spam and books

So there comes a time when you realize that your spammers possibly know more about you that your family does.

Case in point: most recent headers, received today:

( for the people who don't get pornographic spam--are there any of you out there? )

So to give a breakdown of my spam.

Viagara's up, up, up, again, and so, apparently, are a large number of extremely repressed college males who need to be spanked, taught a lesson, or deflowered, take your pick. Narcotics are making a serious comeback, offered from Mexico, Canada, and a country I'm not convinced exists in this particular dimension. No Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, but several highly questionable business offers. Someone desperately wants me to know stock prices and how I should buy, buy, buy now.

My breasts and orgasms are being left alone, but strange offers from bored househusbands have come to my attention, and a distrubing number of promises to remove my wrinkles.

*looks at spam* I do *not* have wrinkles.

Also, a few casinos, a couple of herbal remedies, and a few too many headers that don't actually spell anything readable, though if you squint and read them backwards--no. They still don't make sense.

Fictional Adventures

Usually, I buy new authors only after I've read a page or two in to see what I'm dealing with. Dark Father, which is probably one of the worst horror novels in the history of mankind, and Damon both gave me two things--a fairly traumatizing look at sex, and a raging headache trying to figure out the plot at a very young age. You know there's a basic wrongness to a book when you're not even able to giggle guiltily about reading omgsex!!!1!, because you're just that confused about how everyone got to this situation. And to be honest to myself, my primary focus wasn't the sex--one promised me vampires, the other promised me an evil child around my age, and let me point out, neither of those expectations were fulfilled.

( funny thing about Damon though )

Anyway, I picked out Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy, since I tend to trust female authors more than male when I want something more character driven in my fantasy/sci-fi. It didn't look too scary. It had a nice cover and I read the backs and thought, I shall be wild and crazy and buy the whole series! Since actually, I have found it is a guarantee that if I don't *right then*, I will never, ever find the rest of the books again.

I'm still not sure what the author was going for. I'm almost sure there's some really great symbolic meaning, or a great mythological moment, behind her--unusual choices, that me, being less well-read in Well-Read Literature than many, just wasn't getting.

The problem really started when I started saying the namse out loud.

Okay, here's the thing. What I *read* isn't necessarily related to verbal. So a written word is, to me, a written *word*. I won't actually *get* what I'm calling these characters unless I say it out loud, or something in the book connects me.

Such as, it took me a really, really, *really* long time to recongize the names of the main cast. Say, book two.

( i'm an idiot )

Oh look, another ad for Viagara in my inbox.