That’s part of a spam comment I received yesterday. They snare you with the first part of the phrase, a nice little comment meant to appeal to the author’s ego, and then snap you back with the hard realize that this is all just a lie and you are really just a tool for The Man, and we need to get our people out of Vietnam, man! Johnson is ruining everything.

And then the HUAC is re-formed and things get nasty from there.

I was going to really dissect the spam for fun, but something made me Google it. The 2,740 results suggested that this particular Russian server gets around a bit, but it problem isn’t the most prolific one.

Plus, Dr. Jim Pangborn, a English-lit, poetics, cultural and media history scholar has already done the heavy lifting stretches the idea beyond English. Pangborn takes the idea back to Socrates. You could take the thing all the way back to plumage and scales and cilia.

“Mine are better, softer, sturdier more colorful, more bountiful. Whatever you need, babe. Clearly life with me is going to be better than life with that guy. How droll.”

Then the female, having been impressed with the dance and the spontaneous sense of the male’s dance interpretation, takes a chance. And now the male is at the bowling alley four nights a week, coming home late reeking of booze and cigars. And she thinks Maybe, just maybe, the male with less scales or feathers wouldn’t have been so bad after all. She goes to look him up on Protozoabook and thinks Still less plumage/scales/cilia but he is a senior developer at Endoderm, so there’s that.

You never really think of Darwinism with that particular brand of cynicism.

Back to the Lomophotography. I took two pictures today on my iPhone for comparison’s sake, one using the Lomo app, and the other with the conventional technique.

I like the effect, but it is always going to be a novelty to me. I blame the years of rational empiricism training.

Critiqued the Crimson this afternoon. This year’s staff has grown into putting together strong papers pretty rapidly. Very proud. There was one or two minor problems, but I figure if the editors discover them before I point them out they are on the right track.

I showed them the new template for the website re-launch, as designed by the online editor. The mock-up has turned into a working page that will go live sooner than later. Now we begin the talks of more photography, more video, more social media, more, more, more. Dream big, I say, because the answer is frequently yes.

Picked up the Wall of Fame plaques today. They’ll be given out at Homecoming in two weeks. Another good class of inductees, and now I have to write blurbs for their displays. It is no easy challenge to distill a career of success into 30 words. Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?

Studied. Read. For class tomorrow I am critiquing Lang et al. (2005) “Wait! Don’t turn that dial! More excitement to come! The effects of story length and production pacing in local television news on channel changing behavior and information processing in a free-choice environment.” This is not the longest journal title I’ve ever encountered.

My professor, an internationally respected scholar and a talented and kind man, studied under the author. (Lang is mentioned mid-way through this spiel from one of my former professors. I recorded that in the spring of 2009, which seems a long time ago now. Indeed, I’d almost forgotten I had it.) I know one of the co-authors. It is a good paper and I can only find three or four things to mention in class tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a worthwhile critique.

For this class I’ve now almost filled two large three-ring binders with papers on cognition, method and effects. My three-hole punch is getting dull under the strain. I didn’t realize you could do that.

More from the 1939 World’s Fair will come along shortly.