You could have knocked me over with a feather when Jesus Murphy sent an e-mail. Like many of you, I have a nodding acquaintance with Mr. Murphy. How many times, after unexpected turns of events, have we heard people exclaim his name?
“Your crop only went 10 bushels to the acre? Jesus Murphy!”
“Your son’s college tuition cost how much? Jesus Murphy!”
Well, Jesus Murphy turned out to be a pseudonym for yet another e-mail spammer with yet another worthless message about cheap generic drugs. By using names that could, in theory, belong to actual people, the spammers must think there is a greater chance some unsuspecting rube will open the computer message and act upon its offers.
Read Also
Determining tariff compensation will be difficult but necessary
Prime minister Mark Carney says his government will support canola farmers, yet estimating the loss and paying compensation in an equitable fashion will be no easy task, but it can be done.
I can’t help suspecting, however, that the spammers either speak another language or get advice on the name game from someone with a big, fat English dictionary and little knowledge of North American nomenclature. Why? Because some of them have strange yet oddly intriguing names, each with a middle initial to add pretension.
Take, for example, the e-mail from Miscarry M. Phonologist. With a name like that, you’d think the writer would know something about language and its sounds.
I opened the message. Alas, no.
The messages from Estrogen H. Eggs and Kilogram S. Sperm provided pretty strong clues on the nature of the cheap pharmaceuticals on offer, so I didn’t open their messages. Airsickness Q. Midstream suggested some kind of gastro-intestinal concoction, so I passed on that message too.
But then along came an e-mail from Shirts L. Neologism. Yup, good old Shirts. OK, I don’t know anyone named Shirts, but the last name proved irresistible to a person interested in new words or old words with new meanings. After all, these are tools of the trendy journalist.
But when I opened the message, it was the same old drug culture. In so doing, I probably sent an inadvertent message to the spammers that I was one of the aforementioned rubes ripe for a con game.
Sure enough, over the next few days, messages came from my wannabe good friends Gimletting E. Cloistered and Absinthe E. Constipation. After that, I tried to play it cool.
But really, what fiscally responsible computer user could resist Rebuttal T. Taxings? And what lover of a good joke could reject Tie A. Humor? The more I opened, the more I got. Soon, I was deleting messages left and right, from Touchdown H. Fiberglas to Kenneth W. Zacharias.
Whoops! That last guy is the publisher. How do I get that message back?
