WordPress, which publishes our humble blog, provides a program that detects “spam” comments and segregates them from apparently legitimate comments. Every once in a while you need to go into the spam folder and clean it out. That is one of my jobs.
Most spam is self-evidently spammy. The less inventive spam will just give a reference to a sex website. Other times the would-be spammer tries to write something sufficiently generic that you conceivably might think it was written about your posting — if you were desperate enough for comments. Here’s an example: “Thanks a lot for sharing this with all people you really understand what you’re speaking about! Bookmarked. Kindly additionally talk over with my site =). We will have a link change contract among us.” Huh? Like this example, most spam probably was originally written in Croatian and then translated, badly, into English. The words are familiar, but the sentences may as well have been written by chimps randomly stringing words together.
I always think of the classic Monty Python spam song as I am doing my spam deletions:
My grandmother told me, however, that I should always look on the bright side. I’ve tried to do that about the current sad state of the American economy, and have come up with the following possible silver linings:
The overreaction to the 2010 election is similar. We have some 
Remember Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? He was the publicity-hungry knight who desperately wanted to join in the search for the Grail. He left on his quest accompanied by a minstrel and a cadre of musicians who sang constantly about his adventures. And yet, when the going got tough and the giant three-headed knight awaited, Brave Sir Robin made no attempt to fight. As his minstrel sang:
This scenario has become all too common. Has anyone else been troubled by the fact that dinners at too many American restaurants consist of large platters groaning with impossible amounts of food? We aren’t all contestants in competitive eating contests, or NFL linemen chowing down after a hard-fought game. Those of us who were raised to be members of the “clean plate club” when we were growing up face an impossible predicament when confronted with such dinners. Either we clean our plate and depart waddling and uncomfortably glutted, or we leave a significant amount of food on the plate and have to deal with the voice of the inner Mom, reminding us of starving children in Asia, for the rest of the evening.
