Got a spam today that may have been designed purely to annoy me. The title is “hi, I fixed the problem . . .” and the entire content is

<img src=”http://www.1stchannel.com/images/pixel.gif?track=1&entry=[myaddress]” border=”0″>

Had I opened this with image-loading enabled, it would look blank to me, but notify 1stchannel that my address is valid. (2004 Oct 07: This is why Mozilla lets you turn off image-loading in mail.)

Meanwhile, stop me if you’ve heard this one: ( . . more . . )

My clipping service (hi Jo) found these in alt.peeves:

Well apart from coffee, algebra and astronomy, Positional notation/place value, soap and international trade, what have the arabs ever done for us? [link]

and:

Peeve: people who think the main purpose of the Internet is to enable little Jasper to research his school project on rainfall without being distracted by images of donkey sex. [link]

Steve Baker tells the tale of the Utah Teapot. (Found through another Steve’s links.)
Links in turn to the Stanford Bunny.

And what collection of digital models would be complete without Lena Sjööblom?
I first saw her in Foley & van Dam, where her face (cropped rather tight) was used to illustrate halftoning; my copy vanished in ~1982, and I now have a later edition without her (*snif*).

The oddest things sometimes bug me. Does anyone else remember a children’s book which mentions eating “roast beast”?

Update. One reader (see, this is how I smoke you out) points it out in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I feel that the thing tickling at the back door of my mind is in prose; something between Winnie the Pooh and Fractured Fairy Tales — but maybe that’s just neural interference from the Questing Beast of The Once and Future King.

(I received about three versions of this warning today. This one came first, from Harvey Newstrom of Extropy Institute, and is the most detailed.)

Yahoo has added a new section to your “Account Info” that requests spammers to send you unsolicited e-mail. They have set this on for everybody. Everybody’s default settings are initially set to “yes” meaning that everybody who uses Yahoo is allegedly requesting advertisers to send unsolicited e-mail to them!

Follow these instructions to turn these settings off:

• Go to groups.yahoo.com
• Click on “Account Info” in the upper-right corner
• Click on “Edit your marketing preferences” down under “Member Information” under “Yahoo! Mail Address”
• Click all the buttons to “No” for Special Offers and Marketing Communications
• Scroll down to make sure you get all the checkboxes
• Look at the very bottom of the page fto click “No” for U.S. Mail and Phone calls.
• Press the “Save Changes” button
• Click “continue” to confirm your changes
• Click the “Finished” button

Dave Krieger, whom I haven’t seen in too long, tells the tale of his role in the creation of Krieger Waves. (This is not new but I don’t remember seeing it before.)

I feel like mentioning, for no particular reason, that The Font Bureau’s Graphite Condensed looks remarkably like Walt Kelly’s Henry Shikuma’s lettering in Pogo.