My penis is fine, thank you very much...

Marney Wallace, and about a thousand other people, send me email every day offering to sell me “Generic Viagra.” They are sneaky, these penis hardening charlatans: often their email to me has a subject line of something alluring like “Did you lose your keys?” or “Long time, no see!” The rest of the time they are less subtle: “Harden up!” or “Pleasure her with your manliness.”

The traditional response to this sort of assault is to complain about the scourge of email spam, and to suggest filters, blockers, or other tools to stop Marney and her peers in their tracks, or at least to divert their messages into a virtual burn pile.

But it’s not working. I’ve got three levels of email filtering installed now, and the penis messages still get through. Proving that, as with alcohol prohibition and grey market satellite encryption, determined disreputes will always find a way over the fence.

So perhaps it’s to to change tactics, to realize that there’s a determined group of marginal entrepreneurs out there who have enough energy to pound, pound, pound at me until my penis is deflated enough to need their products.

Can’t we harness this energy for good? Give these people an income without requiring they assault us with their spam? Obviously some of these people are simply criminal or neo-criminal con-people; but surely the majority can be controlled by some sort of integrated pest management system that converts pesky bugs into useful tools?

Just a thought.