Chapter XVI: Party Pooper

As the world's most active poker site, PartyPoker.com has about 20,000 players online, from all over the world, at any given moment. This humongous player base contains a large number of college students, who are not the most polite demographic on the internet. Furthermore, poker itself predictably gives rise to situations where a certain amount of vituperation occurs. All this is to say that you get a bunch of people cussing at each other.

To deal with this, PartyPoker, like many online entities, implements a profanity filter. Thus, on PartyPoker, suppose someone hits a two-outer on the river and, upset, you say to him, "GO MASTURBATE A GOAT YOU FUCKING WHORE!" This will appear in the chatbox as "GO XXXXXXXXXX A GOAT YOU XXXXING XXXXX!" You get the idea. There are, however, a few interesting things about PartyPoker's filter that I have noticed and shall now impart to you.

The first is that the word 'ass' is not filtered, whereas 'asshole' is. This, I surmise, is because many innocuous words contain the string 'ass', such as 'morass,' 'neoclassicism, and 'lassitude.' and Censoring 'ass' would render these non-profane words unintelligible. It is rarer for the string 'asshole' to occur in a context other than swearing and thus it can legitimately be filtered.

Unfortunately, similar consideration was not given when the decision was made to filter the string 'spic', which I only realized was on the blacklist when I used the word 'inauspicious' which appears as 'inauXXXXious.'

And finally, PartyPoker filters the word 'prophecy.' Why, you may well ask, is this so? 'Prophecy' is not generally considered to be profanity--it is not a racial epithet, nor does not seem to be insulting in any way. In fact, it isn't. In a disturbing move, PartyPoker censors 'prophecy' for its own profit-driven purposes. Those unfamiliar with internet poker will never have heard of pokerprophecy.com, a site which runs several large computers that track the performance of tournament players on PartyPoker. This information is then sold to other players. In essence, you can sit down at a table, click a button, and be presented with a chart showing the relative skill of all the other players at the table. pokerprophecy.com is also useful in tracking your own performance over time. The problem, though, is that pokerprophecy.com is not affiliated with PartyPoker and is apparently percieved as a threat. Thus the word 'prophecy' is censored to make talking about it more difficult.

All in all, the profanity filter is utterly ineffective. Anyone who really wants to swear can easily bypass it by simply interposing another character between the first and second letter of the the filtered word (i.e. 'F.UCK'). One can only hope that the apparent use of the profanity filter to attack other businesses is an isolated incident.

In other news, there is still no other news.

Chapter CXXIV: In Which Our Hero Is Gravely Wounded

"This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause birth defects and other reproductive harm." Well, shit. I guess I shouldn't buy this coffee mug. Or this knock-off tupperware. Or this 'sexy nurse' costume. Everything I would ever want from the 99-cent store causes birth defects and/or cancer--according to the State of California, anyway. To be sure, the State of California might be a lying bitch, but even so, I just can't bring myself to eat out of something that has a skull and crossbones sticker on it.

The can openers though, are stickerless and free of danger. Or so I thought. During the summer, I ate approximately three cans of tuna a day, and opened them with a stainless steel can opener that I bought at a supermarket for about $20. It opened cans with the efficiency of a German blitzkreig conquering Poland, and I loved it. Unfortunately, while moving into my new apartment though, this marvel of kitchen engineering took it upon itself to disappear (perhaps escaping to Argentina like numerous Nazi officials.

So, I needed a can opener, and could nary believe my luck upon procuring one for a relative pittance at the 99-cent store. I rushed home with my prize, flung open the cabinet door, and cackled menacingly at the cowering tuna cans. They had grown complacent in the interim. I chose a victim and brought him to the sink, where I proceeded to use my new can opener for the first time.

It was unexpectedly difficult, more like the Russian campaign than the Polish one. I had to reclamp the edge several times to make any progress at all, and eventually reached an impasse--there was this little part of tin that the damn can opener simply refused to cut through! I named that bit Stalingrad. I resorted to trying to pry off the lid (mostly detached) with my fingers. And then it happened.

AAAAaAAaaaaHHH1!!!! OWwwwW!!!!! The fucking can decided to fight back and sliced an inch-long gash into my thumb. I bled all over my tuna--but ate it anyway--and then called the Student Health Services center to make an appointment for a tetanus shot.

The moral of this story is, don't buy ANYTHING for the 99-cent store. Even if it doesn't cause cancer, it'll figure out some way to kill you.

Chapter XIII: Junk Mail Junkie

I used to avoid junk mail like the plague. My spam filter consisted of a five hundred foot wall topped with barbed wire, surrounded a crocodile infested moat. My inbox was so secure that it took me two weeks longer than anyone else to find out I had been accepted to Cal Poly, since my acceptance email had been deflected by my junk mail filter. But hey, it's just like with national security--sacrifices must be made to ensure the integrity of the motherland, or inbox, as the case may be. Behind these impregnable defenses, I revelled and made merry, like Prince Prospero.

Inevitably though, a piece of junk mail was able to infiltrate my castellated abbey and gruesomely kill all my guests, a la Edgar Allan Poe.

That was a couple years ago. Now, I pop into my junk mail folder pretty much whenever I check my email, hoping to find a neat piece of spam. Contrary to popular belief, not all junk mail is created equal. Sure, most of the time it's just some boring fluff where the subject is "enLarGeYour /\/\anhood" from someone named "NOWYOUCAN" but every so often, it's something cool, albeit inadvertently.

