It’s Spam Week here at MTPN!  The umlaut is an uncommon mark in American English, generally reserved for Frenchy-sounding names like Chloë and Anaïs and for hoity-toity publications like The New Yorker, whose house style decrees that it be used in such words as coöperation and reëdit.  The exception to the rule that says umlauts are for elitists is the heavy metal umlaut, found in the names of such bands as Motörhead and Queensrÿche. The heavy metal umlaut was originally intended to seem “mean” and “Wagnerian” by association with noted historical badasses such as the Visigoths and the Nazis, but it has been parodied so often (most famously, by “Spinal Tap,” which places an umlaut over the “n”) that it is now as much a satirical meme as a sincere one. (That’s right, Abörted Hitler Cöck, I said it.)

Which is why I was a bit surprised to discover one of the first Facebook spam worms (which are at long last starting to crop up due to Facebook’s rapidly growing market share) posted something on my wall informing me that “SOMEONE HAS A CRÜSH ON YOU!” I hadn’t realized the metalhead love-connection market was so demographically powerful, but hey, maybe this worm’s creators were hoping to catch the extremely irony-steeped as well.

Welcome to the new and improved Maybe Tomorrow–Probably Not!  I’ve missed you all. 

My experiment in Tumblelogging was more or less an abject failure.  I’m just too much of a verbose blowhard for short-form blogging, and I’m not particularly interested in sharing dozens of links, videos, and images every day.  But I also don’t regret leaving Blogger, which is a clunky, confusing, inflexible, bloated platform that’s designer-unfriendly, to boot.  

So here we are, using WordPress on the servers of the new and largely unimproved joehankin.com, with a custom theme of my own creation and a pent-up blogging fever that ought only to be relieved by torrential, stain-splattering posting.  Get ready, world — and buy some Shout.

The word of the day is “spam,” which has been used as a verb for many a day to mean “to send unsolicited email or to create internet postings offering goods or services, soliciting sensitive information, or as vandalism.”  Today, though, I discovered that WordPress has repurposed the word “spam” to hold the definition above. 

I received an email today alerting me to my first comment on this new blog, whose text read as follows:

The joehankin.com is interesting resource, tnks, webmaster.
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I’ve finally made it!   The options to deal with this comment were Approve It, Delete It, and Spam It, which threw me for a moment — someone had already spammed it, after all — but there are only so many realistic options for a link like that.   Gmail uses “Report Spam” as the name of their Spam-It button, which I think is vastly superior, but WordPress tries to be a fun, funky, speaks-your-language blogging engine, so I guess the parallelism of the three “X It” options was just too fresh to pass up. 

I guess all this is a roundabout way of saying, WordPress, I think you’re pretty great, with your CSS/PHP templates and your intuitive content management system, but you will never be the cool kid at the party, and the sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be.