Chapter XIII: Junk Mail Junkie

I used to avoid junk mail like the plague. My spam filter consisted of a five hundred foot wall topped with barbed wire, surrounded a crocodile infested moat. My inbox was so secure that it took me two weeks longer than anyone else to find out I had been accepted to Cal Poly, since my acceptance email had been deflected by my junk mail filter. But hey, it's just like with national security--sacrifices must be made to ensure the integrity of the motherland, or inbox, as the case may be. Behind these impregnable defenses, I revelled and made merry, like Prince Prospero.

Inevitably though, a piece of junk mail was able to infiltrate my castellated abbey and gruesomely kill all my guests, a la Edgar Allan Poe.

That was a couple years ago. Now, I pop into my junk mail folder pretty much whenever I check my email, hoping to find a neat piece of spam. Contrary to popular belief, not all junk mail is created equal. Sure, most of the time it's just some boring fluff where the subject is "enLarGeYour /\/\anhood" from someone named "NOWYOUCAN" but every so often, it's something cool, albeit inadvertently.

There was a period of about a month when I got a slew of emails where in the email text, after the ad for printer ink/penis enlargement/SUPER LOW mortgage rates, there would be a couple weird sentences, like "As Abbie limped across the street "Looks like a storm's comin'" mumbled Uncle Leroy and the Axe fell swiftly on the cat who blew Autumn Mist into the air like butterflies. I love Goats."

This was probably a device to try to get the email through spam filters (it failed), but every so often something almost meaningful emerged from the randomness.

At any rate, last night I got an email from "HIS HIGHNESS Farzand Bin Ali, Emir of the state of Bahrain." It was rather lengthy, but very entertaining. The basic gist was that he got a lot of bribes from American oil companies ($32 million), and he wants me to help him invest it in the Canadian stock market. In return he'll give me $2 million. To make this transfer, he needs all my bank account information. And finally, he looks forward to a "fruitful business relationship."

Quite clever I thought, but there's one minor detail that annoys me. The emir of Bahrain's name is Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, not Farzand Bin Ali. Why would they fuck that up?

Supposedly, spam composes about 95% of all email traffic in the United States. That's fucking awesome.

In other news, my bookstore doesn't stock The Economist anymore, for some reason.