You can find James Veitch’s book about replying to Internet scammers – Dot Con – on Amazon!

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OK – deep breath – here goes: My penis isn’t big enough.

That’s right, my name is Linda and I have a small penis. And as if that isn’t enough, my emails have convinced me that my life expectancy is threatened, my libido is libidon’t and my pasta is being cooked in the wrong pot! But back to the issue of my penis…it isn’t long enough, my girth is to be ashamed of, my performance could really stand to be enhanced and…whoa. Wait just a minute. I DON’T HAVE A PENIS.

Whew!

What I do have is an inbox overflowing with the latest garbage being SPAMMED throughout cyberspace. If the aliens came down and used my daily email to report on what is troubling the populus of planet Earth, they would quickly surmise that we are a bunch of overweight, not-long-for-this-world, uneducated, in debt, not well endowed losers. Oh yeah, we are all also in need of mortgage refinancing and we have porn on our computers.

Come on people! Who is actually buying this garbage?

I mean someone out there must be in order for this glut of advertisements to continue. Who out there has ponied up their credit card to purchase Human Growth Hormone (HGH) online? I bet you would be interested to find out that Elmo Lally, not Eli Lilly, is behind your purchase. That your “promise to grow muscle and live longer” is housed in a double wide, not a sky scraper. Oh, and that your credit card balance is much more likely to grow than are your muscles.

I mean it’s one thing to buy a book from Amazon, but to buy a supply of generic Viagra from a company called ScatterTheMud.com or Viagra-buy-order-cheap-pills-online.bunchajerks.com? I am not kidding. Someone out there is placing their trust in a “BunchaJerks.” Please tell me what guarantees you your magic bullets won’t be filled with a buncha sugar or buncha cyanide? What was that? The website looked professional? It had pretty colors? Oh well, I feel better then.

I’ll be the first to admit that I do a great deal of shopping online. I enjoy the convenience, the selection, the ability to do it 24 hours a day. But I am buyingBarbie dolls, clothing and CDs, not financial advice, international driver’s licenses or “the ability to do it 24 hours a day.” (Again, NOT kidding.)

Lately, the majority of my spam has dealt directly with making “it” bigger, better, longer, stronger, wider and ahem…harder. All in as little as 24 hours. THAT frightens me. Not because I have one, but because of all the people out there who do own one of these contraptions: MEN. Not the most enlightened of folk in the sexual arena to begin with, but when it comes to their packages? I mean a man cannot be bombarded with penile propaganda every time he goes online and not begin to look south and wonder.

I beg of you all: Learn to use your brain. We women do not need it to be a foot long, do not care if you can lift weights with it, and do not want 572% more to come out of it – yes, that was promised in a recent ad. Save your money and take us out to dinner.

I know that SPAM isn’t going away anytime soon; It’s the price we pay for the convenience and freedom afforded by the Internet. But surely we can exercise better judgment in what we purchase and…oh, you’ll have to excuse me. I just received an incredible offer to make my FAT AND WRINKLES DISAPPEAR! Now where did I put my credit card?

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Curse #1: Spam. I get 150-200 spam e-mails per day on my personal e-mail account. Then I get another 50 or so on my work e-mail. Last but not least, I get a handful from each of the dedicated e-mail addresses I have for my various Web sites. Spam filters are generally useless, since they all do a terrific job of blocking mail from coworkers, PR agencies (kind of important when you work as a tech journalist) and of course my grandmother, whose diabolic e-mails gets whacked upon sight.Curse #2: Script kids. As opposed to real hackers, who spend their days productively trying to hack into the FBI Web site to post nude pictures of Shakira, script kids are those contemptible morons who keep hammering your firewall 200 times while slowing your connection speed down to a crawl in stupid attempts to break into your computer. I get an average of about 500 attempts or so on any given night.

The thing that really bugs me is how utterly, totally POINTLESS the whole thing is. A recent Newsweek article put the spotlight on ‘bulk e-mailers’ (aka. ‘Hellspawned Spammers’) reporting about 90% of the spam originates from some 150 people or so (they set their servers to crank out dummy sender IDs, which makes any kind of blocking-attempts to fail.) Since I’m apparently on every spam-list known to the civilized world, that means these people have drowned me with junk on a daily basis for 5 years. 5 years times, say only 200 e-mails per day, makes for about 365,000 spam e-mails I have deleted so far. Now, after 365,000 attempts, one would think that they, somehow, would get the hint that I’m not interested in growing my pecker 3 inches in 10 days or getting fabulously rich by buying into some mail-stuffing pyramid scheme. Yet they keep sending me this shit and clogging up my mailbox in a matter of days if I’d dare go on a vacation.

Then we have the script-kids. These guys have dedicated their lives to finding suckers who have not installed a bulletproof firewall to keep them from hijacking your computer. Well, here’s news; I’m not one of them! Unfortunately, there’s apparently a whole lot of them out there trying anyway, sometimes bringing my computer down due to sheer overload. I bet that earned them some real gratification. I can picture them sitting in some shack in Idaho, cackling evilly to themselves while pressing their pinkies to the sides of their mouths. I hope to become that cool when I grow up, too.

Now, since these two groups of morons are not going to go away by asking nicely, the question is: What can we do to get them out of our hair? The answer is, in my opinion, simplicity itself; Get the script-kids to target the REAL menace to the Internet, the spam-kings! Better yet, get some real hackers to focus their energy on obliterating the spam servers rather than some boring Government site! Since the spammers have set up these complex systems to hide their identity and cover their tracks, it should be a nice challenge for the script-kids and hackers to get to them. And by continuously attacking spammers again and again as soon as they try to revive their crashed and hacked servers, there should be a marked decrease in spam across the nation. Eventually, they’ll go out of business due to excessive technical costs and lost contracts from not being able to deliver their so-called ‘services.’

