28 People are Responsible for all Your Spam

You’ll have to excuse any abnormally large amount of spelling or grammatical errors this week. You see, I’m all a flush with excitement from an email I received from Mr. Solomon Johnson who has offered me the most singularly spectacular opportunity I have ever received from an unsolicited email.

Now, Sol – I’m going to call him Sol because he’s now my BFF – Sol understands that we all want to make a difference in the world and as a wealthy man (a $10.2 million fortune no less) he wants to not only help the less fortunate, but he wants to help me – and by helping me, help others even MORE, by allowing me access to his fortune (because he’s dying) to help the needy. Apparently dying people where Sol comes from can’t get access to their terrifyingly large wads of US currency.

So all I’ve got to do to earn this fortune is give Sol more information than I give to the US government to earn a security clearance. That sounds legitimate to me, I mean, you don’t just hand someone $10 mil without some information right? I mean, you have to turn over a great deal of personal information to get a driver’s license, so this is nothing. Bring on the giant check.

Fortunately, if you have enough brain activity to keep pumping oxygen into your body without conscious thought, you know that Sol is one of a myriad of scam artists who generally say they are from Africa (Nigeria is popular) and who, despite being enormously wealthy, cannot afford to hire someone to proof-read their email for simple English juxtaposition.

And if you’re reading this, I expect that you have a higher than average intellect and have probably asked yourself the same question I posit to you now… Who falls for this?

Well, as it turns out, enough people to keep this little scam going for something like 80+ years.

Yes, you read that right. This isn’t an invention of the internet age – but that’s a good place to start. According to ZDNET, spammers, on average, get one response for every 12.5 MILLION emails they send. This number is not made up apparently. It is the result of a study by researchers – probably researchers who sent 12.5 million emails until the US government answered one and gave them grant money. But I digress.

Anyway, after about 350 Million emails (one for every man, woman and child in the U.S. or thereabouts) they get 28 responses. This means that there are more than 2 dozen people in the U.S. at this very moment that are receiving and allegedly reading emails and who are clinically brain dead.

If you ever needed proof of the Zombie apocalypse, here it is. The Zombies are among us and they’re breeding. (In all likelihood, more prolifically than you or I)

Now the emails sent by Sol, are not stuff of well financed cyber criminals - the ones that use bogus web sites which look almost identical to actual bank sites and stuff. Thousands of people fall prey to those every year and they have my genuine sympathy. It’s not as if they’re guileless, just extremely unlucky. Like people who bought a LeCar. Ok, probably a bad example.

Sol, however is not alone in his perfidy. In 2002 – nearly 10 years ago when we were, as a nation, so much more innocent and gullible – the people running what is known as "the Nigerian scam" (like Sol’s letter) raked in $100 Million in the United States ... that we know about. (This bit of information is from a website everyone should have listed as a favorite called: http://www.snopes.com/ This site will help you determine the veracity of many urban legends and emails that you receive that start with the letters “FW:” in the subject line. Go to Snopes before forwarding emails. Please.)

So, in ‘02, Americans were bilked out of $100 mil and it wasn’t new even then. In fact, again according to Snopes, this type of ploy has been around since at LEAST the 1920s, when old fashioned paper was used and stamps were purchased and scammers could be discerned by copious paper cuts on their tongues. In the ‘20s, however, it was known as the “Spanish Prisoner” scam. The son of a fabulously wealthy Spaniard was jailed and they needed to raise money to get him out of a Spanish prison and they would pay you blah blah blah.

If we could just find the 28 people in question and take away their internet, you have to assume the emails would stop. There would be no point in sending emails asking for money if no one responded, right? But how do we find these people?

It’s urgent that we do find them because about 90% of the more than 2.8 million emails sent every SECOND, are spam – roughly the same percentage of junk mail I get in my real, paper post letter box.

So, here’s what I suggest. Everyone should send me their bank account data and passwords so I can do a full review and cross your names off my list of people who could potentially be answering these emails and thereby flooding all of our email boxes with junk.

After I receive all of this data, I’ll buy a small Caribbean island, a magnificent boat, and probably a sandwich because I’m sure I’ll be hungry by then; and I’ll put an end to spam once and for all by finding the 28 miscreants responsible for this mess.

If you need me before then, I’ll be hanging out with Sol.

Go fast + turn left = NASA

One of the really neat things about my job is that I get to meet or at least talk to some very interesting people. For instance, a few weeks ago I spent some time talking to a man who had flown on three space shuttle missions – and while speaking with him, I was looking at a photo of him taken from space with the Earth as a backdrop.

It was from this very smart person, a rocket scientist no less, that I learned one inviolate truth about the world we live in … we need to send some poets into space.

Ok, maybe not poets, but at least someone other than engineers. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for engineers. They build cool stuff – like space ships. But I think they should be limited to designing and building them – they shouldn’t own the only set of keys to the things.
The reason I say this is because when I asked him what it was like – you know, being ‘in space’, he said the following:

“It’s pretty cool.”

Honestly, that quote isn’t entirely accurate. He didn’t actually say ‘it’s pretty’. He just said, “cool.”

I suppose a writer worth his salt would have asked an obvious follow up like, “how cool?” or “would you like to try again for those of us who aren’t high?” but I was just dumbstruck.

All I could think was, “Really? That’s all you’ve got? We spend millions of dollars to send you into space and you come back with, ‘cool’? You should be put in prison.”

But being a professional, I didn’t actually say this; I just thought about it for an extended period of time, mumbled something and hung up.

So, who is to blame? I mean, someone has to be held accountable don’t they?

The answer came to me as I stared at the phone. I thought about what it would really be like being up in space zooming around the planet and then – WHAM!

NASCAR. A space ship is nothing more than a 17,000 mph race car – it goes fast, flies in circles and requires the pilot to keep turning left. It’s obvious. You see, nuclear, electrical, aeronautical and mechanical engineers are all the people who work in the space program. They and the other ‘hard science’-type people need a way to blow off steam – you know, fling off the pocket protectors, unclip the bow ties and just really let loose. The space program is their reserve and they’re guarding it jealously. As soon as people find out what it’s really like, everyone will want to see it.

From the beginning of the space program up until June 2010 only 515 people world-wide have reached earth orbit. Only 24 – about the same number of people who go through the check-out at the grocery store while I’m waiting behind some blue haired old lady trying to find a penny in the bottom of her purse - have gone beyond low earth orbit and only a dozen have walked on the moon.

There are nearly 7 BILLION people on this planet and we can not only count the number of people who have been to space, but I’m sure with a little bit of research, I could find their names and nationalities. I know people with more FaceBook friends than the total number of people who have been in space.

But putting writers or artists into space doesn’t seem to be much of a priority, which is really an opportunity lost to bring some of the magic of spaceflight and really, the magic of what these engineers have created, to the significant portion of the population that aren’t rocket scientists.

Until NASA starts fitting artists with space suits, they should require engineer degree holding astronauts to take some additional classes. I would like to suggest the following:

- Creative Writing 101 - Describing what you see using at least four of your senses
- Your friends, adjectives and adverbs
- Colors and why people like them
- Bob Ross painting (I can totally see Bob Ross in space… “We’ll just add a little supernova off in the distance there to give it some color and depth. That’s nice.”)

Until we do these things, the 6,999,999,485 of us without access to space will just have to keep hoping space telescopes keep sending us back images that we can all look at and say, “cool.”