A TEDIOUS DAY, THE ORIGINS OF SPAM AND A GIANT RUBBER DUCK

It was a tedious day today. I've been allocated to Team Spamalot, the scrum team responsible for enhancements for our anti-spam features. It was either that, or Team Awesome and I definitely don't think I qualify for that at work. Spamalot's much more up my street.

I looked up spam today. The use of the word in the context of unwanted email came about from a Monty Python sketch set in a cafe. As the waitress reads out the menu, it becomes apparent that everything listed tends to be served with spam, a type of processed meat:

Man: Well, what have you got?

Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam...

Soon some vikings are singing heartily about spam and it's your typical Pythonesque* mayhem. In the 70s, everyone would have remembered the cans of spam that pervaded the larders and kitchen cupboards of post-war Britain. It was everywhere, not quite proper meat (it came in a can) and it was mostly unwanted.

No wonder then, that when email was invented, the pioneers of the technology borrowed the term from the Python sketch. For a start, it was a time when everyone was quoting the show, especially techies. Those bearded programmers of the 1980s with their massive computers and shirt-pockets packed with pens would have taken great delight in asking each other about the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, or jumping out in the lab with a demented cry of 'Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!'.

Spam quickly became integrated into the language of electronic communication. It refers to unsolicited email and there are all sorts of clever ways to detect it, filter it out and send it to the trashcan. You might find this hard to believe but 80% of all email traffic is spam; not the stuff that arrives in your spam folder, but the vast and varied digital detritus, the electronic flotsam and jetsam that washes up unseen beyond the shores of your firewall and never gets a sniff of your inbox.

In Team Spamalot, we deal with anti-spam software. It's a curious etymological circle that brings our team round to be called 'Spamalot'. Spamalot, of course, is the name of the stage-show production of Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, a film which played on the original spam sketch by rhyming Spamalot with Camelot... a lot. I think the scrum master chose the name because he thought it was a pun; not realising that the two ends of the spam circle were connected... by the Pythons.

It really was a very boring day.

I don't cope well with boredom. I also found out today that a Dutch artist has gone off in a huff because someone copied his idea of making a giant rubber duck. Florentijn Hofman his name is, and in 2007 he created a seaworthy, 18m high, inflatable bath duck with which he travels the world. A stallholder in Keelung, Taiwan, wanted to boost the dwindling number of visitors to the duck's exhibition in the harbour and so reconstructed his own version. Hofman, who let's face it, didn't come up with a truly original idea himself, is furious at the 'copycat' and has disappeared in an arty mood, presumably taking his giant duck with him.

I imagined him sailing it into the distance, disappearing into the sunset over the South China Sea. Now that's Pythonesque.

*I dislike that I've used this word, but under the circumstances, it's the only one that will do.