strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive

Adventures with an unreliable narrator.

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Apr 9 04: drive-by epigrams

I’m so thrilled whenever anybody leaves a comment on one of my blog entries that I go rushing off to read it. Who could it have been? What did they have to say? Is it somebody I know? Or a total stranger wandered in from who-knows-where?

So when I saw that somebody had commented on a posting that was over a year old—from the earliest days of the blog, when I was swimming at the Games in Sydney—you can imagine my excitement. The new comment was at the bottom, from a person I’d never met: one Brockway Kim.

Who? I’d never heard of this person. And the content of the posting was equally mysterious. Just a pithy little sentence that either (a) had no real connection to what I’d been talking about or (b) was delivering some sort of extremely oblique compliment. A drive-by epigram.

What else could I do? I googled. One of the other Brockway Kim hits provoked an array of reactions:

Hey, look! A Clay Shirky reference! Yep, he’s still out there…
Huh. Brockway Kim doesn’t seem to add much to any conversation. Just these little phrases…
That’s unexpected…Steve Espinola does this sort of Zen commentary as well? How funny is that? Paul knows that guy…he had that music-happening thing down on the Lower East Side a while back. Played the electric tennis racket.
Aw, crap. This stuff is just spam, isn’t it?

Yup. I had hoped that perhaps it was some sort of act of DaDa, but no. It’s just spam. In my case, my anti-comment-spam mechanisms stripped out the URL it was trying to peddle….leaving us with an interesting bottle from which the rancid contents had been drained.

I guess we can just leave the bottle on the windowsill for now.

(Oh. And the quote is from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As it turns out. At least the spambot’s drawing from a good database.)

Commentary

That’s odd. Yeah, that whole blog appeared to be some sort of spamming experiment. I didn’t contribute that pithy little quote…it was either another Steve Espinola or a machine pretending to me.

Who you be? Who is Paul who knows me?

Steve, googling self.

posted by Steve Espianola, Apr 16 04 2:45 PM

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