Sherlock Holmes Meets a Spammer

Anyone who runs a blog gets spam and almost all of it gets filtered out and ends up in a trash folder. I like to open the old spam trashcan and take a peek inside. Here is a gem from two days ago.

Not this kind. 

1. The post the spammer is referring to was about a museum in Chicago.

2. The spam arrived a week after the post was placed.

3. This spammer has excellent taste in blogs.

What can we deduce about this spammer?

1. English is not their first language and looking at the sentence structure I would assume they are from an Asian country. (Since there are more people living in Asia than anywhere else, this is a safe guess.)

2. They are self-aware.  Note the, “Please excuse my bad english” phrase tacked on to the end of the message. This acknowledgement shows us that the spammer is not a machine cranking out messages and sending them off into the internets unknowingly.

3. They are happy. The “:)” is evidence that this spammer is filled with joy. Why else would anyone attach a smiley face to their email.

4. They are probably female. Most males would use a winking smiley face when sending spam. The winking smiley face is a little more masculine and creepy, the traditional smiley face is more feminine and joyous.

5. This person is a little confused. One cannot “creat[e] up this knowledge.” Knowledge is either there or not, so there is no creating of knowledge. This leads me to believe that this spammer is from a country where there are elements of magical thinking.

6. They don’t like confrontation. “No matter if I concur or disagree” is an interesting non-confrontational way of saying, “I might just possibly disagree with you, but I don’t want to fight about it.”

7. They are conflicted. They “like facts” but believe that knowledge can be created. This struggle between science and mysticism is causing a great deal of turmoil inside this spammer.

8. They are older than the internet. They “don’t forget the old times” when the library and newspaper were the only places where you could get facts. One would assume that the spammer is someone youthful, but this evidence suggests that they are older and therefore even more optimistic than previously assumed.

Now this is very confusing since we have established that this person lives in Asia, does not speak English as her primary language, is happy, doesn’t like confrontation, is older than 25 and is conflicted.

Some of you, dear readers, are already guessing who this might be and let me just say, “No, it is not Sarah Palin.” There are two very specific pieces of information that point to her not being the spammer: 1.”I really like facts” 2.”even the newspaper.”

Katie Couric established that Mrs. Palin never read a newspaper, and anyone paying attention to the republican party for the past 20 years realizes that liking facts is not part of the platform.

Arthur Conan Doyle (me) will now put it all together for you. One of the overlooked possibilities (overlooked because I overlooked it, making it more difficult for you to figure out what was going on) is that this person might be a recent immigrant to the United States.  They are aware of their weaknesses in English because they are constantly confronted by the mean streets of America. They must live in a city that has a vibrant Asian community (just about any city in the US) but since the post was about The Art Institute in Chicago we can safely assume this middle aged woman lives in Chicago, is happy to be in America and loves good writing.

I think that narrows it down enough. I will leave the rest of the figuring to you.