Rickety Criketey

I get a lot of spam e-mail as do most people these days. It's a fact of internet life and I try not to let it annoy me too much. Spam filters these days can take care of almost all of it but I still give a quick glance at my spam section before I delete it just in case the filters made a mistake. It's pretty easy to tell the spam at a glance because it's from no one I know.

Most spam is just people trying to sell you stuff but there are plenty of grifters and thieves out there who want to steal your money. Everybody wants to get money out of their country and if I could just lend them a hand we could both make millions. The hand they always need is bank account numbers. Yeah, they're not gonna steal from ya. Trust 'em.

The spam that I hate the most isn't somebody trying to steal from me. It's the fake "the mail you sent was rejected" e-mail. It's disguised to look like the automated response your ISP would send you if you typed an address wrong. If you open the e-mail it's really an ad for one thing or another. Who would not be annoyed by this? Who would not resent being tricked into opening an ad? Who came up with this idea? I get a ton of them so it must be working on someone. But on who? The mysteries of marketing.

Spam is easy to spot when they try to make it look like it is coming from me. I have a web site with my name in it so I get spam all the time disguised to look like it's coming from jaredosborn.com. Why would they do this? I know I'm not sending myself e-mail so it has to be spam. I just don't understand the mind of a spammer. I guess they are just as bored as a lot of people at their jobs.

As long as I'm bitching about stuff, who can watch TV anymore with commercials right in the middle of the show? Animations pop up and advertise the next show right as a dramatic moment is happening in the show I'm watching right now. TV used to be our friend. Now it wants to make enemies of us.

Football has gotten rotten with commercials in the last few years. When the network came out of commercial and back to live action and it was in the middle of a play that used to be a screw up. Now it's business as usual. They have so much ad time crammed into a game that they routinely cut it as close as they can to the start of a play. And don't even get me started on Monday Night Football on ESPN where they now have an actor sit in for twenty minutes while they ignore the game. A few weeks ago while the Giants were playing the Cowboys we got twenty minutes of Emmitt Smith talking about "Dancing With the Stars". That was torture.

I watched Talladega Nights last week. It was okay but the product placement was painful. I don't hate advertising but I like the choice of not watching it. They tried to work it into the humor but not with no real success. The film makers took no chances on bad mouthing or showing a product in a bad light. If a joke needed to be made about a lame product they made that product up. This undermined the humor and left a bad taste in my mouth.

At least I can stop complaining about the NY Giants. After four weeks of losing they finally won a game today. That may only stop me for a week because they are playing badly but a win is a win.

There you go; a week of me moaning. They can't all be winners. If the world would bend to my will I could stop all this bitchin'. I really should be Dr. Doom. He makes the world bend to his will.