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Unstable Cheese Wheel (And Other Oddities From My Inbox)

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Greg Williams

Published: September 27, 2007

TAMPA Not long ago, a co-worker caught my attention and, pointing to his computer screen, invited me to check out the subject line of a spam message he had received.

No, it wasn't nasty — or even mildly insinuating. Itwasn't an obvious sales pitchfor Xanax or Viagra.

This particular blip of random e-junk had a refreshing Monty Pythonesque flair, arbitrarily linking words that may never have been seen together. (Think: "My hovercraft is full of eels.")

Was it computer-generated, we wondered, or was it carefully crafted by a would-be business dynamo who believed an absurdist grab-bag approach to e-mail marketing might be the next big thing?

The subject line: "A fife so leghorn."

Conceptually, it was a thing of beauty. My spammed colleague, however, was not remotely tempted to click through to the message. (Art and commerce, it seems, so rarely are in sync.)

Alice Waugh (aka The Yak), a blogger from Lincoln, Mass., assembled a number of similarly random subject lines to create what she calls "spam poetry." An excerpt:

"See a dewey graham,

hear a vandal whinny ...

A career blonde engaged

feels the carpenter admiration

for the chain smoker mane ..."

In the same transformative spirit, we present this gallery of illustrations based on electronic clutter from my own Inbox — guaranteed to be 100 percent virus-free.

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