Spam, egg, sausage, and spam...

Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!
Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!

If you haven't already guessed, I'm going to talk about spam.

No, not that stuff from the grocery store made of something almost (but not quite) totally unlike meat. I'm talking about the stuff that clogs up your email inbox, not your arteries.

And like most of you, I get a lot of it. Ads for cheap Rolex watches. Pleas from African dictators to assist them in their money laundering. Offers for cheap Viagra from Canadian pharmacies. Promises of wondrous growth from a miracle penis-enhancement formula. Emails from women I've never heard of who allegedly want to date me. Emails from men I've never heard of who allegedly want to date me.

Some are more creative. Like the post from an allegedly long-lost "friend" that you've never heard of, who wants something. Just what they want varies, but it usually involves money. Yours.

Of course, not all begging emails are spam. (I just deleted several paragraphs excusing my own begging. Yes, I am aware of how pathetic I appear.)

And they're getting more creative by the day. I recently got spammed on my cell phone (yes, I have one now). I received a text message from someone named Patrick that said, "Hello, sweetness!" That was it. I suppose it says something about me that I immediately assumed this was spam, but there were a couple of red flags. First, I don't know many Patricks and none in that area code (Hawaii, I think). Second, I'm not gay. Third, anyone who would call me "sweetness" does NOT know me.

Not surprisingly, most spam emails are of a sexual nature. They either offer you sex, or a way to find sex, or a pill or something to make sex better, or pictures of other people having sex (who appear to be enjoying it far more than you enjoy looking at it). This includes dating services, which will promise to find you either Mr./Ms. Right or Mr./Ms. Right Now. It also includes the mail-order-bride industry (is there a mail-order-husband industry?).

(I've never been tempted to try the mail order route; I just hate it when I order something in the mail, but when I get it it isn't what I ordered or it doesn't work...)

I must admit, I have a secret respect for the emails that use a technological trick get you. There's always some virus or other that replicates itself by reading your inbox (or Facebook account or whatever) and sending a message to whoever it finds there, usually containing a masquerading bit of code that will totally screw up your computer. As quickly as the virus-checking software gets a handle on one of these, it mutates into a form they can't defeat. Well, that's what viruses do...

Occasionally, spam gets political. There are always causes that need your support, or candidate that need your support. There are petitions that need to be signed or legislation that needs to be passed/defeated, with your help of course. And most of them want money; they'll offer to feed you for a "donation" of several hundred dollars. Often a thousand dollars or more; I can't imagine spending that much on dinner without at least getting laid at the end of it (though I suppose you would get royally screwed).

Then, of course, there's that guy who used to flood the Internet with email searching for the missing components of his time travel device. I always thought this was a joke, until a few years ago when I heard this guy was actually serious! Deranged, but serious. Apparently he had spent a fortune on junk from people who claimed that they had the missing components (but he would always need something else to make it work). I had always assumed that these posts were bogus, but apparently not; but they were an invitation for others to scam him. This makes then unique among spam, being an invitation to rob someone rather than an invitation to be robbed.

(I must admit that I thought about selling him an old vacuum cleaner and calling it a time displacement vortex generator, that would work if he had a temporal dissonance reduction coil...)

I miss that guy.

There is another class of spam, that I wouldn't even call spam; the emails that want you to give something to someone else. Save the children, save the whales, save the puppies, save the planet...most of these are legitimate causes that you feel bad about deleting unread. (And you should feel bad about deleting them unread.) Most of them want donations. Most of them need donations. Please, do them the courtesy of reading their email, even if you don't donate.

Some few of these, however, are bogus or at least massively dishonest. The hard part is telling one from the other. This is tricky, and I can offer you no advice. (I am spared this dilemma since I can't afford to help myself, let alone anyone else.)

Spam is something that we all complain about but all find ways to live with. We've all gripped about it, we've all deleted it, we've all been annoyed by it, we've all said something should be done but we can't think what so we endure it.  Just like the "junk mail" that clogs up the postal system, it's part of our lives now and is fading into the background noise of an internet that will continue to become what it will become, rather than what we wish it to be. I am not saying that we shouldn't complain, shouldn't try to change the Internet for the better (Hell, that's what I'm doing right now!), but we each have to realize that the Internet is bigger than we are and individual effort against it is bound to end in tears.

But together, now...

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

The Infamous Monty Python Spam Skit! (detritus.org)

(There are a bunch of anti-spam sites on the 'net but I'm too lazy to look for them; do your own research tonight.)