Two articles caught my eye while reading the paper today.

The first is a sick story about vandals breaking into a portable classroom in Palo Alto and, among other things, killing a hamster named Marshmallow. If they cut off his head, it would've been like that headless parrot in "Dumb and Dumber". Instead it was "butchered" and its remains would be buried today.

Two other rodents were not harmed, which raises the question: what enemies did young Marshmallow have? Was there a message being sent when they spared these two?

The second is funny by itself. Ever wonder how junk email is filtered? Usually, the program searches for obscene words and automatically deletes the message. But what if your name was obscene? The article documents the problems Craig Cockburn has in sending email. Please, it's pronounced Coburn, but a dumb computer algorithm doesn't know that.

I know my name isn't obscene, so that's no reason to bounce my email to you back to me.