E-Mails I've Received

This is probably the least motivational E-mail ad for a product I have ever received.

To start off with, it was sent by a guy named Gard Irwin. That sounds like a name from a Homestarrunner cartoon, one of the sketchy people with a pimply face and big glasses that are created to be random authors and such. That should have been enough, but the subject line gave away the whole reason I was being graced with Gard's communication.

"Get rid of your lilliputian penis."

Thank God I had read Gulliver's Travels this summer. Otherwise, I would never had known just how small my penis is. The prefix "lilli-" might have given it away (although it is the suffix for my last name). Coincidentally, Swift's work was not above ribald antics. He has a character in the story named Master Bates.

Of course I have gotten emails like this, as people with and without penises all over the world have too. We know that a subject line that mentions the organ at all tries to sell a medication or an herb. Rarely do they sell a castration service. Opening the e-mail up confirmed my suspicions.

With a big penis you can beat up all the other men
CHECK NOW
Now your penis will be too big to big covered by your hat.

The first line made me laugh. I never knew that this was the point of a large penis, to beat other men up with it. Not to impress the women (or the men), not to pleasure, but to abuse. I could be the king of the hill. Others might come to me with guns and Ninja stars, but I would just have to drop my pants and spin in a circle. Victory would then be mine.


What really scared me out was that the last line talks about having a hat. I am one of the few people who wears one regularly. How did they know? How did they know that my hat his a humble one, not a cap (which I think would be too small as things stand right now ;) ) but not a top hat, which could hide a very large member.

Of course I did not click on the link. Not even in the library where they couldn't trace me back to my laptop. Overall, it is an honest ad, but totally fails to do anything but amuse me.

Meanwhile, Lionel Blake (upstanding and British, perhaps a poet laureate?) sent me a message,"breaking news."

We start:

No smokescreens here
What you see is what you'll get.

Good. finally. I was excited, yet worried that I was getting another e-mail begging to get its electronic hands on my genitals.

SHOTPAK Inc (SHTP) has a unique product that's causing ripples across the globe.

Notice that SHTP looks a lot like SHIT, though of course I have bad vision, even at five inches away from the screen.

The company's shares are going through the roof, up 42 % today alone.

Hmmm, perhaps cheap Viagra? That would make things rise quickly.

see the recent headlines
- ShotPak Signs Major Import Agreement For South Korea
- ShotPak Signs Letter of Intent with India Importer
- ShotPak Signs Letter of Intent with India Importer to Be Available in 120 Hotel Mini Bars Throughout Country
- ShotPak Ships Throughout Texas

It is an interesting choice of markets, South Korea, India, and Texas. But it will be in mini bars, which is a growing market, because I know how popular they are. You just go into your room and knock a few whiskeys and bags of nuts back.

And so on and so on.
This is a real company with real products NO SMOKESCREEN
Look into it and get in on the action.

But they won;t tell me what they are. I am supposed to get in on the action. Do they want to mess with my penis?

History of Poland

Today I had my midterm for the history of Poland. It was alright. I finished with time to spare. Basically I wrote in a Blue Book, identifying several terms and trying to explain how they were significant. I had studied all of them and found it was most difficult how to repeat information without sounding like I was just spitting out the same answer, since the terms all related to the big dates of Polish history at that point: 1386, 1414, 1569, 1648 etc.

It is an interesting class, closer to the kind of history I took in High School than what I have learned in College. One might decry the fact that it was all names and dates, no grand post-modern theories deconstructing the whole notion of "Polish-ness." But I am learning about the history of a country and its peoples, and I find it interesting. it is a good lesson of how not to build your government. I feel bad that it was the Poles who seemed to have a state and constitution that was a laughingstock of Europe. Its most ridiculous provision was that it let nobles legally revolt and fight the king with their own armies. How the country survived for so long without being conquered is the real miracle of the country's history.

Since I knew only the basics of the country's history, this is the approach that works best. I am learning things I can share with other people. One of the kids in my class is in the same fiction workshop as me and we tried to out-do each other in telling our instructor, Darin Strauss,of all the poor decisions Poland made from 966 to 1795.

Imagine trying to teach the history of the US to kids on the model I have experienced in college. They would learn nothing. Even if it was all myth, they would still know something and then could deconstruct it to see what was underneath. Before Racism can be taken apart or the notion of freedom, the concrete history of slavery and the adoption of the constitution has to occur. Grand theorizing is fine (I do it all the time) but without any grounding in time and space, its just wasted energy.