You’ve got mail.
E-mail, that is. The flood of overnight e-mail, much of which should have been caught by the filter to catch spam, by which I mean the electronic equivalent of junk mail, not canned mystery meat. But the filter doesn’t always work.
Which isn’t all bad, actually, from a sociological perspective. It is mildly fascinating how the content of spam changes.
Especially Michigan-based spam. Once upon a time, spam messages were all about naughtiness. Then came endless of solicitations on behalf of various billionaire widows who wanted to share their wealth with me, if I would only show good faith by trusting them with my credit card. Sadly, I am a man of little faith.
These days, however, I have noticed a refreshing new trend in unsolicited e-mail: Honesty. Yes, it’s friendly and warm, but gets right down to the point: Give me money. I had three such this morning.
The first was from a nice woman whose husband I know slightly. Her name is Pam Bouchard.
She wished me a Happy Mother’s Day, which was a trifle odd, but didn’t offend me.
After telling me about her daughter’s year at MSU, she got down to the point.
The year had been a little bit of a challenge, she told me, because Mike is running for governor! That’s Mike Bouchard, the Oakland County sheriff. Then she took me into her confidence.
“Sadly,” she confided, “campaigns are very expensive.” She invited me to donate online, or, quote “send us a check.”
“Every dollar counts,” she said. You don’t say. Actually, reminding perfect strangers of that fact might not be such a great idea if you want them to give up their cash.
The next one was even better. It directed me to the new website of somebody I actually do know, a man who modestly describes himself as a “very active community leader and a visionary.” He isn’t running for anything just now, but wants to stay in touch with friends, and invited me to be his Facebook pal.
And yes, now that you mention it, his family is in a bit of a jam, and if I wanted to make a donation to help them out, why I could do so via MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover or PayPal.
This fellow’s name, by the way, is Kwame Kilpatrick.
Finally I had an e-mail from Andy Goodman. Andy, as I am sure you know, works for Revolution, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party in America.
He faces an exciting challenge: “To be blunt: our current web site is not acceptable for the challenges we face in putting the next stage of the world communist revolution on the map.”
So he asked me for a mere five thousand dollars to hire the techies to help speed the next stage of the revolution. I have to tell you, this had a certain appeal to my sense of the absurd.
But unfortunately, I don’t have that much ready cash. If I did, however, I have to confess something. After Kwame, Pam and the commies, those billionaire Nigerian widows look better all the time.
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