Mytholgical Viagra?

Every morning I go through my junk mail and sort through the messages promoting cheerleader sexuality, low interest rates, herbal Viagra, and the Democratic Party, just to see if there’s anything from a new business contact or a prospective client. There’s usually four to five hundred junk messages and I typically find one or two real ones that got filtered out by accident, so it’s not a complete waste of time.

I don’t read every one, of course. I just scan the addresses and subject lines.

For months I’ve been wondering about the names that show up, how they bear a strange resemblance to people I know or work with. I’ve been wondering if there’s some kind of program out there that lets spammers pull last names and first names from your mailbox and jumbles them into a FROM: address that you look vaguely recognize and click on. Although, I realize that’s just technological paranoia.

As is my vague feeling that someone, somewhere has a complex algorithm designed to generate names that use commonly-recognized elements to generate FROM: addresses that cause 90% of users to say “Hey, I went to high school with that guy…” and click on it.

Not all of this is paranoia. There’s obviously something out there that lets spammers generate random two-word combinations to use as subject lines. I’ve been seeing a lot more of these lately and when your read them in a sequence they’re like some kind of strange, post-apocalyptic poetry: “Errant release dogmatic besotted kindred chide dosage withheld unless illumine…” It’s like reading Tom Stoppard backwards.

This morning I fell for it, I fell for a subject line that read “eurydice awakens” — I suppose I was thinking that there was someone out there who was interested in something I’d written.

Nope . . . just a male enhancement device that’s apparently “guaranteed to make her howl” (which, honestly, doesn’t sound that good for anyone involved).

Although ‘Eurydice Awakens’ seems to be a great product name, particularly for some kind of herbal Viagra for people with Liberal Arts degrees: A natural extract gathered from the grassy slopes of Mount Olympus by nubile Grecian virgins, guaranteed to put the spark back into any god’s thunderbolt…

Somewhere, there’s an impotent Classics professor saying “Yeah baby, you can mount my Olympus anytime.”