There was a period of about a month when I got a slew of emails where in the email text, after the ad for printer ink/penis enlargement/SUPER LOW mortgage rates, there would be a couple weird sentences, like "As Abbie limped across the street "Looks like a storm's comin'" mumbled Uncle Leroy and the Axe fell swiftly on the cat who blew Autumn Mist into the air like butterflies. I love Goats."

This was probably a device to try to get the email through spam filters (it failed), but every so often something almost meaningful emerged from the randomness.

At any rate, last night I got an email from "HIS HIGHNESS Farzand Bin Ali, Emir of the state of Bahrain." It was rather lengthy, but very entertaining. The basic gist was that he got a lot of bribes from American oil companies ($32 million), and he wants me to help him invest it in the Canadian stock market. In return he'll give me $2 million. To make this transfer, he needs all my bank account information. And finally, he looks forward to a "fruitful business relationship."

Quite clever I thought, but there's one minor detail that annoys me. The emir of Bahrain's name is Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, not Farzand Bin Ali. Why would they fuck that up?

Supposedly, spam composes about 95% of all email traffic in the United States. That's fucking awesome.

In other news, my bookstore doesn't stock The Economist anymore, for some reason.

Chapter XII: Honey Bunches of Shit™

I never paid attention to cereal commercials when I was younger. I had no disposable income to speak of, and besides, the cereal that my mom bought--the cereal I would be eating--was determined solely by one factor, which was (of course) the price. For example, my mom once bought 15 boxes of Honey Bunches of Oats (henceforth referred to as HBoO) for a dollar each.

Some weeks prior to this, she had bought a couple boxes of HBoO for the first time as a trial run. Us kids--my brother, sister, and I--ate them and expressed the sentiment that they were passably esculent. This, apparently, was interpreted as validation and taken as a green light to capitalize fully on any deals local supermarkets were offering on HBoO, including 3 boxes for $3 (up to 15 boxes at this price), with your Vons Club card.

You can guess what happened next. The process was slow, but implacable. Breakfast took longer and longer to eat and by box three (five, if you count the two we ate before), what was never really a cheerful time of day to begin with became downright shitty. Sometimes my siblings and I would look up from our bowls of soggy sweetness and sigh. Our eyes would meet silently, since at that point words were no longer necessary--the eyes said everything. They (the eyes) said, "This fucking sucks. I fucking hate HBoO. Why the fuck did she buy 15 fucking boxes?" And whatever variations on that theme one 10 year-old and two 15 year-old (they're fraternal twins) minds could think of.

Furthermore, HBoO turned our cheap nonfat milk blue for some reason. This takes a few minutes, so we hadn't noticed it before when we were still eating the cereal reasonably quickly. Eventually though, this transformation became a fact of daily life. Thus, even after we had finished the cereal, we had to deal with a bowl of bluish milk, not quite cold anymore, with specks of cereal dust floating aimlessly around, like the frozen bodies in Titanic. Not to put too fine a point on it, this phase of the meal was very unappetizing and usually took longer than the main cereal phase.

I don't quite remember when we decided we had had enough. Each one us probably had a slightly different threshold. I'm guessing Charlie lasted the longest. He's like that. In any case, the expiration dates passed, and then passed again and again as the years went by. Everytime we opened the cupboard, they were there to mock us. Row upon row of pristine white unopened boxes (and one opened box). Our mom refused to buy any different cereal until we finished what we had, reasoning that unopened cereal can't expire, but we never ate another bowl. Just the thought of HBoO leaves a sour taste in my mouth. And by sour, I mean sickeningly sweet. Honestly, I can still taste them if I think about it hard enough. They have all sorts of different colors for the insignia on the front now, but I remember distinctly: our boxes were the ones with blue.

Basically I never ate cereal or drank milk for the next several years, not even when I first escaped to college last year. This summer though, I took to eating Honey Nut Cheerios, which I find delectable. That brings me to last night, when the incident occurred that jogged my memory of the tale of woe I just recounted. Last night I had just enough Cheerios left in the box for one last bowl, but the milk had run out the bowl before. Being ever so resourceful, I immediately weighed the options in the refrigerator: water, Gatorade, vodka, or orange juice. I decided to go with orange juice--after all, it's all "part of this complete breakfast" as cereal commercials are so fond of saying at the end, whilst displaying a table loaded with a bowl of cereal, a giant glass of milk, a giant glass of orange juice, two apples, a banana, scrambled eggs, a stack of pancakes, and a head of lettuce.

Bottom line: bad idea. The sweetness of the Cheerios made the mildly tangy orange juice downright sour, and everything got a million times stickier, and the gobs of cereal dust that came out of the bottom of the bag looked plain gross. Orange juice may float Cheerios, but it definitely doesn't float my Cheerio, so to speak.

Darron, one of my roommates, bought more milk today, but now I'm out of Cheerios. If there is a word for the evil version of serendipity, this would be an example of it.

In other news, this is actually the second time I've written this. My computer mysteriously turned off half an hour ago and took draft one with it. Fortunately, Word rescued the philosophy paper I was writing at the same time about Plato's Phaedo and the Theory of Forms. Exciting stuff, I know.

Thank you Microsoft.