There is SPAM, the canned luncheon meat. It's fairly harmless and I don't hate it; I used to eat it once in a while back in Canada, and I even liked it sometimes. Spam is also sold in Japan, but mainly in specialty food shops, not regular supermarkets. It isn't cheap, either, selling for roughly 600 yen a can. While I wouldn't pay 600 yen for a tin of fake meat, I can understand the people who do - I recognize that it is the price of the familiar in a new and strange world.
And then there is spam - those annoying, obnoxious, uneducated advertisements that I receive daily. The spam comes in many disguises, promising to make my body thinner, my hair thicker and my penis bigger. Naturally, I have yet to actually be taken in by these numerous promises!
The term spam in reference to bulk email advertisements has its origin in the Monty Python SPAM skit in The Flying Circus. The skit features a couple who go into a cafe that only has SPAM (the meat) on the menu, and a group of vikings who burst into song everytime the word SPAM is uttered. Classic Monty Python humour.
Humourous though its roots, spam is not so funny when it forces bloggers to turn off commenting on their blogs, forcing us to admit that, in some small way, we are allowing spam into our lives.
1 comment:
I agree with how annoying spam can be. We have been very lucky to have AOL ... it is quite efficient in spotting and stopping spam. It even gives us a chance to check out some of the emails which it has filtered as possible spam, so we can retrieve and read it if it isn't actually one of the "bad guys." Life is much quieter on the 'net with AOL.
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