I get spam

I get such strange email sometimes. Here's one sent to my blog's new address:

To: madengineering@gawab.com
From: mr aliu (address redacted)
Reply-To: (address redacted)
Subject: DEAL $20.5MILLION DOLLARS
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 08:58:45 +0000

Good day to you,
I am the manager of Bcb Bank in Burkina Faso,my name is Mr Aliu Medena. i have a business which will be beneficial to both of us.The amount involved is ($20.5 million us dollars) which i want us to transfer out to your account.Please if you are willing to work with me,kindly reply to me for the deal.
As to your benefits,you shall be entitled to 50/50% of this fund for your co-operation in this deal while 10% will be set aside for expences both of us may incure during the completion of this business.Please have no fear and let me know if we can work things out,i hope my mail
will meet your favorable consideration.
Call me (Phone number redacted)
Yours Sincere
Aliu Medena

Gee, thanks for sending me this, Mr. Medena. I sure would love to commit wire-fraud over a supposed $10 million that I'm quite sure doesn't exist in any form, since that's not totally illegal in both the United States and Burkina Faso, and I'm quite sure that you can't just invent a bazillion little "fees" that you'll want me to pay to get this supposed money. And no, the $20 million can't be used towards the fees, naturally.
Also, I'll totally agree to this, since as an American, I must clearly be a principle-free greed-bag, and clearly have enough for you to ride the gravy-train for the rest of your life. And Burkina Faso is clearly a paragon of African honesty, where the police would totally give a wet slap were you to try to scam me on this.
And lastly, if you actually had access to that kind of money, transmitting it to any country on earth would be no problem whatsoever. You would not need to work with a native person of any kind, just call a bank and tell them that you'd like to open an account with wired money.
Nice try, Mugu.
PS: There seems to be something wrong with your keyboard. I think the problem is dust. You might want to, I don't know, clean it or something.

The Ungoogable List of Mr. Monroe

Randall Monroe of XKCD proposes a list of words that had no hits on google when he wrote them. These words now have a number of hits, mostly people talking about his list like I am.
I think most of his phrases had no hits for quite good reasons. He picked some damn unusual thoughts.

"ate a violin"

No animal on earth is capable of eating all the parts of a violin, although if I allow multiple organisms, I can find a combination that can eat everything: Termites consume the wood, various specialized bacteria can eat the laquer, the nylon strings, and if I let the metal parts rust away, these can be made into an iron rich health supplement.

"driver-side bidet"

A bidet is a toiletry part that squirts water onto your toileting parts to clean them. To use it successfully, you probably shouldn't be wearing pants as you do it. They're uncommon in America.
"Driver's side" seems to imply that this is in a vehicle, and used by the person operating it. If you're driving without pants, (or a skirt, or something to cover your crotch) then I think I might be a tad disgusted by you.

"unlike normal furries,"

"Furries" are an internet sub-community that depict themselves graphically as anthropomorphic animals. They're new enough that no one is sure what is "normal" for them. In fact, every time the internet turns around, it seems to uncover an even stranger one than was ever seen before. Thus making "normal furries" a nonsensical concept in two ways.

"Sarah, plain and tall and a cyborg"

Sarah, Plain and Tall, was a book about a stepmother who moved from the east coast to the midwest, and was about loneliness and existentialism. The book was set long before cyborgs were technically possible.While at first thought being a "cyborg" would make one explicitly not "plain," I suppose a plain and tall Sarah could have a pacemaker surgically installed, therefore making her a combination of a person and machine and therefore a cyborg.

"people are too civil on the internet"

For one, people tend towards the rude and caustic on the Internet. The authors of Penny Arcade point out that if you give the average person both anonymity and an audience, their behavior decays considerably (warning, rude language).
The other thing about this is that "too civil" is really really hard to imagine. What discussion wouldn't be better without the normal half-baked retorts and copious insults and the raging fury of a thousand broken dreams that characterize most internet arguments?

"his penis shattered my world"

I'm still not sure if having one's world shattered is a good thing or a bad thing. In any case, most straight women only really care that a potential boyfriend has a penis and that it works, and even among gay men, "size queens" are kind of rare.

"more like LAME-arkian theory"

Lamarkian Evolution is so entirely and throughly discredited that this kind of insult is stupid and unnecessary.

"my little horse must think it gay"

Horses of any size probably don't give a web slap if something is homosexual or not. Unless you mean it in the "it's lame" sense, in which case horses don't think that way either.

"it turned out her bottom half was a robot"

Half body replacement is still not technologically feasible.

"Aww, a baby hooker!"

Most people (in America anyway) would reguard anything remotely similar to "a baby hooker" as immensely creepy. Even the offspring of a hooker would be more pitied than admired.

---

I'd like to thank Mr. Monroe for this little crazy journey.

Other Mad Engineers

When it comes to building machines that make little or no sense, I'm not alone. Let's go over a few that I found with a quick search of Google, ignoring the matches that were just people bragging about their "mad engineering skillz." (Which they may or may not have actually had.)

There's another mad engineer right on our own blogspot. He's of a rather different political persuasion than I am.

A Mr. Quackenbush has proven quite the inventor, boasting 7 strange inventions, many with detailed instructions.

A man named Marv may not have come up with the ideas on his own, but was kind enough to point out the 7 wonders of the modern world. Thanks, Marv.

In England, an entire company has dedicated themselves to making your car more interesting. Although clients are requested to keep at least a modicum of sanity when ordering, because the "mad" part is actually an acronym.

A Polish company would like an engineer who can speak German and English. The madness of their science cannot be evaluated by me, since I speak neither German nor Polish.

DragonconTV invites you to learn more about mad scientists in general. The more you know...

Lumrix presents a tretise of mad scientists that's strangely similar to the one on Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia's copy, it notes that few mad scientists venture into civil engineering, geology, metallurgy, math, or the social sciences. Perhaps because a script revolving around those fields would be incredibly boring, but I am now inspired to write articles about those subjects.

Mr. Mudnoc of Atlanta is a mad...sound...engineer. I'm not a member of Myspace, which has forbidden me from listening to his work.

Dr. Anderson isn't a mad scientist, he just loves it a lot.

Ms08tx ... um, I can't read Japanese, but I think this person works in IT. Speaking of Japanese postings, any idea what this is?

Neatorama would like to remind you how to fold a shirt as an engineer would do it. And the way I've advocated doing it.

The other entries were mostly people talking about mad cow disease.