Spambot Poetry: Pretty Element of Content

The comment section of Flint Expatriates is truly a mixed bag. For all the meaningful connections I've made with Flintoids over the years, I've also had to deal with racists, weirdos, and sickos who think Detroit actually knows how make a real Coney.

Then there are the spambots clogging the comment section and forcing me to spend hours of my life deleting them. But I eventually discovered that many were quite beautiful, if not poetic, with their tortured syntax, goofed up conjugation, and lines that would feel at home in a Patti Smith cover of Nirvana.

Here's the latest batch, with my comments below each ode.

Pretty element of content.

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that I get actually enjoyed account

your weblog posts.

Anyway,

I will be subscribing to your feeds

or even I achievement you get admission to consistently rapidly.

— Teddy Bear

Thank you, Teddy Bear. I am having bumper stickers made as we speak declaring "Pretty Element of Content!" I hope they will bring solace to other drivers in these troubled times.

This is my very first time i go to here.

I discovered a great number of entertaining stuff in your blog site, particularly its discussion. From your tons of feedback in your articles,

I guess I am not the only one possessing each of the satisfaction here!

Preserve up the great operate.

— drukarka 3d

Actually, drukarka 3d, judging from the sales of my book, you may indeed be "the only one possessing each of the satisfaction here!"

I haven’t any word to appreciate this post.

Really i am impressed from this post

the person who create this post it was a great human.

— Anonymous

Thanks for the kind words. I'd like to think, in my moments of unbridled hubris, that I am a great human. But your use of the past tense does cause me some concern.

Nice blog and absolutely outstanding.

You can do something much better but i still say this perfect.

Keep trying for the best.

— Indianapolis Junk Yard

Junk yard, why do you torment me? You say it's perfect, but then tell me I can do much better. This kind of Zen crap may work in Indy, but not in Flint.

Time Travel Is a Discretionary Art

Downtown Flint, Michigan in the 1950s (Photo by Mary Fisher)

"I find these days that a wistful form of time travel has become a persistent political theme, both on the right and on the left. On November 10 The New York Times reported that nearly seven in ten Republicans prefer America as it was in the 1950s, a nostalgia of course entirely unavailable to a person like me, for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others. Meanwhile some on the left have time travel fancies of their own, imagining that the same rigid ideological principles once applied to the matters of workers’ rights, welfare, and trade can be applied unchanged to a globalized world of fluid capital."

— Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books, 2016