Today’s blog come by way of Pippi

She writes: We are growing serious, and, let me tell you, that’s the very next step to being dull. - Joseph Addison, The Drummer They would not be smart enough to pour piss out of their boots, if the instructions were written on the sole. - Garrison Keillor If it is illegal to dump toxic waste in your neighborhood playground, pour used motor oil in storm drains and stare at the mayor of Paris, it should also be illegal to forward spam email. This mornng in my email inbox there were so many forwarded email hoaxes that I had to close my email program, take a deep breath and take a walk around the block before I could respond to any of them. It wasn’t just the sheer volume of the emails promising a new screensaver or warning me about a computer virus from something as inoccuous as logging in to my email, it was that people are actually stupid enough to still believe such amazing bullshit. Some goodies from my Inbox: * My cousin sent me an email warning me about MySpace and viruses from pre-made layouts. Apparently she has a virus on her computer that could “only have come from MySpace” as does everyone she knows who has a layout on their MySpace page. Everyone but me, that is. Probably because I am the only person who is smart enough to never open any attachments she sends me. She thinks it is cute to send people a file that someone else forwarded to her that will, for example, open the DVD drive on your computer. The problem isn’t MySpace, pre-made layouts or the evils of the internet. The problem is that she opens every attachment that is sent to her, forwards everything, re-enters her PayPal information and doesn’t have a firewall or anti-virus software on her computer. She’s a fucking moron. * Speaking of fucking morons, let’s talk about an email I received from a college friend who logged on to her computer, opened her browser history to find a page she looked at the previous day and found, along with the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe, that someone had been browsing porn sites. Since her kids are both under 5 and not very internet savvy and she doesn’t look at porn, it had to be her husband. Her husband told her that he turned the computer on and porn just started popping up on the screen. Her husband, who is an alcoholic and has been going to therapy because he is a sex addict and was having affairs, swore that he would NEVER look at porn in their home. Because it easier to believe that the computer just dialed up her ISP, opened Firefox and started hitting porn sites than to believe that her husband, who went through a record amount of Kleenex during her last pregnancy and worked his way through her friends when the entire New Orleans region ran out of Kleenex, was surfing circuspenis.com. Apparenly the man who couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the sole is smart enough to use an anti-virus software to get rid of the problem though. I kind of wonder now how she graduated in the top 10% of our graduating clas if she really believes that her husband wouldn’t surf porn because he started going to church. Particularly since his last affair was with the church organist. * Or the woman who swears she knows someone who knows someone who knows people whose son was killed at Virginia Tech. Apparently the hapless couple was backing out of their driveway, so intent upon getting to see their son that they didn’t notice their 8 year old daughter was behind the car. They killed her and thus lost two children on the same day. Funny though… The same story circulated after 9/11, after Columbine and after 100 other tragedies. At any rate, she forwarded the email message pleading for prayers for John and Betsey Morgan of Albany, New York to everyone in her email address book. And didn’t much appreciate it when I ‘replied-all’ with the link to Snopes. * A forwarded email from someone, concerned about my health and my seeming inability to avoid getting whacked with the cancer stick, with information from John Hopkins on how to avoid getting cancer and why I shouldn’t have the chemo after all because, according to this email at least, chemotherapy causes cancer, too. Well, great, but the name of the hospital is JOHNS Hopkins and I sincerely doubt that a researcher there wants to share cancer secrets for free when they could instead turn a tidy profit. And by the way… I don’t have cancer. I’m also not pregnant, so I don’t really care to hear about a problem with Enfamil or how someone’s child died from drinking the fluid from a Swiffer WetJet. Tiger Woods’s new yacht, a free website that lets you track where a cell phone is if you lose it, entering your PIN number backwards will help you if you are mugged, commencement speeches where Kurt Vonnegut tells graduating students to wear sunscreen…. The internet is awash in the stupidity that can only be found when people who are otherwise savvy and intelligent fall for bullshit because it makes for good email. And unfortunately most of those people seem to be people I know. Someone told me that I should be grateful that someone was thinking of me enough to forward an email they got that they thought I would like. I say to hell with that. It isn’t thinking of me, it is polluting my inbox and from now on I am going to reply-all to every single email with the link to Snopes. I’d rather be thought a bitch than have people think I am so stupid I really believe that the Dalai Lama created a personality test.

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