Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam

For my birthday last week I received the gift of spam. Lots and lots of spam. My e-mail address somehow wound up on one of the seedier servers of the Web, so for the past week I’ve been inundated with offers to meet sexy singles, purchase herbal supplements promising to increase the size of my non-existent “man tool” (exact quote), or earn commissions by helping Nigerian oil ministers transfer wealth off their home continent.

Most of the offers are penny ante scams: thirty bucks to register with the singles service, or fifty for a two-month supply of phallic-promise sugar pills. Dr. Dagogo’s oil-royalties scheme could in theory suck my bank account completely dry, but even then my losses would be limited to what I have right now; he can’t make a legal claim to any of my future earnings.

So if I lost all my IQ points tomorrow and said “yes” to every one of those unsolicited e-mail offers, it would still cost me less than what the government expects my taxpaying self to pay on its bailout plans for Wall Street and the mortgage industry. Which is why, come November, I’ll be writing in a vote for “that guy in Africa who keeps offering to sell me V!agra without a prescription,” because he can’t possibly trash the country worse than our current crop of elected officials is already doing.

Meanwhile, here’s a collection of spam recipes. Eat hearty. High-sodium chemically preserved pig byproducts may not be the healthiest diet in the world, but it’s still better than what the government’s feeding us.