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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 109 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 May 08 Saturday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Today I solved (I think) one small mystery which has been puzzling me for months now, and got a sudden insight into a previously unsuspected world of semantic creativity, a product of the Age of the Internet. Before talking about the mystery, let me begin with a little background to set the scene:- I pay close attention to the search terms that people use to find the zenvirus.com site, and use this data to optimize my links and my HTML code. For example, lately the site has been getting quite a few hits for the search term short poems and is not doing badly for short stories. But this month I realized that, hey, I'm not getting any hits for the search term "short short stories", which is a bit sad as there are plenty of shortshort stories on the site, an example of such a short short story being (anyone in the mood for a gag clamps and catheter story?) the "flying in an age of terror" story:- NEVER FLY ECONOMY Because I have the short short stories material but have not been getting the hits, I did the logical thing and made the appropriately signposted HTML pages, and look forward to getting a decent share of short short story hits in the future. This kind of activity helps me optimize my website for its intended purpose, which is, primarily, to showcase my literary work, and explains my intense interest in search terms. Anyway, the scene having thus been set, let's get back to the question of "semantic creativity" and the associated mystery. For months now I've been puzzled by the fact that the zenvirus.com site has been taking occasional hits from totally weird and incomprehensible search terms such as, to give a couple of real examples:- "tarnal or fluorogen or retrogenerative or spillage or grumbling" (that's all one search term) and "chromogram or pundita or subtribal or unsentinelled or oculistic" I mean, what's the logic here? The term "unsentinelled" is actually on the zenvirus.com site in the (adults only, please) poem HELEN OF TROY, in which Idomeneus of Crete declares that:- |
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Since we have forges, and our neighbours likewise,
We cannot risk that naked peace Which puts its trust in trust alone And sleeps unsentinelled, guarded by less than geese. |
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(I just did a Google search for "unsentinelled" and got "about 29" results, most of which seem to relate to the fall of Troy, for example "wealth. But when sweet sleep stole over mortal men, Then sons of Troy and battle-biding Greeks All slumber-heavy slept unsentinelled". Presumably I absorbed the word "unsentinelled" while doing background reading about the Trojan War, although, if you'd asked me about this yesterday, I would, in all honesty, have claimed uninfluence originality.)
The word "unsentinelled", then, is definitely on the zenvirus.com site. That said, why would anyone be searching for the seemingly arbitrary collection of options specified by "chromogram or pundita or subtribal or unsentinelled or oculistic"? At first I thought someone must be doing academic research for a thesis into the frequency of the use, on the Internet, of recondite words. Alternatively, I postulated that someone might be hunting for example sentences to illustrate dictionary entries for selected words. Neither of these notions were entirely satisfactory, but they were the best explanation I could come up with, so I made do with those makeshift explanations for some months. (The mind abhors a vacuum. Give me a mystery and I'll give you an explanation, even if I can't shake the nagging suspicion that the explanation is wrong.) Recently, I got a hint of the truth (though I didn't realize it) when I e-mailed out the latest issue of the zenvirus.com newsletter, an SF fantasy poetry newsletter which now has the title CREATIVE FRACTION. The automated software at one organization sent me a stern message advising that the newsletter had been blockaded in line with the organization's policy on "netiquette and cyberliablity" because it "has been found containing content that is potentially unsuitable and not in line with our Company Policy on emails". What caused the virus-free plain text newsletter to labelled as "potentially unsuitable"? Well, maybe the word "fetish" in the phrase "nose picking fetish" or maybe the word "breasts" in the phrase "helen breasts greece". Both phrases happen to be sample search terms which found the zenvirus.com site. Helen's breasts are online as part of the poem HELEN OF TROY as follows:- |
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Elsewhere yet again,
In Sparta, Veiled in dreams, young Helen sleeps, Breasts uplifted by her breathing's ease. |
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The point here is that some e-mail delivery systems are now using software to hunt for specific words or phrases and to screen out any e-mail messages containing those words or phrases.
