The opposite of "making the playoffs"

What's that you ask, dear reader? "What is the opposite of making the playoffs?" I will tell you: the opposite of "making the playoffs" is losing to the Cincinnati Bengals.

Seriously. The effing Bengals. The Redskins just lost to a team led by a quarterback from Harvard.

First the Commodores epic collapse after beginning the season 5-0, and now the Redskins virtually assured of a January spent playing pinochle. And September seemed so promising! The football gods are truly cruel and merciless.

Anyway, I'll see you all later. I'm off to commit hara kiri.

"We always say it won't take long
Oh, but something's always wrong"
- Toad the Wet Sprocket, Something's Always Wrong

Think of the boost to the economy!

Okay, just about everyone has probably seen "Prop 8: The Musical" by now, but I wanted to post a link to it anyway, mainly because it reinforces one of my favorite points I've made about several other controversial issues (e.g., legalized marijuana, legalized prostitution): the amount of money businesses as well as the government (from tax revenue as well as the absence of enforcement expenditures) that there is to be gained from reversing course is simply staggering.

Wow, that may be one of the worst run-on sentences ever written, second only to the first sentence of Robinson Crusoe, which if memory serves is also equivalent to the first chapter. But anyway. Enjoy!

"The hardest thing that I've done is laying down with someone
And the idiots in Detroit, well, they've all gone sour
Everyone lies"
- Rogue Wave, Salesman at the Day of the Parade

Spam in the place where I live...

During the month of November, I decided to conduct an experiment to determine how much spam e-mail I would receive in a month. Yesterday, I concluded the experiment, and the answer was this: over one month, 611 pieces of e-mail were sent to the spam folder of my GMail account. I painstakingly scanned through the emails to provide the following empirical data for your perusal and amusement:

• 301 spam e-mails were sexual in nature, mostly offers for Viagra or Cialis (which are unneeded), penis enlargement (also unneeded unless I ever want to become a porn star), or solicitations from women who purportedly found me on some dating site or other.
  
• 93 were about discounts on Rolex watches or replica Rolex watches (or more often, Rep1ica Watches)
  
• 58 were offers for a university dip1oma just in case I was having trouble finding work in the struggling economy (clearly, they haven't done their research)
  
• 59 were offers for discounted medications of a non-sexual nature (usually such well-known drugs as "Valiun" and "Xamax")
  
• 25 were in German, and based on words such as "impotenz", likely also sexual in nature. (And I really don't want to know if I'm right on the phrase "10 Minuten kommen".)
  
• 10 were oddly political, with disturbing headlines such as "Bush killed Michelle Obama" (zuh?), as well as headlines implying our president-elect is an animated rabbit ("Who framed Barak").
  

Some of the best subject lines included:

• "add meat to the friend"
  
• "wind joystick around leg"
  
• "Pepper Are you a legend? Become a legend with Viagra! Magnet Horoscope" (I can only assume this was intended for retired linebacker Pepper Johnson, who apparently also has a zodiacal sign I'm unfamiliar with.)
  
• "The things are really bad when your male friend is dead" (Indeed.)
  
• "McCain and Obama use it too" (That's a mental image I really could have done without.)
  
• "Check how far her dark grotto goes" and the related "Make her grotto wet of pleasure" (Just when you think you've heard every euphemism there is...)
  
• "If you can read it, your wife isnt happy then" (Apparently, literacy is a sign of sexual inadequacy. Also, I'm married now.)
  

All of which, though amusing, raises the question: what the crap do these e-mails actually accomplish? I suppose it's possible that I'm underestimating the stupidity of people, but really, who looks at a subject line like "Prolonge your love pole" and thinks, "Oh, what a smashing idea! I think I'll open this e-mail and click on the link inside! Jolly good!"? (I have no idea why I made my hypothetical stupid person British.) Then again, I suppose there's the other, far more likely, possibility that the people composing these spam e-mails are the stupid ones. Yeah, let's go with that.

And just when you thought it was impossible to give Spam a bad (or, even worse) name...

(It's noteworthy that only two messages got sent to my Spam folder that shouldn't have been: a MySpace newsletter (which I frankly just deleted anyway), and a Rice newsletter. And to my recollection, no messages that should have been sent to my Spam folder were overlooked. Both of which facts indicate that Google's spam filter is quite good.)

P.S. If anyone has sent me an eCard using 123greetings.com, and I haven't replied, this is why. So don't send me eCards using 123greetings.com. Thanks.

"Now if there's some left, don't just throw it out
Use it for spackle or bathroom grout"
- "Weird Al" Yankovic, Spam