For some reason, the subject line of a spam email in my inbox caught my eye.

Make your fat friends envy you

I don’t know, it just clicked for me. So’s I checked the other 10-15 spam emails also in my inbox for any other choice phrases.

Surprisingly, I found several gems.

1. Do you want your dick to be wallpaper for a computer? Try [product name deleted].

I honestly don’t know if I want that or not. My brain almost short-circuited when I read it.

2. [product name deleted] is a penis enlargement product that will enhance your penis in length and girth without damagining your health.

I like that word, “damagining”. Didn’t he play for the Yankees in the 1940’s?

3. [product deleted] – an extremely striking flesh loss product is made available now wherever you need it!!!

Would you believe me if I told you the product was called Shylock?

4. May 24 2007 day of the explotion.
Already 200 millions of people has read this message !!!

Didn’t the season finale for Heroes already air on the 21st?

1. Rights to use the word bef*ckered.
2. An openly hostile interview subject on Inside The Actor’s Studio.
3. Spider-Man 3. I paid $9.50 to see it. It was worth $5.
4. Charlie Rose wrestling a greased hobo.
5. Rainbows, smiles and happiness.

Had kind of an interesting thing happen to me when I was visiting Wikipedia earlier today.

I actually have an account there (used it once to correct the glaring, horrible error that the Lizard first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #6, *not* #7!).

Despite the fact that I have an account there, when I visit the site I am never logged in.

So, imagine my surprise when I see that there is a message waiting for me.

I click on the message. The message was intended for the IP address I am currently using.

Now, realize that most Internet users don’t have “static” IP addresses. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) usually has a bunch of IP addresses reserved for their use. When you connect to the Internet, your ISP will just assign you an IP address at random. This is often referred to as a “dynamic” IP.

From time to time (I’m not exactly sure what prompts this), your IP address will switch.

Wikipedia allows editing by members of their site, but it also allows edits anonymously. Instead of logging your ID when you edit a page, it logs your IP address.

Apparently the miscreant who last had my dynamic IP address had a little fun with the Lincoln-Way East High School page.

I just want to go on record that I would have spelled it “douchebag” not “doochbag”.

I guess if you have a nightmare, you might as well cover all your bases.

Last night was one of those glorious dreams.

1. I was wandering around at college, after having gone back to school to start a new career. But, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing there.
2. A relative of mine got shot and lay on the ground, all bloodied.
3. I tried to help this relative, then realized I had traveled from the future and was in danger of meeting myself, creating a time paradox.

This is old news, I know, but I saw Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room for the first time last night when it aired on PBS.

I had followed the Enron case, but there were things that I learned of that I hadn’t known. For example, Enron traders actually had some of their power plants shut down under various false pretenses during the rolling blackouts in California in order to artificially inflate the cost of electricity they were passing on to you, the consumer. They have some audio of traders patting themselves on the back and laughing — it’s really beyond my ability to comment on it, it’s so horrid.

This kind of crime just makes me boil with rage. Someday this kind of crap will hopefully be seen as just one notch above child molester. Maybe when we stop worshipping the almighty buck.

Around twenty years ago my brother was living in Atlanta, Georgia, and while I was down there visiting him I was struck by how people drove differently there.

People drove at about 85 mph on the highways, which was a shock to me, at that time being used to a more calm 55 or 60 mph. Even stranger was how courteous everyone was — if you needed to switch lanes, you simply put on your turn signal, and without fail, you would be let in.

I was amazed that there seemed to be a set of internalized rules governing people’s driving habits, and that this was a localized phenonema.

Years later, I was driving in Chicago on a daily basis, growling at the countless driving a-holes would pass me on the right at a red light. Chicago was no Atlanta.

Well, now I have a label to put on this phenonema — emergent behavior. Apparently it’s all the rage now, what with the INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY and all.

Here’s a nice article about emergent behavior and traffic patterns from the Boston Globe:

“THE FIELDS OF computer science and education suffered a blow on Dec. 5, when Seymour Papert, the 78-year-old cofounder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, was struck by a motorbike in Hanoi. Papert, who had come to Hanoi for a conference on teaching math with computers, remained in a coma as of Friday.

Strangely, shortly before the accident, Papert had been discussing how to build a computer model of Hanoi’s notoriously chaotic traffic. He found it an interesting instance of a theme closely associated with his work: “emergent behavior,” or the way that large groups of agents following simple rules, with no central leader, can spontaneously c