Spam

A few baseball seasons ago, a group of friends and I had a fantasy baseball league on Sandbox.com. There was something screwy with my original account when I went to join the league, so I set up a quick second account. Bill had just written a story with a character named Television Set, and I liked the name very much. I appropriated it. The name the sandlot account was under was: Television Set Velazquez.

Sandbox was pretty good about selling their members' e-mails to spammers. And by "pretty good," I mean they were adept and quite practiced at it.

This has been three years or so since.

For a long time, I would get a lot of e-mails for Mr. Velazquez. Most of those now go directly into the junk folder, which I have to empty sometimes twice a day for all the spam I get. If I let it go for a couple of days, and I go to check it, I'll have a nasty message from Yahoo about my account being 121% of capacity, or somesuch nonsense.

Occasionally, one would get through the filter and Television Set would poke his head into my life once more.

Today was one of those days, and by God it made me laugh.

I'd forgotten that I listed Television Set's street address as something special, and was reminded of it when I read the subject line of the spam in my inbox today:

Get a New Lower Mortgage Rate on your Home at Bullshit Lane, Television Set.

If I remember, his complete address:

Television Set Velazquez
123 Bullshit Lane
Charley FU 77777

Over at Musings of a Philosophical Scrivener, we see that Len's been getting some interesting e-mail names too. I brought up Honorific J. Murray, who's a personal favorite sender of mine.