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There was a fax waiting for me when I got to the office this morning from Right 2 Vote Ltd., supposedly “the North American people’s polling company”. It asked, with a big box for Yes and a big box for No, if the words “under God” should be removed from the pledge of allegiance. What you do, they said, is check one of these boxes and then fax your vote back to them at one of two 1-900 numbers:

Calls to these numbers cost $2.95 per minute, a small price to pay for democracy. Calls take approx 2 mins. in standard mode. Your views are important. We make sure the decision makers are hearing them! Your votes will be presented to The Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Riiiiggggghhhhttt… Is there anything people won’t use to try to make money?

Looking through my e-mail, I notice one or two things. A lot of it is from people I don’t know trying to sell me things I don’t want. If I were half as clever as Kevin Guilfoile, I might try turning this e-mail into poetry, but I am not. I also notice that most viruses are so obviously viruses that I almost never need Norton to tell me I should delete something. “Oh wow! Something called ‘Mind Aerobics’ from someone I don’t know and it’s nothing but an .scr attachement?! How could this be anything but good?!” Messages like this are so transparently stupid, that it’s amazing anyone gets computer viruses via e-mail. Not that everyone who gets a computer virus is stupid, of course, but, geez. An executable file from someone you’ve never heard of with really bad grammar ought to set off some kind of alarm, don’t you think?

Lately, I’ve been trying out MailWasher, which allows you the opportunity to bounce messages directly back to the spammer, with the idea that they’ll assume your address doesn’t work and eventually remove you from their list. It doesn’t always work — I’ve had to manually unsubscribe from all the About.com mailing lists someone thought it would be fun to sign me up for — but if nothing else it makes the process of deleting spam much quicker and keeps mail like “Free XXX Webcams” out of my In Box.

But I think what I notice most about my e-mail is that I don’t get enough from people I want to hear from. That just doesn’t seem right.

“I know you miss the Wainwrights, Bobby, but they were weak and stupid people — and that’s why we have wolves and other large predators.” — today’s cartoon on my Far Side calendar

I debated scanning the image (a little boy and his father at a fence, watching wolves run through the house next door), but then I came across this letter from Gary Larson.

Oh dear god, no:

Independence Day producer Dean Devlin told SCI FI Wire that he and partner Roland Emmerich came up with the storyline for a sequel in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. “Since September 11th, [director Emmerich] and I did a lot of reflecting on the movie,” Devlin said in an interview while promoting his latest film, Eight Legged Freaks. “It started because people were asking us about images that were fantasy images that then looked so frightening real in the [wake of] horrible events that took place.”

Found at Science Fiction Weekly. Personally, I’ve gone out of my way not to see Independence Day a second time, since it…well, since it sucked. I’ll admit, I enjoyed it at the time, but the minute I started thinking about it…whoo boy. Someone once said that, as a moviegoer, he really did enjoy the film immensely but that, as a fan of intelligent science fiction and story and writing, he wanted to burn every minute of the film to the ground. I thought that someone was J. Michael Straczynski, but, despite quite a bit of effort, I haven’t been able to find that quote anywhere.

If you can’t find something on the internet, does that mean it doesn’t really exist?