Hello. Has it really been a week? I guess it has! So here’s some links with which to fritter away the last hours of your weekend (that is, if you’re on the progressive side of the dateline – the rest of you have ages yet).
Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List
If there’s a way to fill a legitimate communication form with deceptive bullshit, you can bet the internet will find it. Here’s the story of one scientist who submitted a paper that consisted entirely of the phrase “get me off your fucking mailing list” (yes, even the graphs and figures) and still the content farm that was trying to scam him published the whole damn thing.
Cute Cube
Readers, I’d like you to meet the cutest pixellated pink cube on the interwebs. Cube, these are my readers. I’m sure you two will have a lot to talk about.
An Oral History of the Poop Emoji
I’m a bit get-off-my-lawn when it comes to emoji, but this article on the 💩 icon is a great example of how language is history and history is culture.
Borges’s Lectures on Poetry
via the always reliable Open Culture, 8 lectures on poetry (scroll down to “The Craft of Verse”) by Jorge Luis Borges (in English), for you to download and listen to whenever you want. I haven’t started listening myself, but the titles alone are exciting: “Thought and Poetry” (eeeee!); “The Poet’s Creed” (ooooohhhh….); “The Telling of the Tale” (huzzah!!) – do I gush? I guess I do!
The Other Adam Ford 
Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List: What a perfect response to a stupid scam.
Also, the history of the poop emoji – what a ridiculous piece of clickbait – and yet, not – the article was so interesting. And I don’t have that emoji but now I really want it. So many times I need to say things are shit. The anti-like. We need more of that!
I like the subtleties that the article says 💩 is capable of expressing. And you DO have that emoji. Everyone does. It’s a unicode symbol these days: just type “&-#-1-2-8-1-6-9-;” (without the hyphens) into your code and voila! Watch: 💩
Excellent. I’m going to be pooping all over the place!