Lately, we've been getting a lot of really eloquent spam. There we were, thinking the spammers had been attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop -- it turns out, according to NPR, that they've been plagiarizing Dickens, Doyle, and others: In order to get past [email filters], spammers try to make the text of their e-mails look more like something you'd actually write. These spammers mine Web sites that post the full text of books, like Project Gutenberg, which, along with its affiliates, has more than 250,000... READ ON

A few weeks ago one of our readers referred to this as a "blog about facts," which I have adopted as an unofficial motto. Nonetheless, it's Friday, so let us get all wacky and fictional for a sec: If you want to spend your entire workday procrastinating, check out Wikipedia's list of fictional things (insert joke about fiction and Wikipedian accuracy here). My favorite excerpt so far: Fictional people known as "The Great" (not to be confused with real people known as "The Great"): Sheila the Great... READ ON

Yesterdaysnoisyposthasgottensomecoolnoisyfeedbackwhichweatmentalfloss alwayswelcome justas wewelcomeproper pun ctua tion, But if you're thinking professor Kosko is the first author to do away with commas, apparantly there was also some guy in Dublin named James Joyce, who wrote many long passages in Ulysses without them. (Of course, Samuel Beckett, E. M. Forster and Somerset Maugham made up for the dearth by using commas instead of periods!) I think the best book on the subject is Lynne... READ ON

Memoirs are a funny business. So many get published each year by authors who can't write, but rather dictate their lives to a ghostwriter who makes sense of the rat-a-tat and types it up in a logical and (hopefully) entertaining fashion. Sometimes the scribe gets a "With" credit on the cover but more often than not, just a polite "thank you" on the acknowledgments page. I go through phases of reading tons of them back-to-back, and then boycotting the whole genre for... READ ON