Aristo! Aristo! A la lanterne!: The real problem with spam e-mail.......

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

The real problem with spam e-mail.......

I love living in the internet age, where so much information is at my fingertips.

I love having access to people... good people... around the world, making friends of folks I'll likely never see face to face. It feels good to find ones tribe, and be a part of of it.

Yet... there are downsides to such... and one of them is e-mail spam. Junk mail that finds it's way to your mailbox, clogging it with offers to improve your sex life, buy cheap drugs, and help out the occasional wealthy Nigerian peasant.

As much a pain as such Spam can be... you know what I dislike about the most? The fact that it doesn't come by way of my real mailbox. It's not printed, on paper, with a stamp on it.

You see, I have a wood stove...... and I sorely miss the reams of real live junk mail I used to get. Every day, total strangers would pack my mail box with excellent kindling to start my wood stove. I simply had to walk to the end of my drive, and there I would find a large handful of material perfectly suited to building the morning fire, all delivered at some marketers expense.

2 comments:

og said...: Dude, get your butt subscribed to some insustry trade journals. Start with New Equipment Digest, it's a tabloid sized book printed with non poisonous vegetable ink, and it is FULL of free scrips for other trade mags.

GREAT fireplace fodder. I have a friend who used to heat his house with those, rolled up in a special log roller.; February 2, 2011 at 9:04 PM
Moshe Ben-David said...: I got a great kick out of this post, and I think I'm going to quote the last paragraph and link to it from my blog.

We have a pot belly wood stove and we depend on that stuff too. We even ask relatives to bring their old newspapers when they visit, since we don't subscribe to any.

I especially love burning anything that comes from the AARP.; February 4, 2011 at 4:48 PM

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Robert Heinlein

"Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.

But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please — this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time — and squawk for more!
So learn to say No — and to be rude about it when necessary.
Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.

(This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)"