Too Much Spam to Eat When I first started writing this column last spring I talked about the Internet as it relates to living in Crestline and complained that I wanted more Crestline stuff. Now there is probably 100 times as much mountain information available online and it is increasing every day. But life on the Internet has changed a lot in the past year, and not just with Crestline. Now I’m getting so much e-mail spam that I’m disgusted with trying to delete it all. I’ve all but given up on television. Now do I have to give up on the Internet too? I guess I’ll just have to give up the Internet and go outside once in a while. Too cold and windy right now, though. I started on the Internet a long time ago in Internet years. My first browser was Mosaic, if you can remember that. It was the forerunner of Netscape, of which I’m still a fan, because it doesn’t feed you daily doses of viruses and worms like Microsoft Outlook does and it doesn’t crash you like Internet “Exploder,” as we Netscape, Java and Unix followers have always called it, is notorious for doing. I modemed my first file in 1986 when the word “modem” was not in the dictionary, and made my first Web site in 1995, when that term was not in the dictionary and there were very few of them. An old friend and I are still the owners of the domain: wwwdotcom.com. Don’t put a “www.” in front of it or you’ll never reach it—that’s how old it is. We once used it as a resource for Web publishers, but now we just keep it so we can say we have it. A resourceful and funny programmer employed by my friend put a message up on it a while back that is still there now: “Attention: You have reached the very last page of the Internet. We hope you have enjoyed your browsing. Now turn your computer off and go outside.” Good advice, if you ask me. That is, if it’s not too cold and windy. Even before browsers, I was a poor guy who was a bus-riding newspaper editor in Fallbrook who lived in an apartment in Carlsbad only because it was a great place walk to the beach to surf on the weekends. Some right-wing guys with a company called PressNet in Washington, D.C. paid me on the side to summarize political-related articles in the San Diego Union and Evening Tribune newspapers on a laptop in my spare time to send to clients in Congress. I still don’t know how they got my name and number. Doo doo doo-doo, doo doo doo-doo! My job was to convey the editorial spin that was being put on the articles here by their “adversaries,” and they passed it on to their clients in Congress. I can’t remember, but I think the guy who signed my checks was named “McCarthy,” or something like that. After a while, the checks stopped coming, and my booby prize in lieu of payment was this giant paperweight that couldn’t even stay on for 45 minutes outside the reach of a wall socket. The point is that in 1987 I had an honest-to-goodness laptop. Me and three other guys in San Diego County probably had a laptop back then. It weighed about 20 pounds. So I sat on the bus in the morning and filed my Union report, charged the thing up at work, then in the afternoon I got the Tribune and filed my report about that on the bus back home. At night, I hooked it up to a phone line during dinner and transmitted my text reports on a 1,200-baud modem for an hour to Washington, D.C. What a life. Spring forward 16 years. I put myself on that do-not-call list last year, and it seems to have worked great for the telemarketers, but the e-mail spammers haven’t missed a beat. Spammers, if you’re reading this, listen up. No, I’m not interested. I have no use for breast-enhancing pills. I do just fine without your product, thank you, just sitting in front of this stupid computer all day and night deleting spams instead of running around the lake and stopping at all of those new fitness stations like I should be doing. And I don’t find larger breasts particularly attractive on me anyhow, and I imagine that any woman looking at them would agree with me. I also like it when the spammers tell me that I have a blind date. Even if I were single now, a blind one would probably be the only kind of date I could get. Maybe I should save those in a special folder, just in case I become a widower or something. I also get these spams telling me that they have a wonder drug that can cure my PMS. At first I was convinced that I couldn’t get PMS, but then I keep getting more of these, and the more of these irritating spams I get, the more I think I really could use a cure for PMS, because I’m sure starting to feel like I have it. SO SIGN ME UP FOR IT AND STOP SPAMMING ME!!!!. Here’s my credit card number. My favorite is when they spam me and say that they have this product that can completely eliminate spam. Let’s see—a spammer spams me and tells me that he has this great way to keep annoying people like him from annoying me anymore. Is that an oxymoron, or do they think I’m just a moron? I’m gonna put a few more layers on and go outside.
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