Spiced Ham

I don’t know about you all, but I have an electronic mail account. It’s a great new way for family and friends to communicate with each other instantaneously without the hassle of stamps or telegrams. As the world wide internet rapidly expands, I receive more and more unsolicited messages from random people with stupid ass names like Danity Kane who tell me that I need “pharms” or that my penis needs to be bigger or that so and so wants to meet me, then sell me some ViAgrA. I believe they call it “spam” for some reason nowadays, which is a real shame for the Hormel Corporation. They’ve actually been prompted to publish an official position statement on internet spam, saying that they aren’t the ones who want you to have huge unit. They just want you to eat their processed meat in a can.

Every time I see that I’ve received a dozen or so spam emails, I always wonder how the hell anyone is making money by sending them. I’m no economic genius, but the fact that I receive a dozen or so of these emails every day must mean that someone is making money by doing it. But I find it hard to believe that there are people out there who are so gullible that they see a message from a person named Violet Bickerstaff or something with a subject like, “RE: your proposal” and say to themselves, “Hey, I guess I could have written a proposal that I sent to someone named Violet. I mean, I stock shelves for a living and don't know anyone named Violet but who knows what I do in my sleep? It appears she's responding to a message I sent--must be important. Oh, she wants me to buy anti-depressants. Well, I hope this gets my proposal approved.”

So what’s the explanation? My guess is that it’s probably so easy and cheap to do that it essentially boils down to a numbers game. You send out millions of these computer generated messages to people around the world and it probably only takes a few morons to make it worthwhile.