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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
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I don't know about you folks, but I get some pretty fricking entertaining spam.
And I think that's the way you have to look at it. Sure, it can be annoying, and take up time and mailbox space. But it can also -- like just about everything else in the world -- be a rich source of entertainment. And free entertainment, at that. Yay, spam!
Okay, wait. I can see that you're unsure. You're saying to yourself, 'Yay, spam? Has Charlie been mixing up his ecstacy and his Flintstones vitamins again?'
Well... maybe. (I'm pretty sure the little green monkeys crawling on the wall know, but they're not talking. Damned monkeys.)
But regardless, it's a valid point, and I'll try to prove it. Let's take a little stroll through the spam currently in my Yahoo account, and see what we find. C'mon -- it'll be a hoot. (And we might see hooters, too! Bonus!)
Okay, so I've taken a careful look at this, and I've found that there are essentially two types of spam. There's the boring, anooying kind -- 'Get low mortgage rates!', 'Buy vitamins here!', 'Ink cartridges, ink cartridges, ink cartridges!' -- and then there's the entertaining kind.
(Which are pretty much all about sex, frankly. It's really pretty tough to send an unsolicited email about earning money at home, or some cockeyed pyramid scheme, and make it funny. But the porn peddlers -- ah, now, they have all the fun, don't they?)
Of course, within the scope of 'entertaining' spam, there are many subtypes. For instance:
There's the 'Mean It, But Don't Spell It' technique. In just the past couple of weeks, I've gotten enticing emails with the following subject lines:
Not into butchering individual words? Well, then, maybe you'll appreciate the 'If There's One Thing We Don't 'Conjugate' Around Here, It's Sentences' approach. Observe:
But not all spammers eschew the rules of grammar, of course. No, some of them simply abandon reason and meaning, instead. Structurally, these sentence fragments aren't so bad. Semantically, they're half-baked head-scratchers. Here are some examples from the 'That Subject Line You Keep Using... I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means' camp:
Maybe all this misdirection isn't really your style. Perhaps you're more of a 'direct approach' kind of guy or gal. Well, then you might like these examples from the school of 'Less Than Subtle Suggestions':
Perhaps you don't enjoy the subject lines of emails at all. That's fine -- spam can still be entertaining, let me assure you. You can still enjoy the practitioners of the theory of 'Make Yourself Sound Like a Haughty Nineteenth-Century Englishman'. Folks with these aliases (or not?) have taken the time to send me email in the past two weeks:
Finally, there's always the old standby. Find an angle, and get it to as many people, from as many filthy spammer accounts, as humanly possible. It's the 'If I Send This to Everyone in the Fricking World, Something Good Is Bound to Happen' theory. And it's why I, in two weeks of collecting spam for this post, received no less than sixteen emails proudly offering to regale me with the story of:
'How I became Mr. King Dong'
Inside the emails (yes, I opened one; how could I not? It's a compelling premise, damn it!), we find the following text:
'Mr. King Dong took our madication & just look at him tool, it worked insanely well:'
(Yes, yes, I know... look, forget the fact that he was apparently already called 'Mr. King Dong', okay?
And that he seems to have taken the 'madication' and now 'him tool' is 'insane'. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.)
The text above is followed by three pictures of... well, let's just call them 'willies of progressively increasing mass', and leave it at that. (And yes, I could have gone my whole life without seeing that particular spectacle. I won't subject you to it, as well.)
Then there's more text, and more pictures, and some other stuff... but I keep coming back to the question: which of these jokers is the real Mr. King Dong? I mean, presumably, it's one of them in those pictures, right? One of them has taken the 'madication', enjoyed the results, and taken pictures for all to see. And now at least fifteen other snivelling, heartless, cheating bastards are claiming the Mr. King Done throne as their own. It's an outrage! An outrage, I say!
I'm looking for the real Mr. King Dong to step up any time now and put these jokers in their place. Photographs will be examined. Distinguishing... um, features will be compared. Who knows, we may even need DNA samples to sort this thing out. But mark my words, folks -- Mr. King Dong will have his day. He'll stand on stage in all of his glory. Ed McMahon may even sing a little song; it'll be very tasteful. And finally, after ousting the pretenders, he'll claim the title, and don his sash, and his wreath of roses, and his lovely silver tiara.
Just... just don't ask where he's gonna wear them. Really, folks. You seriously don't wanna know.
Seeing as how you're so entertained by the regular bombardment of XXX rated sporn -my own special word for spam porn- perhaps you'd like us to forward you all of ours? LOL. Actually the spams that annoy me most have more elusive subject lines and the reply to name closely resembles that of one or more of my friends listed in my address book.
I just love the fact that the people in the porn messages always seem to have shining beacons of light emanating from their bits and pieces. It always reminds me of when Davy fell in love during a Monkees episode. Perhaps this is holy porn, rather than, well, holey porn. I can't help but think that Jimmy Swaggert is in some way involved. Only he would be involved in porn that's so pure, so innocent, that everyone in it looks like toothpaste spokespeople just gave them head.
God loves you, Jimmy. A hole lot.
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damn, great minds think alike, scrap the spam post now I gotta think of something else!