But what's the connection between that fact (the existence of word-screening software) and weird searches for stuff like "catercap or ententophil or yamato or darr or iamb"? I got another hint today when I was looking through my junk mail, something I don't usually have time to do (it usually all gets ruthlessly deleted in accordance with my draconian policy on required subject lines for e-mail.) (Note: I was running Linux when I looked through my junk e-mail, which minimizes my vulnerability to viruses, and I made certain that, before opening any of the pieces of junk e-mail, I had physically disconnected the cable which connects my computer to the Internet, a basic precaution intended to prevent any of these pieces of spam from phoning home with the message, "Yes, this guy exists!") Whoever composed the subject line Damn, Ur Diicky Really Small ... Hohohohoh phlegmy was obviously trying to make an end-run round software that tries to screen out e-mail containing selected undesirable terms. Personally, I don't care what other people think about the size of my diicky, but, from an aesthetic point of view, I thought the layout of this particular piece of junk e-mail was attractive, so I decided to look at the underlying source code of the HTML e-mail with a view to analyzing it. So I saved the e-mail as an .eml file and then opened it up with my plain-text editor, NEdit. And, to my astonishment, up near the top of the e-mail I found the entirely unexpected text string "balkans necessary uneven hosteller angledozer ulcer westward" followed by the string "inoffice thyrotoxic lambkin alma calibre neritic cento vouloir marksman shaktism janet excavate bluestone publican stiffened shamash calming unarranged near". And the first part of the body of the e-mail was the following:- < offers painful rutted toryism smaltite organizer colleague stupid carboxyl camphor > < miseria awoke fatalist gimlet rallying excluded exogenetic sway > < shrub corybantic vellicate igigi obtensible luce timeful osprey esthete depreciate diffusely > This stuff is completely invisible to the reader of the e-mail because stuff contained between the two arrows < and > (the arrows shown <here> in red) does not display when you're looking at HTML using an e-mail program such as Outlook Express.
To the human reader, then, the piece of spam is an e-mail about the size of his (the intended reader is undoubtedly male) diicky, which, with the help of the right drug, will become "not just longer and thicker, but much harder & healthier". However, to a piece of word-scanning software diligently hunting for naughty words, this e-mail is a message about (perhaps) a hosteller in the Balkans or a necessary angledozer heading westward, none of which takes us in the direction of a "greater and longer lasting erec--tion". The last part of the body of the e-mail is this:- < twit anesthesia tinny burletta strobe driftfish valid edginess continuum reabsorb politick gropingly academist aptness > In the course of looking at this stuff, I had a great "Aha!" experience. Somewhere in the sweating bowels of the bigger diicky industry, someone is doing very elegant research into the realms of semantic improbabilities, carefully engineering dreamlikes sequences such as "miseria awoke fatalist," a sequence which is already very close to being poetry, and which, with just a little reengineering, could become poetry. |
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I am a driftfish; The edginess of my continuum Gropingly academistic. Valid? The tinny burletta Begs to differ, And twits me About the inaptness of my pretensions. |
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That, in fact, having become a poem, will become today's addition to my collection of short poems, as a short cryptic psychological uncertainty poem.
(The poem having been written, a question arises: what is a burletta? "A comic operetta," it seems - a musical farce. In context, then, "burletta" actually makes rather more sense than I had expected it to, which is a bit disappointing. I had vaguely imagined that a "burletta" might be a kind of Italian cardigan or something like that.) The logical solution to the mystery of the baffling search strings, then - search strings such as condoling or drab or cockerel or transfusive or zymase - seems to be that someone, somewhere, is doing research into strings of recondite words as part of the world's ongoing spam wars. I don't know whether the person responsible is a spammer or an anti-spammer, but I find it tempting to construct a speculative fictional scenario which runs like this:- Alabaster Methampetalina, a failed poet with a heavy Versace habit to support, is recruited by Gengortalormus Industries, the hypersecret organization which supplies "baffle strings" to the ever-needy spam industry which is dedicated to the task of enlarging diickies (mine, yours - if you have one - and even George's). Sweating in the humidity of the underground bunker in which she works, a bunker lined with dictionaries and lexicons, Alabaster puts together recondite text strings designed to be bafflingly improbable, and thus to confound the defensive heuristics of the world's Guardians of the Higher Good software programs, an example of such a string being donkeyride Geneva habeus Rumsfelditis abu leashpet Well, maybe, in view of the intended let's-play-respectable purpose, "leashpet" is not such a good choice. So let's substitute "hubristic". Alabaster then goes online, intending, perhaps, to check that the words which she has chosen are not on some red-flagged "used by spammers" watchlist. And that's why she runs searches which look like donkeyride or Geneva or habeus or Rumsfelditis or abu or hubristic That may not be the complete answer to the mystery. But I think this (speculative) scenario is a lot closer to the (probable) truth than my earlier hypothesizing. Update 2004 May 10: more on:- spam hidden text strings |
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