tried to trace the 'first internet mystery' and hit a wall (markovian parallax denigrate, 1996)

before cicada, before any of it, there was this. august 1996, hundreds of messages flood usenet, all with subject lines like 'markovian parallax denigrate.' open one and the body is word salad — grammatically shaped but meaningless, stuff like 'jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring ch……