It finally begins

Tonight I heard that an attack had begun on Iraq; and that further, an attempt was made to hit the high leadership. As I expected, news of this event has swamped all of the stations, even to the extent of trumping sports events; usually the news on the weekend get sportsed out. The headline on the CNN site was the largest I have ever seen, and I expect the headline in tomorrow's paper to fill the front page. These all mean that the start of this war is a Memorable Event, only six of which have occurred in my lifetime, with the other five being the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, the manned landing on the Moon, the start of Persian Gulf War I, and Planeattack. Let us hope this war ends quickly with only a few civilian and military casualties and with new hope for the people of Iraq.

Spam-of-mouth

I got a shock this morning when I opened my email up and found a message saying that a report on me had been made by someone on the site word-of-mouth.info. Now who would do that? It sound like the biggest tattle site of them all. I went there and tried to find out who this was, and it would not tell; it said send an email or something. Then I got another email saying that someone had searched me. Right. Myself, just now. I tried the magic antidote of this age on the site. That's right, Google. I googled the site, looking for sites about word-of-mouth.info, not in it. I got about 10 or so blogs sort of like this one, and all of them said in so many words that it was spam. What really made me conclude that it was spam was a message last year from the site that said, "This is not a spam.", in capital letters surrounded by asterisks. As I said before, any email that contains the phrase "This is not a spam." is megrittian instead and is indeed spam. So much for word-of-mouth.

Megrittian is my newest non-word: it comes from the artist René Megritte, who made a drawing of a pipe with the caption "Ceci ne'st pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe.).