19 December, 2005

My see no anyway deviant

"Ooooo. Now there's something I have to read," I thought. "Or catch a computer virus from."

Spam e-mail with subjects like this are so obviously junk that they're pretty low on my nuisance list. Thanks to the fact that my mail reader is text-only, I can even look at the contents if I want, without having to worry about downloading an image or running a script.

I looked at this one.

"sentimental to Traddles," it began. "I met him in town, and asked him to walk out with me."

Traddles, you say? Hmm. That's actually better English than I've come to expect when dealing with tech support at some outfit like Dell or Symantec. Traddles... Traddles... like some nickname a college girl at Brown might have given her beau, the captain of the sculling team, around the turn of the century (not this most recent one—the one before).*

In those days, Big Men On Campus wore beaverskin coats, smoked pipes, and spoke with vaguely British accents. I know this from watching old black-and-white movies from the '40s and '50s. It's like they were the spawn of Thurston G. Howell III, all imperious and secure in their place at the top of the food chain. Certainly, there were normal people back then; they just weren't worth depicting in movies, unless the plot called for a milkman or someone to drive the coal truck.

They almost certainly wouldn't have found themselves in the pet supplies aisle of the local Wal-Mart grocery. If they had, they might have just grabbed a couple jugs of the cat litter with the blue label. They would not have climbed into the rack so far that only their ankles stuck out, whilst trying to drag the last two jugs of cat litter with the red label from where they cowered, all the way at the back.

"Help," they wouldn't have had to call to the bemused 100-something-year-old decorated WWI veteran, who was shuffling past, looking for the rawhide bones. "Can you give me a tug?"

Of course, I never saw a BMOC eating a hand-tossed pepperoni, mushroom, and black olive pizza. If that's what they gave up for the right to wear the beaverskin coat, I'd say they can have it. Party on, Traddles.

"So incontinence Diogenes anchovy," I always say.


* Yes, yes... Tommy Traddles is a character in David Copperfield. Go 'way, kid. Ya bother me.

3 comments:

Foo said...

That's precisely what I'm saying. I didn't actually get stuck, but as Maxwell Smart was fond of saying, "Missed it by that... much."

Anne said...

killer kat litter! I thought I was the only one diggin' around in the back hoping for one last hidden "whatever it is at the time" item.

Foo said...

That's right, Susie. You want to replace your original template with the new one. After saving the old one, of course. I'd walk you through the specifics, but I don't know how the Mac world works. Basically...

1. Select all the old template code and copy it to the clipboard.

2. Open a new text file on your computer and paste the template code into it. Save the file.

3. Now copy the new template code to your clipboard.

4. Delete or past over the old template with the new template.

5. Save the new template.

Items 1 and 2 are important, because making a backup of your current template allows you to go back if you don't like the new one without losing all your customizations, like links and so forth.

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