I get a fair amount of blog spam.  The spam I like least is the sort that comes with a vapid but plausible plaintext comment—”Cool site!”; “Thanks for this!”; “lol that’s really funny”—because those are harder to weed out at a glance when I purge my moderation queues.  I get easily twenty spam comments for every actual reader contribution (NOTE TO READERS: COMMENT MORE, DAMMIT), so I’m usually glancing through the queue for the occasional message I should not delete.  These brainless little pseudo-greetings take more culling effort than, say, a great big mess of oxycodone links.

I got a new one today, though, and it was refreshingly plaintive.  Skip the robotic praise of the generic Nice Site, skip the polite fiction that nothing untoward is going on: just shoot straight for the heart.  Ready?

“Pleasse Do not delete this urls , i need money for my child”

That’s right.  Think of the children.

As depressing as the here-to-stay spam epidemic is to me, I find myself consistently entertained by the appearance of new tactics and feints on the part of spammers.  Internet spamming has essentially grown up with me (are we Generation Spam?), and watching the application of information theory over the years has been fascinating.  I laughed out loud the first time I saw evidence of markov chain text reconstitution in a v1aGr4 email—yes, it was spam, but they were using stochastic methods to defeat the recent Bayesian filter fad! 

Cut-up method as marketing vector!  I don’t know if Burroughs would be thrilled or insulted or what.