SLC Post-script

Taking down the laundry this afternoon (all dry but a couple of towels!!), the kids were running around playing. I had tossed the slightly damp towels in the dryer while I took down the other clothes. The dryer vents right underneath the clothesline. When the boys noticed the air coming from the vent, indicating that the dryer was on, they disappeared around the back of the house, returning a moment later.

They had gone to check the electric meter, to see how fast the little wheel was spinning. Apparently, it wasn’t spinning too fast, giving them hope that they’d have enough energy for the magic light that fought against the “rising darkness” and the “attack of the alien lasers.”

Energy conservation as Imaginary Planetary Defense Support.

Radar rainbow circus mist fungus desk

I avoid reading my spam as much as possible. Don’t we all? Gmail very conveniently dumps suspicious mail in the spam folder before I ever lay eyes on it, and mostly I ignore it. But, you know, every once in a while a non-spammy message ends up in there, so I skim the messages every few days to catch wayward messages.

I zip down the list of names and subjects. Most of them are unintelligible, garblings of drug and sex enhancement products, but every once in a while a creative spammer will have a catchy subject line. I don’t mean catchy as in commercial-jingle catchy or gross catchy. I mean that they do something a little different.

One style of message pastes in a bit of a news article or headline into the subject line. I guess they’re trying to fool us into thinking that someone has sent us a news article to read. These aren’t particularly interesting to me, but they do tend to stand out.

The style that I really like is the random list of words subject line. These are often like monkey-poetry. A random list of words that somehow come together in a lovely juxtaposition. More than once, one of these listy little gems has inspired a character or scene in my writing.

So, if you’re lost and looking for a smidge of inspiration, take a skim at your spam subjects. You never know what you might find.

Oh yeah, NaNo Day 1: 3500 words.