Zathras' Great Machine

Amusing unintended effects

As most of you no doubt already know, spammers are using a variety of techniques to defeat anti-spam filters. One of these techniques is to include a random literary passage in the spam message to fool the filter's dictionary. I got one of those this morning, and it worked: the spam filter scored it too low to be spam, so it landed in my inbox instead of the spam bin.

The funny thing about this one, though, is that, for one thing, the actual "spam" part of the spam -- an image linked to a URL -- didn't come thru, meaning that I didn't even know what I was being spammed for. The even funnier thing is that that sent my attention instead to the random literary passage, and when I read it, I actually found myself becoming interested in it and wondering where it was from (I would assume that spammers grab these passages from various random areas on the 'Net rather than writing them themselves). I'd do a search on this to determine its origin, but I'm getting ready to head out the door. For anyone who might be interested, here's the passage, quoted verbatim and in full:

"With a soft-spoken goodnight he reversed the car and drove away up the hill.Arthur Calary was left alone waiting on the quayside.Alone with his thoughts and his apprehension of what was in front of him.How wild the scenery was here,he thought.One could fancy oneself on a Scottish loch,far from anywhere.And yet,only a few miles away,were the hotels,the shops,the cocktail bars and the crowds of Redquay.He reflected,not for the first time,on the extraordinary contrasts of the English landscape. Fear-what a strange thing fear was. . . ."