Fun with the Babelfish II

I keep receiving this (rather obviously spam) email in Portuguese from an address with a Brazilian domain name. Today, I decided to paste the entire body of the email into the translation engine known as the AltaVista Babelfish and see what it actually said...sort of. Here's what it came up with:

Olá, Carol visited the site [name].com.br and sent a card to it. The code of its card is [code here] To read it, it follows the procedures: 1. It has access this address: [address here], Salve its virtual card in its computer. 3. Later, it is enough to execute it. The [name].com.br is adopting the Politics of Security to send the virtual cards. In this way, the users are protecting against virus and Spam. This card will be available per 30 days. If it does not forget to repay the card that Carol sent for you. The [name].com.br will have the biggest pleasure in delivering its cards. One I hug, [name].com.br

(I deleted the name of the site and the URL for the "card" from this post for reasons that will become obvious in a moment.)

This is funny stuff; I especially like the statement that the site is "adopting the Politics of Security" to send their cards, and you have to love the salutation "One I hug" at the end. Incidentally, I did try to click on the link for the "card" just to see if it really was one; I got a dialog box from my computer asking me what I wanted it to do with what turned out to be an ".exe" file. I may not be a PC guy (either in terms of Windows-run personal computers orpolitical correctness--heh), but I've read enough virus alerts to know that .exe = bad in 95% or so of all instances. Thankfully, when a Mac gets an .exe file, it just scratches its virtual head for a moment and goes "Huh?" until the user, seeing that it's that type of file, goes immediately for the cancel button. That's just one more reason I'm glad I'm a Mac owner.

If you're a new reader from within the past few years (and haven't checked out Past Posts of Note on the sidebar), I should mention that I've had fun with the Babelfish before; the previous time also involved Portuguese.

The delivery guy always "rings" once: A furniture delivery man in Guilford, New York, saw a diamond ring sitting on a dresser while making a delivery yesterday afternoon, and, wanting to take it but not get caught, decided to swallow it. He was caught and arrested anyway, and now authorities, while waiting for the ring to pass through his system, have charged him not just with larceny, but also with "criminal tampering." Umm, yeah, when that ring comes out, it will definitely have been "tampered with," that's for sure...