Spam & Spork

As if it wasn't enough on email, now it's started showing up on my blog comments! I'm turning on word verification. Damn spammers. I think they deserve to have a whole circle of Hell all to themselves.

On a vastly more fun note, anyone read the sporking of J. Fenimore Cooper by Mark Twain?

Excerpt:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.
...
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.
...
7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the "Deerslayer" tale.

Tell me this guy would not have been completely at home on the internet. Blogging. Ooh, the thought.