Horizon

The Joy of Spam

Alan Hogue writes that his acute sense of a misplaced apostrophe has preserved him from all sorts of schemes to defraud him of his checking account. I'm sure that still applies to 419 scams, but you can find perfectly grammatical English in the image-based spam which compiles sentences from literature in its text section to trick filters. At its best, the results can be as fun as a game of Exquisite Corpse:

Everybody in town said so. Whatever you called the stuff, however, there were enough torches in there to get the whole village afire — it would burn like a Guy Fawkes dummy, Geoffrey thought. God, what if she's moved the dope?

Paul understood that Annie had been driven to cull only the most hostile ones — those which reinforced her jaundiced view of mankind as Homo brattus — but they were vituperative by any standards. It looked like an octopus. "I did it in the night," she said. The challenges were constant. He had managed about four feet before realizing he was going to do nothing more useful than roll the wheelchair past the door and into the far corner unless he could turn it. On those occasions he would take Maugham along, but rarely read him &mdash being outside again was too great an experience to allow much concentration on other things.