Rhymes With Five: Spam worth reading

If you use email, you probably get Spam. It's pretty much a fact of life, and it's nearly as useless to complain about the Spam messages as it is to wonder aloud about what, actually, composes its meaty-ish namesake. (Which, by the way, seems to have undergone a major re-branding of late. "Crazy Tasty"-- really?)

Something about Spam email that I find really funny is how it so pointedly-- yet so unsuccessfully-- preys on peoples' fears and insecurities. A few weeks ago, some of Paste's inter-office email lists were besot by numerous Spam emails with subject lines like "what a stupid face you have there, editor." I could just feel the collective self-esteem of the editorial staff plummet each time that message popped into our inboxes, before swinging back up as we all realized it was sent by a robot. And also that we don't have stupid faces. And also that we aren't eight years old, so even if it was a real person, would "stupid face" really be that sick of a burn, even if any number of us did, indeed, have stupid faces?

And lately the fear-mongering has grown more intense-- and more ridiculous. It started off with vague messages about the 2008 Olympics being canceled, and President Bush being killed, and Barack Obama being caught with his fly down. And while I realized that most of the subject lines were fake, I get a lot of press releases in my inbox, so I opened a few of the messages just in case. Not a single one was real, obviously, and thankfully-- Obama better keep his pants zipped. The body of each one was always some totally unrelated, way-less-scary one-liner, then a link to some computer-destroying website or another.

In the past few days, though, these Spam messages have become pretty hilarious. The subject lines have become even more preposterous, and the brief body messages even more inane and tangential. Here are my five favorite ridiculous Spam emails from the past week, sketchy URLs excluded.