Birdbrained downstream
Birdbrained downstream is the title/subject of one of those random spam e-mails, of which I’ve received dozens in the last few months. According to David in IT these e-mails are filled with randomly generated text to make them look “friendly” to spam filters and firewalls, whilst hiding sure-fire share buying opportunities or cheap, “performance enhancing” drugs.
But some of this randomly generated text is really interesting, almost poetic in a surreal way. I’ve started collecting them and here is my current top ten, in no particular order.
Of wakeup my modular rude
By fly go parliamentary blubber
On shut in harpy bowling
Copulation circumference
Better life, well-horsed
No translate at surrealistic
In ask of liberate pathetic
He send at target artful
Which open so frugality swatter
Pheasant translucent
Most of these are inherently more interesting than the titles and text on 9 out of 10 Powerpoint charts. Which is a crying shame given the business we work in.
I was thinking that a good presentation training exercise would be to get people to talk about a particular subject but with slides populated only with randomly generated spam text. It would force you to be interesting. Which is kind of the whole point of presenting really.
We should at least think about injecting more quirkiness of language into our presentations. There are certain charts that really whet the appetite for what the presenter is about to say. “Copulation circumference” beats the hell out of “Key findings” any old day of the week.