Spam It!

It seems that I spend about half of my time on the computer deleting spam. Clearing spam is a lot like shaving. If you don’t do it every day, you are going to be overcome with a growth that is much more difficult to deal with. 

I’ve noticed that as I’ve aged, the spam I get has changed. Several years ago, every piece of junk e mail I received seemed to be about a new miracle product for hair loss. Then a few years later, I was besieged with offers for cheap Viagra from Canada. Fast forward to today, and a lot of the spam is from some nice people who want to help me with my final burial expenses.

Spam has always been with us in one form or another. If you read comic books like I did when I was a kid, you were exposed to a version of it.

Back then, comics had pages of ads hawking all kind of ridiculous products. This was spam from another era. As I thought about this, curiosity got the best of me and I pulled a 60 year old Spider Man comic out of my closet, and begin flipping the pages. Wow. 

The gold standard of 1960s comic book spam were the X-ray glasses. For only $1.00 you could buy a pair of specs that supposedly would enable you to see  someone’s skeleton thru their skin. The ad also implied you could see thru people’s clothing, which as a boy nearing puberty, had a great deal of appeal to me. 

There were plenty of other things to choose from. For only 99 cents I could get a booklet that would make me a master of karate in no time. If I sent a buck twenty-five, I would be the proud owner of some live sea horses - whatever they were. And, if you bought the workout brochure from Charles Atlas, you were guaranteed to add 3 inches of muscle to your arms in just a few weeks.

The advertisement for the Polaris Nuclear Sub is one of my favorites. The description says it’s over 7 feet long, seats two kids, has controls that work, and torpedoes that fire. And ya’ll it was was made from heavy fiberboard. We call that cardboard. The advertisement also guarantees hours of good clean fun looking thru your periscope and firing nuclear missiles. I got in a lot trouble when I was a kid, but I sure didn’t want to be blamed for nuclear winter. One of my buddies bought the “sub”, and all he got was a box full of cardboard pieces with assembly instructions written in bad English. The periscope was a mirror on a stick and the torpedo firing mechanism was an elastic band. Once he (meaning his Dad) finished putting the thing together, it had to be moved in the garage, or the humid night air would turn to the sub to mush. 

One company actually sold live monkeys - no kidding!  I did a little research and discovered that an  importer brought in squirrel monkeys from South America, put them in cardboard boxes with a little window, and shipped them to any kid that was stupid enough to pay the $18.95 price.The advertisement said they were “Darling Squirrel Monkeys, an adorable pet and companion.”

A couple of observations.  

1) the fact that someone could ship live animals through the mail is unthinkable; and 2) I seriously doubt they were as sweet as a Golden Retriever. My guess is when a child opened the box, he found one irate monkey. 

Today this would be considered animal abuse; or depending on how ticked off the monkey was, child abuse.  Maybe both. 

I’ll admit this kiddie spam played into my pre-teen gullibility, and suckered me in to buying something that looked too good to be true. I was smitten by the $6.98    3-D motion picture projector. However, because of my limited funds, I shelled out  $3.99 and bought a device that converted your black and white TV to color. This turned out to be nothing but an opaque piece of multi colored plastic that would cling to your television screen. I suppose technically (and legally), it did turn your television into a color one, if you wanted to watch The Lone Ranger with green skin. 

There is a lesson to be learned from spam, then and now. No matter how wonderful the description is, if it’s sounds too good to be true, it is. Or put another way, if you buy a mail order monkey, all you’re gonna end up with is a rabies shot.