One of the great pleasures of writing this column is getting emails from the residents of our fair county. I love to read your thoughts and ideas, which reach me at mdolshan@perrycountytimes.com.
I maintain a website for my other writing, www.matthewolshan.com, which has a way for readers of my novels and children’s books to email me, too.
Which is where this week’s story begins.
Authors like to hear from readers, but hate hearing from spammers. In this way, we’re no different from anyone else with an email account.
About a month ago, I started getting dozens of emails every day advertising a smorgasbord of prescription drugs. But unlike the spam I usually get, these emails were coming from my own website.
I started investigating the problem and quickly found myself swimming in an ocean of strange new words. I learned about “botnets,” legions of hijacked computers forced to do the will of evil spammers. A computer in Greece, a zombie soldier in some botnet army, was apparently at the root of my spam troubles.
Unfortunately, in order to silence that one spammer, I had to block the entire nation of Greece from emailing me through my website. It may seem extreme for one man to embargo a Mediterranean country just to unclutter his email account, but this is war!
Many of the new words I saw in the course of my spam research had roots in the agrarian world. The programmers who organized these zombie networks were called “bot herders.” Their criminal activities included “harvesting emails” and “planting worms.”
All of that herding, harvesting, and planting got me thinking. Apparently, the internet was a kind of vast farm, its virgin soil waiting to be put to productive use.
So what was I, the individual user, on this brave new plantation? Of course, I was the ultimate target of the spammer’s fraudulent marketing. If there were no suckers to order the phony Cialis, the spammers would have no business model.
But aside from being one of a billion potential rubes, I had another equally important role: serving the needs of my computer, which needed to be woken up every morning and fed a steady diet of contacts — email addresses of friends and business associates — that could then be stolen and used to disseminate a whole new crop of spam.
In other words, my role in the spam universe was that of slave. To my computer.
This was a disturbing line of thought, so I steered my research in a different direction: why was spam called “spam” anyway?
This was something I’d known about but forgotten. A quick Google search later, I was reminded of one of my favorite comedy sketches of all time, the famous “Spam” sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
As a kid, I memorized huge chunks of Monty Python comedy and acted it out with my friends. The “Spam” sketch was one of our favorites. The premise involved a young couple trying to order breakfast from a menu completely dominated by spam. One of the items, for instance, was “spam, eggs, spam, spam, bacon, and spam.” A recitation of the menu gave Python cast member Terry Jones, who played the waitress, the opportunity to deploy his squawking falsetto in service of the word “spam” again and again. And in true surrealistic Python style, there was a chorus of operatic Vikings waiting in the wings to interrupt the order with a hilarious manly ode to spam.
In 1994, before the internet was such a universal phenomenon, and people were inventing new words for the brand-new experiences they were having online, a pair of immigration lawyers in Phoenix got the brilliant idea of sending a mass advertising email to all the Usenet groups they could find. The word “spam,” meant to denote an electronic message repeated to the point of obnoxiousness, emerged from the irritated outcry that followed.
But since we’re on the topic of new words and spam, what about the original “spam,” the canned Hormel product made from ham and pressed pork shoulder? Spam, which made its debut in 1937, was initially called Hormel Spiced Ham. Not very sexy. So there was a naming contest, and the $100 prize went to “Spam.”
According to Hormel’s trademark guidelines, Spam should be spelled in all-caps: SPAM. Which makes it look a lot like an acronym. And, in fact, there’s a competing theory of the name’s creation. Supporters of this theory claim that “Spam” really came from the words “Shoulder of Pork and Ham.” Others derive it from “Supply Pressed American Meat,” which is how the British described SPAM in the 1940s.
Some wags have it as, “Something Posing as Meat.”
Substitute the word “mail” for “meat” in the last one, and we’re right back where we started.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 20 January 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
