Short of getting Carl Kasell on your answering machine, here’s a bit of fun you can have with your phone message, especially if (like me) you live in a swing state this election year.

“Hi, you’ve reached [phone number]. If you are a telemarketer or you’re making a political call, hang up now. Otherwise, please leave a message. We might even pick up if we’re screening this call.”

That’s been my phone message for the past several weeks, and I love it. Nine times out of 10, here’s what I hear:

“Hi, you’ve reached [phone number]. If you are a telemarketer or you’re making a political call, hang up now. Otherwise [click].”

That’s almost as satisfying as picking up the phone and blasting the air horn I keep on the kitchen counter into the receiver.

We were all talking about politicians and Twitter back in the Anthony Weiner days. Now UK Prime Minister David Cameron has joined Twitter (not to mention that it’s just a few weeks away from Election Day), and Social Media Today reminds us of the basics for politicians — and everyone else — on Twitter.

Today’s New York Times reports on a possible pending antitrust lawsuit against Google. Salient excerpt:

The areas of inquiry include accusations of manipulating the search results it displays to favor Google commerce services it has developed like Google Shopping for buying goods and Google Places for advertising local restaurants and businesses. In the civilian subpoenas, the F.T.C. calls this “preferencing.”

The investigators are also looking into whether Google’s automated advertising marketplace, AdWords, discriminates against advertisers from competing online commerce services like comparison shopping sites and consumer review Web sites.

C|Net also reports … and provides some interesting commentary from readers.

Stay tuned: We’ll be hearing a lot about this in the weeks to come.

“Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”
—Christopher Hitchens

Here’s another example from my ongoing rogues’ gallery of crappy spam messages. If you’re like me, you’ve seen your inbox inundated with LinkedIn-related spam messages today. (I received 7 of them before noon.)

One theory I’ve often seen says the misspellings and bad grammar are intentional in order to fool spam filters. I think that’s giving these scummy bottom-feeders far too much benefit of the doubt. I’d have to think that better grammar, spelling and punctuation would fool more people into clicking — probably enough to far counterbalance any spam filter effect.

Of course, if you roll over any link in such an email (don’t click, fool!), you’ll immediately see the domain that they’re trying to trick you into visiting. Sadly, too many people don’t take that half-second and as a result get completely hosed.