Ways Paul Simon Might Have Advised Leaving Your Lover If He Had Been Born In India
Say “No, danke,” Banke.
Make yourself disappear, Samir.
Send her off on some kind of wonky safari, Bankebihari.
Tell her to ride back out on the horse she rode in on, Bollywood star Salman Khan.
It-spay on her in-chay, Chinmay
Send her on a plane flight after you’ve spiked her carry-on luggage with hashish, Debashish.
Sneak off to Marikech, Harikesh.
Just poison her naan, Ishaan. You don’t need a big plaan, maan.
Ways Paul Simon Might Have Advised Leaving Your Lover If He Only Wrote Songs About Members of the Bach Family
Tell her she will find somebody who will provide for her better than you will, Carl Phillip Emmanual.
Just poison her naan, Wilhelm Friedeman.
Write a cantata using ornate contrapuntal harmony to set a text informing her that you wouldn’t touch her if you were an alcoholic and she were Earth’s last gin, Johann Sebastian.

Like anybody else with e-mail, I get all sorts of virus-laden messages, accompanied by a flimsily transparent attempt to get me to double-click on the attached Trojan Horse– “I think you will find the attached file interesting,” or “What do you think of this?” or “I am naked!” I find these all very easy to ignore.
Today, though, I got one that stabbed me with such force, I almost forgot myself and double-clicked on the attachment. The message said, in its entirety:
“You are a bad writer.”

Global warming, political unrest, the Bush presidency. the fact that “Lost” is being aired a year later in the UK than in the US–these are all painful aspects of modern life with which I have made my peace.
But when an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary argues that using the word “literally” to mean “figuratively is no big deal, I fear for our future.

I just received the following e-mail:
From: Chong Pek Kee
Subject: request an autograph
I would like to request an autographed photo of you. Hope that’s not a problem for you.
Here’s my address:
Peggy Chong
[ADDRESS DELETED]
Perak, Malaysia.
Best wishes,
Peggy
Theoretically speaking, it is entirely possible that Peggy really wants my autograph. Maybe she’s a fan of Yankee Fog or The Government Manual for New Superheroes. Maybe she’s a slightly obsessive fan of Dennis Miller Live. Or maybe she’s a really obsessive fan of The Onion.
Still, the e-mail smells like spam to me, mainly because it’s so generic. Anybody who is enough of a fan of my work to want my autograph would know that I’m about as non-famous as writers get, and would therefore begin with an explanation of why she wanted an autographed photo of me.
If this is spam, though, it’s puzzling spam. Is it part of some art project, to see how many autographed photos one can collect? A sort of fame-based phishing expedition, in which somebody is sending out thousands of e-mails in the hopes that some of them will reach actual celebrities whose autographs are worth having?
Either way, I hope posting here will resolve it. If Peggy is really a big enough Jacob Sager Weinstein fan to have tracked me to my website, she’ll presumably see this post, and perhaps she’ll be kind enough to comment on it and explain why she wants the photo. And if this is just a spam e-mail sent out to vast numbers of people, perhaps some of the other folks who have received it can pipe up.

I’ve always assumed that the lyrics to “Scarborough Fair” were nonsense, but at a recent concert, my wife’s singing group performed some old English folk songs, and I was intrigued to read the following in the program:

Scarborough Fair tells the tale of a young man, jilted by his lover, who jokingly tells the listener to ask her to perform a series of impossible tasks, such as knitting him a shirt without a seam and then washing it in a dry well, adding that if she completes these tasks, he will take her back.

I think the new Dashboard in Max OS X Tiger is pretty cool. But there’s one Widget that’s missing, as far as I’m concerned:
I want a Widget that will track Amazon.com sales rankings of specific books, in the same way that the Stocks widgets tracks stock prices.

I have stumbled across what may be the best quote ever from an actual press release by a United States Senator.
“I am very concerned about [the] Spidey-Signal’s potential impact on our environment…”
That’s Representative Diane Watson speaking.
Now, maybe she just wants to lock up J. Jonah Jameson’s endorsement her next election cycle. Or maybe I’m taking her quote entirely out of context.
But maybe–just maybe–she’s actually the Green Goblin.

I just saw a very pointed political ad. It points out that the projected budget surplus in 2000 was $2.2 trillion, adding, “That’s $8000 for every American.” But–the ad warns–a president who is willing to squander the surplus and create a deficit puts America’s economy in danger.
The ad was from 2000, of course, and the spendthrift America was being warned about was Al Gore. The thrifty fiscal conservative who could be trusted not to blow through $2.2 trillion was George W. Bush.
Ah, the good old days.

It’s that time of year when all mankind puts aside its differences and unites in a common pursuit: the making of “10 Best” lists. Cruelly, simple mathematics dictates that most of us will never be on one of these lists.
That’s why I’ve created the handy Automated “Yankee Fog Website of the Year” award.

Turning for the moment to American politics… I’m really pleased to learn that a major non-partisan group is going to start broadcasting an advertisement that will, at long last, refocus this presidential campaign on the issues that really matter. I’m doubly pleased that Yankee Fog readers will be the very first people to see this ad. If you want some sober and well-thought out advice on choosing between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry next november, just click on one of the links below.
[NOTE: Due to a sudden surge in visitors, I’ve moved all my public service announcements to a site that can better handle the traffic. You’ll find them here.]