When I first started using the internet, I still thought spam was a tasty meat treat that everyone loved. As far back as I can remember, my mother dished up spam for my sisters and me on a regular basis and we inhaled it. It was sirloin to us. As I grew older, when asked what my mom cooked for us as a child back in the Dark Ages, for a while, I always mentioned Spam, along with fried chicken, liver and onions, city chicken (veal on a stick), toasted cheese sandwiches, every flavor of Campbells soup, Swanson’s pot pies, fish sticks, etc.
Younger friends now sometimes ask the same question, but not very often because they usually couldn’t give a shit. When I hesitantly tell them, they either turn away to laugh, gag or look at me with confusion written all over their cherubic faces, and say, “What’s Spam? I thought it was something you didn’t want on the internet. And liver and onions? That’s like eating brains and gall bladders.” They’d gag again.
Now, years later and much, much wiser, I only mention spam as unwanted ads for beautiful Russian babes in my area (did I say unwanted?) or ads for toasters that talk to you. And keep in mind, I’m savvy as Hell at 78. Well, on this blog, I am now getting lots of comments on posts that I don’t want. All the unwanted comments are in Russian and are re-sent, as best I can tell, every day. In the early days of this blog, I was getting lots of comments from international beauty shops and products that came mainly from people with Italian names, and in bad English. Almost always, they had nothing to do with the subject of the post. They were short, but the Russian ones are long. For all I know the Italian beauticians were replaced by talkative Russians.
When I tell people about this, if they are millennials, they always say, “Yeah, you’ve been hacked.” I looked up “hack” because I knew it wasn’t in reference to what happened to the cherry tree in George Washington’s back yard.
So, I notified the WordPress (blog gurus) authorities this morning and got a live person from what sounded like Ukraine, and they told me that the only choice I had was to block all comments or provide them a list of key Russian words that would signal an unwanted comment. Since I don’t know Russian and didn’t want to spend my final days trying to learn it, I took the drastic option: block all comments. So, if you wish to comment on a post, you are going to have to email it to me at dgreegor@gmail.com.
My old neighbor buddy comes out of his house every day and says, “Getting old sucks.”
Granted, he has reason to say that. He has had at least 252 knee replacements, 192 hip replacements, a 1 in. thick cast iron rod in his backbone running from his head into his tail. Sadly, he walks like he didn’t quite make it to the john.
I respond, “Yeah, right on, Willard. But also, spam sucks as bad.”
“What?”, sez Willard. “I use ta love that stuff when I was a kid.”