Oct. 19th, 2005

danlansdowne: (Default)


You Are 60% Boyish and 40% Girlish


You are pretty evenly split down the middle - a total eunuch.

Okay, kidding about the eunuch part. But you do get along with both sexes.

You reject traditional gender roles. However, you don't actively fight them.

You're just you. You don't try to be what people expect you to be.

*groans*

Oct. 19th, 2005 10:13 pm
danlansdowne: (Default)
During the heyday of the Monty Python craze in the mid-'70s, all Britain was overloaded with all kinds of Python-related paraphernalia.

One of these items, "The Viking Songbook", was a one-line gag that sold immensely well for a short while. It was a massive tome of over seven hundred pages of tiny, cramped script...the word "spam", hundreds of thousands of times over. It had an impressive-looking cover that made it look like a relatively authentic songbook until you opened the thing.

What was interesting about this, though, wasn't the book itself so much as, according to declassified Soviet-era records, it was used to routinely and successfully smuggle microdot data from Britain to the USSR between October 1973 and August 1982. For most of a decade, the Russian agent "Red Hawk" would place a microdot on top of one of the words in the book, coded according to date of mailing and post office of origin. Most of the smuggled material concerned European efforts at producing jet fighters, and the success in getting it to Moscow was considered quite the coup.

Although British intelligence knew that data was getting out, and were even able to track it to the mail service, they were unable to discover the microdots themselves. When confronted with a seven-hundred-page joke book that has nothing but the same word over and over and over again, perhaps even the hardiest of Customs officials could be forgiven not wanting to examine the entire tome.

And so the most successful Soviet spy operation ever conducted on English soil concluded without mishap --- because no one inspects the Spammish Repetition.

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