As RB and I alone, as it were -- in fact or hypercontrafactual*-- constitute the soul "management" of "The Rageboy.com team," we were a bit (though only a bit) surprised to receive the following ill-intentioned spammage.

Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 12:19:29 -0800
To: clocke@rageboy.com
Subject: Email account utilization warning.
From: management@rageboy.com

Dear user of Rageboy.com,

Our antivirus software has detected a large
ammount of viruses outgoing from your email 
account, you may use our free anti-virus tool
to clean up your computer software. For details
see the attached file.

In order to read the attach you have to use the
following password: [a broken graphic here]

Kind regards, 
The Rageboy.com team
http://www.rageboy.com

And, as is the way with such faux advisories, "the attach" contained some sort of malignant virus that would have destroyed my entire world. what there is left of it to destroy, that is, which isn't all that much. But no fool I, I deleted the little monster and thus have achieved my one small victory of the year to date.

* hypercontrafactual, n.
an assertion or lemma which, while being patently untrue, is
untrue to such an extreme and ridiculous degree that it takes
on the quality of hyper-truth. a related example might be
substituting "soul" for "sole" and making it look like a typo.
another example is alluded to by the reversal of the Death
card as used here to represent the reversal of the entropy
gradient, which as we all know is, of course, impossible.

To the best of my knowledge, this image bears no relationship to the post-transcriptional
RNA editing process for the correction of DNA coding errors necessary for the translation of
functional proteins. It is also not a pipe, an organ grinder, or a small but affluent suburb
on the southern outskirts of Vladivostok. Click here for hi-rez.

In other news, RageBoy beats out Fortune, The Nation, The Boston Phoenix, and The Guardian, taking first place on Google in the No Love Lost category. See for yourself. Also, my BBedit spell checker this morning suggested that I replace "Superbowl" with "superb owl." It's been that kind of day.

oh the shark bites
with his teeth dear
and he keeps them
pearly white...

mack the knife - bobby darrin
via bertolt brecht and john gay

I see a woman in some sort of girdle. She has lost a foot somehow, perhaps in an encounter with a shark or large snapping turtle. She has managed to drag herself out of the ocean and into this seaside cabana to recuperate. The pain is causing her mouth to contort into a tiny grimace, but she is otherwise taking it like a man. Perhaps this extreme equanimity is assisted by the obvious fact that there is nothing going on behind the eyes. Pain schmain, she seems to be not-thinking. This is all the more impressive as an anvil seems to have flattened the entire right side of her head. Ow! That must have smarted! Some of the words on this blot are "passion" and "pleasure," but she seems capable of neither. Understandable, given her serious injuries. As to "inner peace," if she has attained such a state, it seems to have been at the cost of any apparent intelligence. Perhaps the round gray UFO that just landed in the cabana has sucked out her brain. Happens all the time.

I imagine this as an illustration on the cover of one of those self-help books of the sort that have caused 95% of American men to start taking anti-depressants. However, I admit that this last bit is a little far fetched. No publishing company marketing executive would allow such a disturbing illustration to be placed on the cover of a book. I mean, who would look at it and think, "Yeah, I'm going to buy this book. I want to be just like her"? So now I'm thinking I've taken this fantasy a little too far...