Given the fact that a large portion of the spam being sent out by these people are pushing illegal scams resulting in tons of crimes being committed, I imagine few law enforcement agencies would feel the urge to crack down too hard on the perpetrators in this particular case. So, how to motivate the script-kids and hackers to go after the spammers? Enter the power of the Internet. If everybody who hates spam donated a dollar to a giant virtual bucket of dough, a small committee could dole out cash awards to individuals who could prove that they actively participated in driving a known spammer out of business. If a lone hacker spearheaded a huge, month-long assault and brought a spammer down single-handedly, he’d get a hefty sum on his own. If a gang of 100 small-timers do the same thing through small but unrelenting disruptions, they all get smaller pieces of the cake and so on. You get the idea.

So what are we waiting for? I’d pay a dollar to get rid of spam forever. I’m sure you would too.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Of course I’m not encouraging anybody to commit a crime. This is all just a joke. I have the highest esteem for the bulk e-mailing profession, and it would just break my heart to see these people driven out of business. So, please respect the integrity of their profession and open your next batch of 216 spam e-mails hawking Viagra and rape-sex with a smile knowing you’re supporting a truly vital function of the Internet.

SPAM — You Can’t Beat The Feeling.

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I speak, of course, about porno – the sweet essence of joy and happiness that it is. I’m not going to sit here and argue with anybody about the pros and cons concerning such adult material, but let’s face it: it makes people feel good and isn’t that what life is all about, anyways? While some like to spend their free time running the bases at the neighborhood baseball diamond, there are those of us who, well, would rather be rounding a different set of bases…if you know what I mean! Unfortunately, as I’m sure so many of us have often encountered, it can sometimes be difficult to (how can I put this nicely?) find another “team” to play with. I can tell you right now, though, that this is no longer a situation to worry about because pornography’s got your back! Batter up!

I’ll pause for a brief moment while those still confused by the previous analogy leave the room…

Luckily in this day and age of independent living and, consequently, perpetual loneliness, adult material has slithered its way into the mainstream and, thanks to my favorite invention since sliced bread – the Internet (Al Gore is a genius…), the same things that used to cost us $6.95 a pop down at the newsstand are now available on our computers 24 hours a day, seven days a week! Oh yeah, and did I mention that it’s all free?!?!?!? Well, not all of it’s free, but really, nudity is nudity, right? No-cost smut is better than nothing at all? That’s what I used to think…

We all get them in our inboxes every day – unsolicited messages, or SPAM. Some receive more than others, always ranging from a wide array of topics, including the lowest prices for printer refill kits, university diplomas (soon you can simply call me doctor…), and 1,001 easy ways to make millions using eBay. Fortunately, my e-mail address is plastered all over the Internet like those phone numbers in a public restroom, so I seem to get more of this crap than your average Hotmail user. The above mentioned are usually fairly easy to avoid, as I can typically tell that they’re garbage simply by reading the titles, but with these adult websites using their clever, new mass-mailing techniques to attract visitors nowadays, more often than not I actually find myself having to open and read their mail before knowing whether or not it’s SPAM. Honestly, wouldn’t you have to think twice before deleting messages like these?

• When will I see you again?
• I’ve been looking all over for you!
• Remember me? We went to high school together…
• I need your advice.
• Live Teen Porn Tryouts!

As you can see, it’s quite the predicament I’m in; it’s pretty bad when you need a full-time secretary just to sort through your porno advertisements, isn’t it? Nah, I think I’d rather do that job myself and perhaps hire somebody else to do other mundane tasks for me, such as writing these weekly columns! Besides, if I didn’t get to go through my e-mail personally, I’d miss out some of the funniest creative advertising I’ve ever seen, which is actually what this column is eventually going to be about if I ever get around to it…

I agree that it is kind of sad, but I think some of the best advertisements I’ve ever seen have been for adult services on the Internet. Granted television has had its moments – the Super Bowl in particular – but nothing can compare to the e-mail I have here in my hand. It was so good that I had to print it out for the archives, or at least as proof to show that this kind of marketing does actually exist! The site in question, and I really don’t recommend this for the kids, was called Smut Farm (I’m sure you can figure out the address if it’s really all that important to you…). The ad was obviously presenting some seriously obscene situations, but their centerpiece just blew my mind. Smack dab in the middle of their promotional flyer was a picture of Osama bin Laden having sex with a donkey.

Yes, you read that right…nothing but the best from Smut Farm. Now I knew right off the bat that this had to be a doctored picture because, well, a donkey would never have sex with Osama bin Laden, but hidden deep below the surface there was real marketing genius going on here. Think about it – the majority of the world hates Osama right now and the majority of the world loves pornography. Put the two together and BAM!!! you’ve got yourself a winning combination right there! Come for the “Osama Does the Metropolitan Zoo”image series and stay for those pictures of the farmer’s daughter that you know you want…I’m sold!

If I’ve portrayed only one message throughout this column, I wish somebody would write and clue me in because even I’m lost at this point! The bottom line, though, can (hopefully) be summed up like this:

• Pornography – GOOD
• Unsolicited e-mail trying to sell me foolish products – BAD
• Unsolicited e-mail, yet somehow quite humorous – GOOD (up to a point!)
• Osama bin Laden – BAD

I think it’s time to stop hating the wrong things here, people! Have a safe and happy Memorial Day!!!

Production Notes:
Other Related Sites You May Find of Some Interest…

• Felicity’s Fun on the Farm
• A Man and His Sow
• Real Milkmaids Gone WILD!!!
• National Geographic magazine

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