Out of the mouths of babes

Few people are aware of my work with Jesse’s House, a charitable organization that offers food… Few people are aware of my work with Jesse’s House, a charitable organization that offers food and shelter to lonely models between the ages of 18 and 24.

I’m bringing it up not to fish for acclaim, or to fill in the last few blanks on my application for sainthood. No, I donate my time because I care about models, and, to a greater extent, supermodels. And right now, these models are scared.

Let me tell you a story. The other night I was sitting in my hot tub with a pair of blonde Ukrainians named Anka and Nanka. We were cavorting, lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills and laughing our beautiful, sexy laughs.

A scowl creased Anka’s brow, and suddenly she grew serious. She put down her martini and picked up the newest issue of Information Week. She looked at me with her big Ukrainian eyes and said in a whisper, “Jesse, please. Explain to us this ‘spam.’ Focus your laser sharp insight on the topic and explain to us why it is so awful and whether the world can be saved from its scourge.”

Out of the mouths of babes.

It was then that I realized spam, which I’d dismissed as a trivial inconvenience, was an important topic of debate, and surely of interest to the one guy who reads my column every week.

According to San Francisco’s Brightmail, spam accounts for 38 percent of all e-mail traffic. That means more than a third of the 31 billion e-mail messages sent every day are unsolicited bulk e-mails – divided equally among promotions for penis enlargement techniques, all-natural herbal remedies, and ready-made term papers, I’d imagine. That’s a lot of penis pumps. And a lot of term papers.

There’s no escaping this avalanche of spam. Wherever you go, it is there, waiting for you to check your e-mail. At the coffee shop. At the sock hop. In your bedroom. It is there.

Not even the government can save us. Currently, 26 states have legislation regulating electronic junk mail – 27, if you count the European Union. Such legislation is practically unenforceable, requiring end users or Internet Service Providers to jump through hoops for paltry monetary judgments, assuming they can even find the often-anonymous spam-meisters.

I don’t even want their money. What I want can’t ever be returned to me: no one can legislate that these spammers fix my broken heart.

In earlier, more innocent times, before everything changed, I looked forward to checking my e-mail. I loved the thrill of receiving short messages from people I see every day, humorous anecdotes about Bill Clinton’s moral fallibility and recipes for dishes I would never cook but enjoyed reading about.

I was so naive then. Maybe we all were.

When I opened my inbox and found a message titled, “Someone has a crush on you!” I screamed like a little girl. “Someone has a crush on meeeeeeeeee?!” I began to hyperventilate.

When I came to, I reflected on how far we’d come since I was a child – a dark, gray time when a girl who had a crush on a boy would use a purple pen to create a complicated “Do you like me?” matrix. The boy would then circle “yes,” “no” or “maybe” and slip the note in her locker. Now, unlike my junior year of college, it’s all done with points and clicks.

The only catch was that the crush was secret. I had to visit a Web site and enter the e-mail addresses of everyone I had a crush on. Those people would all receive e-mails from their secret admirer. If they submitted my name and address, the Web site would connect us, at which point we would fall instantly in love and have fashionable babies. Or so I believed.

Twenty hours and 1,300 names later, I realized I’d been had. There was no “crush.” I’d named names and gotten nothing but sore wrists.

That day I vowed I’d never let this happen to another young innocent.

It’s time to end this. Sure, the Internet lived up to the utopian vision of becoming the world’s largest library of pornography. But that vision has become corrupted, and people are getting hurt.

Al Gore, pull the plug on the Internet. Then maybe we can get back to starting this war I keep hearing so much about.

Jesse Hicks would like to thank Ms. Engel for inspiring him to “sex up” his column, and to quit “boring” people with his “ideas.” Send your spam to jhicks@pittnews.com.