the hilarity of spam

Gmail does such a good job of filtering crap out of my inbox that I hardly ever notice that there are like, 500 million emails in my junk folder. These used to be just annoying and boring, but as I did my every-so-often sifting through my junk email this evening, I noticed that junk email has gotten quite hilarious. There are some new trends that have taken over the spam world. One is that they often misspell words in order to get past filters that scan for over-use of certain words. [For example, they spell pill "pilule" a lot. I'll give you one reason why that word comes up a lot... no pun intended.]

But the funniest thing I've seen yet is the current trend for the subject and body of the spam email to have nothing to do with one another. Thanks to Gmail, we can see a snippet of the email's body right next to its subject. Let's look at some examples!

The first email starts out preparing us for the grisly tale of tourist being attacked by cannibals, and ends up being even more grisly as it proceeds to show us where to find "Miley Cyrus bad girl pics." Yikes!! But apparently the cannibals weren't satisfied with people and had to eat a dog in the next email... and the spawn of Billy-Ray was behind it again!

The strange juxtapositions continued as I scrolled down, including the Madonna-Ritchie divorce causing pollution in Beijing and news about the cure for AIDS being postponed due to news about Tom-Kat. There finally starts to be some congruity about 13 spam emails down where the subject declares Teddy Roosevelt to be a homosexual and the body of the email quotes the ghost of Richard Nixon as a source. I guess we know how hell punishes corrupt presidents. In the same vein, we're told of a McCain sex tape and then told that McCain proposes gay marriage. I guess we know what genre of tape it was.
The most perplexing of this first set was the last one. There are so many things in that email's subject that I find both disturbing and confusing. The body of the email doesn't even really make it any more confusing than it already is. Though it is reassuring to know that "Spongebob Squarepants is not Shrek's Father!"

Well, this seems interesting: tobacco is being used to treat cancer? Oh wait, before they could write an email about that, they got the news that "lesbians" are now officially different from "lesbos." I was VERY disappointed that the link didn't work in the email about the video of McCain, Bush and a gay Hillary Clinton dancing in a puppet show. Further on, I failed to see the connection in the message that is ostensibly about a reverse Sodom & Gomorrah, but is actually about the number of George W. Bush's MySpace friends. Also, I fail to see the connections between horses & violence, iPhones & sodomy, and bus crashes & cellphone batteries.
In another brief flash of continuity, we see a commentary on the worth of Picasso's work, as it's juxtaposed with a headline of a cat gouging a man's eyes out.
In addition to these the fairly dirty ones are always really funny.

[Btw, if you click on that link on the line above, like I know you will, I've written funny captions for it which you can see at the link.]