that do not really resemble this one.

Liebster Award

The linguistically inclined among you might be interested in the fact that liebster in German means dearest. Or was this the whole point of the name and you all knew this, and I am looking like a fool now? Googling for “liebster dearest award” seems to corroborate that hypothesis. Did it spread from Germany to the whole world?

Or was Ms. Liebster a Victorian poet perhaps and the award started out by circulating steampunk-style silver-and-brass-plates?

5. No tag-backs.

Looking even more like a fool – I was not able to find out exactly what tag-backs are. No, really!!

2.a 11 Things About Me

1. I don’t know what tag-backs are.

2. Nevertheless, I pretend to be geeky.

3. I have an old-school BlackBerry-style (even worse: Windows Mobile BlackBerry style smartphone) as I don’t like to touch screens.

4. Still I pretend to be geeky. (I said that already, right? Is this cheating? So I better add:) I like to make and bend the rules as a go – whatever rules are concerned.

5. I am probably applying or using tag-backs without being aware of it.

6. I don’t kill or repel rodents (on purpose). This was my utmost trauma.

7. So I plugged off the microwave for some days after that has happened. After several days I did not care any more about rodents.

8. I am not mowing the lawn. I am scything it. And it is not a lawn.

9. I have written a single serious poem in my life. In German. It is published on one of my weird websites. I don’t add a link – my attempts to bait followers should not be that obvious.

10. Thinking once more, I’d like to state: I have published a single so-called serious poem to one of my German websites, but it might actually just be one of my geeky self-ironic attempts to imitate so-called poetry.

11.When asked to provide some facts about myself I do this in a very special way.

2.b My responses to Kristen’s Questions for the Nominees:

1. Why did you start blogging?
In order to answer question 2.b.1.

2. What’s something you could write about, in your opinion, better than many other people?
Spam Poetry and Search Term Poetry of course.

3. What’s been your hardest challenge thus far?
Reducing my consumption in coffee. Now it’s my turn to repent as I announced it publicly.

4. What is your dream job?
Scientific consultant for Hollywood science fiction movies. But I learned from Sean Carroll’s book The Particle at the End of the Universe that he did exactly that – so I am most likely not qualified.

5. What was a big decision you had to make, and would you choose something else knowing what you know now?
Succumbing to the dark side of the force.

6. Who is your greatest inspiration?
Douglas Adams.

7. Who is your favorite writer or artist?
Douglas Adams.

8. What is your favorite song (or favorite song lyrics)?
It’s Slinky, It’s Slinky! For fun it’s the best of the toys

9. If you could intern anywhere or with anyone in the world, who would it be with?
The NSA.

10. What’s one of your favorite memories?
It’s in the – very near – future (Time travel is OK, isn’t it?): Tomorrow, Labour Day, 08:00 AM when I will be waked up by the local brass music band.

11. If there was one thing about politics you wish everyone would agree upon, what would it be and why?
“Don’t panic.” Applies in particular to financial crises, bank runs – and the like. Issues that would not happen if nobody panicked.

2.c My Questions to the My Nominees:

Please correct my typos and other grammars without making me aware of them. If possible, hack my WP blog and correct them here as well.

1. (How) would you try to circumvent the rules set forth by the unknown founder of a blog award with an awkward pseudo-German name?

2. If you could re-design the rules for this award, what would you do?

3. What were the criteria for your choice of your WordPress blogging theme?

4. What is your favorite quote about science? (You can interpret science in a broad sense.)

5. If you need to compile lists of funny questions and answers, and you run out of quirky ideas – what would you do?

6. What is your favorite movie or story on time-travelling?

7. Have you ever been called a nerd or geek or have you called others nerds or geeks? Do you believe ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’ is a compliment or rather the opposite?

8. Have you ever written a book or do you plan to write one? If yes, what would it be about? In case, this is too personal: What would your book NOT be about?

9. Do you know what a tag-back is (without asking anybody and without using that advanced type of googling Elkement incapable of).

10. Did you really read this post word by word down to this line? (You may lie.)

11. A very personal question you do not need to answer: How much coffee / tea do you drink per day and does blogging or other writing has any impact on it?

This was The Great Wall of Text, wasn’t it? (Chinese Wall, Wikimedia)

Surprise Potatoes in the Soldiers’ Vegetable Soup!

Posted on April 26, 2013 by elkement

Having blogged for more than a year I have finally reached the status of renowned, serious blogger. I have carved out my niche, and I have been asked for providing feedback on a book in that particular category.

Of course, it is a book of spam poems.

Surprise Potatoes in the Soldiers’ Vegetable Soup

… compiled by my LinkedIn connection Alan Mundy – “poorly translated Chinese recipes cannibalised to form the most insightful and thought provoking book of its kind ever written (presumably)”

Checking Alan’s LinkedIn URL again I confirm it starts with uk which does not come as a surprise. A book like this can only originate from the country that produced Shakespeare, Monty Python and Douglas Adams.

I am a blog spam expert, so it is an enormous task to review, understand, and do justice to e-mail spam poetry.

Meta-Information

A bunch of spam poets – Alan Mundy, Jess Bryan, Rob Cleaver, Richard Sutton, and Dan Roberts (If any of you wants to have your name sanitized for the sake of online reputation – let me know and I replace it with *****; if I have forgotten somebody let me know, too) – have assembled poems from spam, adhering to the following rules:

You can only use lines from the text in your poem – you must not add anything
You must not edit the original lines in any way
You can use partial lines but must not mix lines together to create new lines

(I promise I will follow these next time, too!)

The book contains 101 spam poems plus the original spam e-mails as bonus material, sort of ‘making of’. The original e-mail spams are rather long-winded which might give the poet a greater selection of phrases to pick from, but in the other hand it might be tiresome to read through all this without turning your brain into the juice of three bark.

Poetry

The poems are as food-centric as the original spam was. This was a novel experience for the philosophically inclined geek in me who prefers postmodern spam poems lingering on the new age-y.

Having read the book for countless times in the past week I have changed my mind – though recommended to all the hobby chefs among you it the poems will also appeal to the refined ethereal poetry lovers. The poems contain gems of timeless wisdom such as Very often you use also be young and aphorisms on ethics such as Be good if you die.

It is in particular the embroidery with all stuff food-related that provides a consistent down-to-earth theme to put all these grand insights gained from spam into perspective. So the poems are both artistic as comprehensible to readers that did not have that much exposure to advanced experimental poetry. After all didn’t great physicist Richard Feynman say A poet once said, ‘The whole universe is in a glass of wine.’? Cross-checked again: Wine is featured in four poems!

Also the Stephen King fans will enjoy their share of creepy violence – Cut in your liver! – and science geeks will love terms as Transmission intensity.

There is also a poem titled A sexual poem… (The header lines have been created by the poets BTW). Thanks for your understanding that I cannot quote from this on your geeky family blog though it might boost my Google ranking.

So I give this alleged first(*) book on spam poetry 5 of 5 stars.
(*) As usual, I did not do research on this, and I do not want to be involved in disputes about originality. It’s probably the spammers who own the stuff and who have licenced it under Creative Commons.

Since there is a lot of yolk in these poems and some wine, and since a glass of wine contains the universe according to Richard Feynman, I have picked an image of a cocktail containing both (Trusting Wikipedia / Wikimedia on this).

PS: I have not forgotten about my scheduled post on networking, professional online profiles and the like. But now you know already how professionals really use LinkedIn!
PPS: Calling people ‘connections’ is LinkedIn’s terminology, not mine.
PPPS: My blog spam queue is exploding!

elkemental Force

Energy, Software, and Anything in between.

Tag Archives: Satire