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Digital Slob Curt Brandao |
Spam, spam, eggs,
spam, spam and spamLately, I've been having this recurring nightmare where I'm sitting on a deserted island and a pigeon flies up with a note tagged to its leg. I unravel the message and it says, "Super Viagra is Here Without a Prescription!"
Then, from the open sea, I see thousands more flying right for me. I run into the thicket, trying to escape like the primary lead in a Hitchcock film, but soon I'm inundated with pecks and paper cuts until I awake in sheer terror.
My therapist says the pigeons represent my hostility toward my emotionally abusive parents, and the messages the birds carry are from my inner child, pestering me to express the rage that I locked up long ago to survive Mom and Dad going at it above me like Godzilla and Mothra.
Maybe. Or maybe I'm just getting way too much frickin' spam.
By one estimate, Internet users in the United States get enough junk e-mail to fill the Grand Canyon with letter-sized printouts every 14 minutes.
Granted, that estimate is mine and I made it up, but everyone seems to accept it as fact when I tell them, and that in itself should be enough to make us all pause.
I think there's only one real solution to spam -- it's about five miles wide and hanging out in the Asteroid Belt biding its time for a clear shot at our tiny blue planet. But even a catastrophic impact might not stop the scourge of unwanted e-mail. Since roaches and certain bacteria might survive after a giant space rock soul kisses Earth, the task of unstuffing the world's Hotmail accounts would only fall to them once the dust settles -- a torturous fate I wouldn't even wish on living things without a central nervous system.
Speaking of lower life forms, members of Congress (who now need staffers shackled to computers around the clock to separate their legitimate bribes, kickbacks and payola e-mails from the chaff) have been stirred to action, trying to kill digital dreck with legislative red tape (the Can-Spam Act), which will be about as effective as trying to unflood the Titanic with a teaspoon.
As for Digital Slobs, we're resigned to keeping our friends close, and our would-be home mortgage lenders closer.
Therefore, as part of ongoing research, I did a content analysis of the spam that infiltrated my e-mail account Wednesday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. I added up the spam and real messages, and the percentage of solicitations that were Viagra-based. At this point I should say my analysis did not adhere to the scientific method in the strictest sense, but if I say that I might not qualify for certain federal grants, so please play along.
In all I got 73 e-mails. Only nine should have gotten past the digital doorman.
Thirty were for sex-enhancing pharmaceuticals (about 40 percent). By far the most frequently used punctuation was the exclamation point (an average of 17.5 per spam). Though, to be fair, that number was skewed by one e-mail that used 506 exclamation points to draw the word "Viagra" in block letters.
As crude as it looks, that's probably the one punctuation mark most would free-associate with the drug. Maybe there are other spams out there that creatively render "Dulcolax" with colons or "Ginko Biloba" with question marks.
Perhaps my therapist and I should dispense with the dream interpretations and just treat my e-mail's inbox like an inkblot test.
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Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's production editor. Reach him at: cbrandao@starbulletin.com
