Talk about surreal.

One of the pieces of spam I received recently managed to avoid my filter by quoting a passage from The Bourne Supremacy, by Robert Ludlum, minus line breaks, quotation marks, and apostrophes. The Bourne trilogy happens to be among my favorite books -- and I'd appreciate it if you would forget that the movies ever existed.

From: Muiris Joynt [mailto:muirisjoynt@wombat.net]
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 12:59 PM
To: Theodora Fusaro
Subject: Re: megascope segregation

[LINK REMOVED]

Its not Carlos, said Conklin, interrupting. What? Yesterday you told me- Forget what I told you, I was wrong. This is out of Hong Kong, out of Macao. That doesnt make sense, Alex! Hong Kongs finished, Macaos finished. Theyre dead and forgotten and theres no one alive with a reason to come after me. There is somewhere. A great taipan, the greatest taipan in Hong Kong, according to the most recent and most recently dead source. Theyre gone. That whole house of Kuomintang cards collapsed. Theres no one left! I repeat, there is somewhere. David Webb was briefly silent; then Jason Bourne spoke, his voice

[I read everything in plaintext, so this is what it looked like to me. There were actually two embedded images that say Ambien and Viagra.]

I read the first four sentences and was thinking, 'Hm, dialogue without punctuation and line breaks. Interesting.' And then I was about to delete the message when my eyes slid over the words "Hong Kong" and "Macao". And I thought, 'Wait, this sounds familiar. Did they say Carlos? o_O' Of course, reading through the rest makes it pretty identifiable, since it mentions both David Webb and Jason Bourne.

I think that's one of the things I hated most about the movies: the fact that they took out David Webb the quiet, peace-loving scholar who was transformed by his family's murder during Vietnam. So much rich backstory lost! And that's why they couldn't even begin to have the second movie follow The Bourne Supremacy, because the book is full of the David-Jason duality and people he knew in the past.

Bah. I guess I'll stop before I rant about the movies again -- and I haven't even watched the second movie, just read a review with a detailed plot summary, which convinced me to stay far, far away.

Stupid apps, literally.

The graduate major option on the Georgia Tech online application says "Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering". While there are lots of cool things, like S_N2, that only involve 2 molecules, somehow I don't think that's what they meant.

I guess I really shouldn't be making fun of them. It's spelled right on their website, so it's probably just a mistake that was made while transferring the information to the third party who hosts the app. Plus, Georgia Tech has the most sophisticated online form of all my schools. UT Austin's is ridiculously primitive -- the sections are labeled "Page 1", "Page 2", etc., and you can't go to one until you've filled out everything in the pages before it, even though you can then backtrack all you want -- but WashU and CMU aren't much better, sadly. WashU had a really nondescript text box that was like, "Some people have personal statements. You can put whatever you want here, if you feel like it." And I haven't found the Statement of Purpose section for CMU at all. And they do things like not tell you the character limit of a form field and then just truncate it when you submit. I had to redo my rec forms 3 times because I'd paste in the prof's title, and it'd seem fine, and then I'd look at it again and it'd be like "Professor of C". Oh, and WashU had date fields that they wanted to be MM/YYYY, and when you submitted it, it would drop the leading zero off the month, so it was impossible to have the format they wanted.

I helped James check over his apps, so I'm kind of jealous of his nice forms. I'm not sure if that's solely because of the schools he applied to, or because EE tends imply a certain degree of computer-ness that apparently ChemEs don't have, even if they do modeling.

Oh, and then I couldn't find anywhere on the Berkeley Law site that mentioned that you could apply online through LSAC -- it just has a section that's like, "Print out this application" -- but LSAC has an application for Berkeley anyway.

EDIT: I take back all the nice things I said about Georgia Tech's application. Their essay section includes word limits, which I followed faithfully and am in fact well under, but when I submit, they convert it into a character limit that's incredibly stingy considering they're asking for essays from college students who presumably use words longer than five letters. In fact, their counter includes spaces, so the average word length is actually 4.6. >_<

*shakes fist*