The Number of the Spam Beast

Every once in a while we’ll check the “Caught Spam” section of the blog to delete all the junk messages and allow any non-spam that was accidentaly blocked. I just checked it to discover:

Akismet has caught 666 spam for you since you first installed it.

Whoa, dude, that’s like totally ev-il!

Around the office, whenever an editor checks a word count and gets “666″ or a designer choses a random brush size in Photoshop and it comes out to “666,” it gets announced and everyone seems suitably impressed. I realize this is hopelessly nerdy and a pretty good indication of us being total horror geeks. I wonder if porno mag employees make a point of letting co-workers know when “69″ comes up when sizing a photo, or if the staff at High Times snickers when a word count totals “420.” If I worked at a math magazine, I’d sure as shit get excited if a word count equalled pi. Man, that would be rare.

Also, 666 is a crapload of spam for a blog that’s a couple months old; at least it seems that way. Where on Earth are there people actually buying medication, particularly something as, er, sensitive as Viagra, through a spam ad? It’s not like it’s 1997; how can this still be profitable? I imagine the buyers are buck-toothed mouth breathers, sitting in front of their computers with fake Viagra hard-ons, wondering when their millions are going to arrive from that deposed Nigerian prince.

To quote Diamond Head: “Am I evil? Yes, I am / Am I evil? I am spam“