Phishing

[Click for larger version.]

When I saw the subject line of this e-mail — "Slight error regarding your account," I knew that someone was going phishing. I was curious enough to open this message and see what it looked like. Look carefully:

The greeting is generic, no name or account number.

The words inability and regularly are misspelled. The word your appears as you.

The odd phrase "address changing" suggests a lack of familiarity with American idioms.

The end punctuation of the numbered items is inconsistent.

The numbered items are out of sequence! (Sheesh! Thes guys ned to proofred.)

The sentence in red is missing a pretty obvious comma. The unnecessary then in that sentence also suggests that the English of this message is a matter of labor.

If I were reading this e-mail in panic mode, I'd be likely to miss these details, just as the dim phishers themselves have. But even in panic mode, mousing over the link to read the URL before clicking is all that would be necessary to determine that this e-mail is a phony. The words in blue point to a Chilean URL that (of course) has nothing to do with Chase. I have no idea what is to be found there.

[Update: A comment on this post suggests that mousing over might not be enough. So even if the revealed URL appears legitimate, don't click. If you suspect a genuine problem with an account, use the phone or visit the appropriate website.]

A phisher who reads this blog post might learn something about creating more plausible-looking e-mails. But that remote possibility is outweighed by the more likely possibility that some reader will stop and think before clicking on a questionable link.

You can check on or report a specious URL at PhishTank. The URL in my e-mail has already been verified as belonging to a phisher. PhishTank also has a page with suggestions about what to look for in a phishing message.

[Thanks to Eustace of The Lock and Key, whose comment prompted me to update this post.]

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By Glen Baxter

I realized this afternoon that part of what I like about the surreal machinery of The Experimental Study of Foods is that it reminds me of Glen Baxter's cartoons.

This image is from The Impending Gleam (New York: Knopf, 1982).

The penetrometer

"Penetrometer with light cone as used to test the firmness of baked custards."

Figure 16-8 in Ruth Griswold's The Experimental Study of Foods (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

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The shortometer

The shortometer: "a device used by commercial bakers for testing the shortening power of various fats in dough" (Webster's Third New International).

The above images come from a home economics textbook, a booksale leftover, Ruth Griswold's The Experimental Study of Foods (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). Griswold describes the shortometer as a device to test "the breaking strength of pastry, cookies, and crackers." The device in Figure 16-5 is a commercial product. Figure 16-6 shows a do-it-yourself device made with a postal scale. Griswold explains: "In either instrument, the pastry or other wafer is put across two horizontal bars, the single upper bar is brought down by means of a motor until it breaks the wafer, and the force is recorded with a maximum registering hand." Imagine, going to work to smash graham crackers.

My brief acquaintance with shortometers has cleared up a line from The Honeymooners episode "Alice and the Blonde" (1956) that always puzzled me. Ed Norton to Bert Wedemeyer: "I do like a short cookie, Bert, and you do make 'em short." The Third New International explains it all: "easily broken, crumbling readily (as from shortening content)."

Note the name Kroger in the caption for 16-5. The Kroger Co. is still going strong, not crumbling readily.

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The penetrometer
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All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Grad-school-ruled notebook

After decades of only offering ruled notebook paper suitable for college-level education and below, school-supply giant Mead introduced its new grad-school-ruled notebook Monday, which features lines twice as narrow as college-ruled paper.

Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook (The Onion)

(Thanks, Ben!)

Hillary Clinton's roots

April 2007:

At a recent gathering of donors, [Mark] Penn said, he asked the group: "Who here knows where Hillary is from?"

"Not one, really, guessed that it was in the Chicago suburbs," Penn said. "They really didn't know. They drew a blank. So, a lot of people always say to me, well, they know everything about Hillary. It's not true. There's really a lot to tell."

April 2008:

Hillary Clinton's campaign hit the airwaves in Pennsylvania with five new ads Tuesday, including spots that feature two of the state's most high-profile Democrats — Gov. Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter — and one that plays up her roots in the state.

Messy desk

Thought and work are unpredictable, varying, and ambiguous. They're messy. Why shouldn't your desk be messy too?

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 32

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Spam names

In the spam folder recently: Horace Fish, Madge Herring, Jewell Mayo, and Ham, just Ham.

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France debates le point-virgule

Not a belated April Fool's joke:

In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. . . .

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that — in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur — "the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought."

Read all about it: The end of the line? (Guardian)

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Lucky numbers

Perhaps there's a shortage at the fortune-cookie factory. In Jewish tradition, the number 18 is lucky: the letters of חי (chai, "living") add up to 18. It's not unusual for a Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah gift to be a multiple of 18 — e.g., $36: a double chai. But as Wallace Shawn says in My Dinner with André, "the cookie is in no position to know about that." Related reading Chai (Wikipedia)