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.