Unhealthy Fascinations, Part 744

I'm becoming entranced with the world of spam. Yahoo is pretty good about shunting all the sex and drugs into the bulk folder, but I go in there pretty regularly to sort through since things I want end up in there occassionally. I love the randomly generated names that show up in the "From" lines. Bifurcations P. Foodstuff, f'r instance. Or Infested A. Upstart. And then there are the subject lines. Not the screaming, blaring ones, like those advertising the naked horny babes, or "V!a6ra Cheep!"--those just start to run together. But I find the more subtle ones oddly endearing, in a pathetic way. Today's favorite: "Like sports and movies?" I'm imagining the lonely individual who sees that in his or her inbox and thinks, "It's like they know me!"

Tapping the Hivemind

I'm looking for resources--print, web, video, or even human--on things like genetic disease and interspecies viral transmission. I'm starting from something pretty close to zero, so be gentle with me. If you can help me, please comment or email me at my profile addy. Thanks!

Please Stop Sucking, Blogger

You hear me?

Bring Your Radical Naturalist to Work Day

My roommate Marianne didn't sleep well last night. She's also been reading The Last American Man. It's about Eustace Conway, a present-day Thoreau who owns a thousand acres of pristine wilderness and lives in a teepee in the woods full-time. He's remarkably committed to reconnecting kids to nature, but he's also highly eccentric, and many of the people who are drawn to his ideals are repelled by his personality.

I emailed Marianne to ask if she had any idea why she couldn't sleep. She wrote back:

I was hot. Also I kept dreaming that I had to bring Eustace Conway in to work with me today, and it was stressing me out.

Holy Mother of Godzilla What Have We Created

So, this thing? You know, the thing that was started out of giddy frustration with genre labels and has taken on a life of its own? The one that Jed Googled a week ago and found half a dozen results for?

I just Googled and got 485 hits. Either we've tapped into some deep-seated frustrations about genre, or people really like the idea of blowing things up.

(Or maybe it's just that everyone in the world reads BoingBoing.)