How To Spot A Psychopath

…that I’m the only person on the whole Web who’s ever quoted the “we are cool, we are badasses” line from True Lies?

Go on, look for yourself. Hyphenate “badasses” if you like, split the quote up into two phrases, look on Usenet, go nuts. The closest I could find, besides my two pages, was a comment on some illegible MySpace page that now only seems to exist in Google’s cache.

The line is not even, as I write this, in the IMDB quotes for the film.

[Although, now that I look again, IMDB does have “We’re cool, we’re badasses…”, which I accept as being much the same thing since Arnie is unable to pronounce “we’re” and “we are” so that they sound different. There are still, as I write this, only four Google hits for even that, though; two are the same IMDB quotes list, and one’s another single MySpace page.]

The line is, of course, spoken by Arnie as he translates the Scary Terrorist’s self-promotional ranting. It’s an enormously useful quotation to use (preferably in as authentic an Austrian accent as you can manage) whenever someone starts big-noting themselves. I tend to mutter it while reading press releases.

I came to search for it after I looked up the Biblical source for the title of Stephen Fry’s autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot. Fry doesn’t see any need to explain the title in his book’s text, since everybody obviously already knows it’s from a couple of near-identical Psalms. God Himself is alleged to make this observation about a million acres of the Middle East, among other I’m-so-great-I-kick-ass claims.

Why, exactly, the author of those Psalms felt that an infinitely powerful being needed to come on like a self-aggrandising blues/rap artiste, I’m not sure. But the quote fits just fine:

“Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the strength of mine head; I am cool; I am a badass.”

Incidentally, True Lies is that rarest of birds, a Hollywood remake of a French film which does not stink. (Well, except for the dodgy title.)

If you’re familiar with True Lies, you’re also familiar with La Totale! (or “The Jackpot!”), because Lies is virtually a shot-for-shot remake of that French movie, only with huge super-expensive effects sequences added.

All of that weird misogynistic stuff in the middle of Lies, with the one-way-mirror interrogation room and such, becomes less mystifying when you know that three Frenchmen actually conspired to create it.

I get quite a lot of spam.

Less, I’m sure, than many people, but it still pitter-pats into my dan@dansdata.com account at a rate of around one message every three minutes - and that’s after it’s passed through SecureWebs‘ spam blocker. That blocker is deliberately set “loose”, to make sure it stops virtually no legitimate mail; SecureWebs claim it catches something in the order of 75% of all spam.

So dan@dansdata.com probably actually gets around 75 spams per hour.

My own anti-spam solution remains MailWasher, which I reviewed ages ago. The current version of MailWasher is a good straightforward client-side Windows spam-catcher for people, like me, who want to be able to zap the spam on the server, but also eyeball the headers of the messages first so I can make sure I’m not trashing letters from people whose ISP has just happened to drop onto some DNSBL or other.

I have two other e-mail addresses, from two different ISPs. One ISP uses Ironport and Brightmail spam filtering, through which no spam at all has ever penetrated; almost all of the mail I get to that address is from mailing lists, and I don’t remember ever noticing any legitimate-mail bounces - but you usually never know about them, of course, because the bounce-ee can’t tell you. I don’t think the other ISP has any server-side spam filtering at all, and I get a constant trickle of the stuff via that address as a result.

MailWasher still has its own stupid bounce generator, which allows you to send fake bounce messages to the “sender” of the spam to try to trick them into thinking that your address does not exist. That’d be a great idea if the apparent sender was very often the actual sender, and if spammers bothered to weed dead addresses out of their mailing lists. Since neither of those things is actually true, though, the bounce feature is just an annoying waste of time and bandwidth.

Apart from that, MailWasher works fine.

And provides decorative statistics.

I do my best to derive as much entertainment as possible from any situation in which I find myself, so you can look forward to a few posts here about the more spamtastic (or spamtacular) items that make it to my attention.

First subject: Odd words for “good”.

Spammers thesaurusise their spam to get around word-match filters, which is why you get all of those aphasic spams whose actual intended meaning is very difficult to determine.

One particularly obvious example of this is the spam, I think usually from people who speak little or no English anyway, in which completely bizarre words are used to mean “good”, or at least “attractive”.

Like “killing”, for instance. Which gives rise to subject lines like “killing Bitch at Porrn”, which is not advertising anything quite as alarming as you might at first think.

We may also never know how many people have been exhorted to visit a particular site to see a “scenic Bitch”.

And then there’s “Punctilious”, which I do not think means what they think it means.

And my very favourite, “Goluptious”, which actually is a real word, and even means just what the spammers think it means, but is so obscure that it, by itself, can now serve as a 99.9%-effective spam indicator.

What’re your favourite Words (And Word Combinations) Found Only In Spam?

I just noticed this MAKE: blog piece (which links to a site that’s currently down) about using outdoor sensor light fittings to give other gadgets motion triggers. They’re talking about using this trick in a haunted house context, given the impending arrival of this year’s Satan Day/nocturnal orgy, but you could plug in anything you wanted.

Well, within the current capacity of the light fitting and its wiring, anyway. A motion-sensitive bathroom heater, for instance, might be a neat idea but could easily pop a fuse or smoke some insulation.

The Edison-screw-to-standard-receptacle adapters they use are, I note, neat little off-the-shelf items - just screw ‘em in to turn any light socket into a power socket. Apparently you can even get three-pin versions, with the earth pin unconnected.

And fair enough too, I say. What kind of crappy haunted house lets all of the kids come out alive?

It is decided. At least for the time being.

This blog is, as of now, “How To Spot A Psychopath”, as suggested by user Stark, who signed up (Userid 2! 1337!) almost immediately after I asked for suggestions. For which promptness he was punished by having his comment eaten, thanks to my developmentally-delayed fiddling with the spam blocker.

The title, of course, comes from my Dan’s Data page of the same name, which is celebrating its seventh birthday around now.

(How To Destroy Your Computer could have been in the running, too.)

Those in search of further evidence of my unbalanced nature may care to read what I have to say about deadly poisons, killing yourself with electricity, and bombs, of both the sparkler and atomic variety.

Oh, and kids: Don’t pay attention in school.