Marty Barrett: The Flight of the Mavervorl

Spam constitutes 83 percent of my incoming mail (and nearly all of my outgoing mail, as I earn my living from manufacturing college diplomas and cooking up male enhancement pills in my lab) and I am usually adept at spotting it.

I have always been impressed and interested by new forms of spam. First were things like mass e-mailed Neiman Marcus cookie recipes, followed by messages disseminated in the days before people knew how to use Blind Carbon Copy, necessitating the invention of opt-in lists and the word "netiquette", that dictated not swiping someone's e-mail list and writing in all caps.

Now, while I still get nostalgia-inducing spams that begin this way:

MR.MICKY BULO
Investment Manager,
Safe Deposit Bank.
Lusaka, Zambia
Email:mickybulo@netscape.net

Dear Sir,

This is an urgent and very confidential I am MICKY BULO, Investment Manager of Safe Deposit Bank Zambia currently on a short Banking programme here in United Kingdom (UK).On March 6,1998, a Foreign Oil consultant/contractor with the National Petroleum Corporation, Mr.Gerald Welsh made a numbered time(Fixed) Deposit for twelve calendar months, valued at US$5,500,000.00,(Five Million, five hundred thousand Dollars)in my branch. Upon maturity,I sent a routine notification to his forwarding address but got no reply. After a month,we sent a reminder and finally we discovered from his contract employers, the National Petroleum Corporation that Mr.Gerald Welsh died in a plane crash along with his wife on the 31st October 1999 in an Egyptian airline 990 with other passenger on board.
On further investigation,I found out that he died without making a WILL, and all attempts to trace his next of kin was fruitless. I therefore made further investigation and discovered that Mr.Gerald Welsh did not declare any kin or relations in all his official documents,including his Bank Deposit paperwork in my Bank. This sum of US$5,500,000.00 has carefully been fixed in my bank for safekeeping.No one will ever come forward to claim it.

and:

I am a staff of NatWest Bank London. I am writing following an oppurtunity in my office that will be of benefit to both of us and the needy. In my department we discovered a floating account with twenty Six million,five hundred thousand British Pounds in an account belonging to one of our customers,Mr. Morris Thompson(now late),an American who died in the plane crash of Alaska Airline Flight 261 which crashed on January 31st,2000 with both his wife and only daughter.

I also get spams that evade filters by having so much discontiguous information in them that they are fun to read just so I can feel what it must be like to have had a stroke, like:

my father served on the uss nevada during the pearl harbor attack unfortunately he is blind but loved to hear of this it brought back many memories thank you.
the vast majority of material that are just initials- eva edpm etc are all synthetic rubber latex foam products - no natural rubber.
was another member of the figaro family who played football at notre dame and was a football head coach at vermillion catholic church in abbeville.
hey my whole english class came to this site lots of info nice job and ill catch u on the flip side.
you are a great person and a great friend i am very glad that i have gotten the chance to talk to you i hope that your guestbook finally likes me.

and:

it was and still is the custom of spanish speaking countries to keep the surname of the father as the middle name and the surname of the mother as the last name in marriage.

In fact, it seems my friend Gaby might have a future in writing spam, as her stories are often indistinguishable from it.

Here are some recent spam subject lines that avoid problem words by just being weird:

But cordele be calipatria

Is turgid whichever mach

Be my vestal

by to lordsburg

There are also baiting subject lines, leading one to believe the sender is someone you know:

What Karen said about you

Sorry about last night

She's thinking of leaving

Don't worry about it - this time (I clicked on this immediately. It was about mortgages)

The file I promised

Today I got:

You like entice fishwife with big? (I misread this as "You like big Entwife with fish?" because I am dyslexic. I suppose I do.)

My favorite new spam pops up on YouTube. It hearkens back to snail-mail chain letters. I found the following when I was searching for "Cult of Snap":

PLEASE DON'T READ THIS. You will get kissed on the nearest possible Friday by the love of your life. Tomorrow will be the best day of your life. However, if you don't post this comment to at least 3 videos, you will die within 2 days. Copy and paste this, to be saved.

I suppose I could invest in a better spam filter, but spam really seems to be the way literature is headed, and how am I going to cash in if I'm not up on it?

Some day I will write the Great American Novel and it will consist entirely of spam, because books are only what we know already. I will call it "Base easy my cumquat".

Previously: Letters from Nigeria (2002)

Labels: faulty technology, found, literature, pop, spam

--5.02.2007--

Cult of Spam

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