(h/t to lexelectric for the link)
So tomorrow this Large Hadron Collider thing kicks off, and it’s bound to create a black hole that annihilates Earth and the rest of the solar system. For nihilists, annihilation must be pretty exciting. For the rest of us, it might kinda suck. Oh well.
In other news, I received an interesting random spam(?) message today:
>Donna Werner
wrote:
>From: “Donna Werner”
>To:
>Subject: voter registration info
>Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 07:51:12 -0600
>
>http://www.dmv.org/co-colorado/voter-registration.php#
>
>http://www.bouldercounty.org/clerk/elections/InformationforCollegeStudents.html
>
>Erin,
>Here are a couple sites about registering to vote and mail in ballots. The tricky
>part for all of you in Nicaragua is that the mail in comes to your home and then
>someone will have to send it to you and then you have to make sure to mail it back
>to the right office here in Boulder. The other sneakier way it to have someone you
>trust fill out your mail in, forge your signature and mail it back. It’s such a
>crucial election that the 4 votes from you boys really is important to get counted!
>Xx donna
I’m puzzled. Maybe someone legitimately meant to send this to someone else? It almost reads like it could be the sort of thing meant to scare uptight xenophobes into thinking that Nicaraguans are trying to steal the election, but that really wouldn’t make any sense at all. Everyone knows that Nicaraguans hate democracy. Oh well.
By the way, I’m giving up on the spam blog. I simply don’t have time. Sorry for all of you who’d hoped that the Internet would reveal the Ultimate Truth by way of spam messages to me. What can I say; not everyone is cut out to deliver salvation.
That’s clearly not a piece of spam. Unless you checked the links and they are not what they show, it is pretty self-explanatory: someone (or four people from the sound of it) from Boulder, Colorado (a liberal stronghold in that state, I might add) is living in Nicaragua and trying to figure out how to vote as an ex-pat. Donna Werner obviously feels strongly about the outcome of the US presidential election and is doing the homework for Erin to make sure she finds a way to vote from Nicaragua. Wait, Erin is a boy? It’s a weird message, but seems very, very clear to me that it’s a legit message and the person typed the wrong email address in.
There’s actually a blog – I don’t remember the name but it was “Wrong [common name]” and the author apparently had the email address [commonname]@gmail.com or whatever, so he constantly got email from someone else, and so he turned it into blog material. It was pretty amusing; I wish I could remember what it was.
And I tried again… I still can’t tolerate watching that video for more than a minute.
It might’ve showed up better if I’d forwarded the message to blogger rather than simply copy-and-pasting it into the blog entry. The message was actually forwarded to me by “Ehren Wrong” whose address is “e.wright72@…” Wright or Wrong? Ehren or Erin? Those little subtle strangenesses seemed reminiscent to me of many spam messages I’ve received that try really, really hard to look legitimate but have quirky inconsistencies throughout. That’s why it just made me wonder if maybe it was some weird attempt to incite paranoia about illegitimate voting practices by them damned libs. oh well.
as for the video, it really doesn’t pay off unless you stick around to see how the lyrics work to convey some pretty complex information in an impressively simple manner. it also made me feel nostalgic for the little physics and astronomy I’ve taken, and some of my uber-nerdy science friends I had at the math and science academy I attended.
Peace Corps maybe.