A spammer by any other name

Are spammers’ names getting more outré?

This morning I had offers of genuine prescribed medication from, amongst others, Demetrius Column, Arnulfo Mcleod and the titanically monickered Inflorescence B. Afghan.

Either there are some very bored people being forced to come up with an ever-increasing number of names or this is an escalation of the spammer-punter arms race. This arms race is based on grabbing the punter’s attention. Arguably this means grabbing attention by whatever means necessary, even if this draws attention to the fact that this is spam. You see it in subject headers too. I had one this morning titled “parenthesis maid spinal”.

The only alternative that I can imagine is that these are being sent by the sorry tail end of the once great clans of the French surrealists.

I imagine Duchamp’s grandson, struggling now to maintain the crumbling pile into which he was born, one wing of which is now entirely closed off for repairs that will never happen. All over the house heaps of grandfather’s eccentric constructions fight for floorspace with heaps of accumulated tat. That pile of damp mattresses was probably one of his, but now nobody’s quite sure. Their spring has sprung long since. The famous urinals are now pressed into service as urinals. Duchamp III is forced into hawking the familial talent for a meagre living, handcrafting and sending up to a thousand gibberish emails a day, each one uniquely absurd. “Sati fa tion gua teed!”, he types furiously, “yygd mryu”.

He knows that he is the last standard bearer of a lost movement. Magritte’s grandson has been doing cigarette advertising for years. Any surviving Dalis are fully engaged in setting editorial policy for British tabloids. This week he heard that Man Ray’s son — Boy Ray — breathed his last in a Parisian garret (which he insisted to the last was a railway carriage shaped like a woman’s behind).

Only the callow Duchamp, the end of his line, relentlessly sends out his incomplete messages into the vague night of the web, refusing to surrender his final nub of hope that some unknown Dadaist will pick one up, add to it, and send it on again, in memory of the great games of consequences once played in Paris.