In January, I did a series of posts on discrimination against fat people in the workplace. The first post Fat Chance provided a general overview of the situation. The second post, Kicking Butt was about an Ohio Company that fired employees for smoking and I mused that firing fat employees might not be so far behind. The third post was a follow-up to Kicking Butt, I called it Big Butts Need Not Apply.
Ever since that post, traffic to my blog has grown exponentially. That is the Upside of Big Butts. It's a very popular search on Google. Realizing that visitors were probably hoping to find a more photogenic website, I still was grateful for the increased traffic and thought it might be fun to continue having headlines that may have a double entendre.
In fact, I was fairly confident that my post You can call me Dick might attract the Big Butt crowd. It hasn't. My friend Harold says if I had called it Big Dick then I would seen increased traffic.
However, there is a real Downside to Big Butts. It has opened my email to porno spammers. Every hour on the hour, I hit the organize function on Outlook to banish them forever, but they keep coming, so to speak. This morning I have billets doux from Proscribed S. Sherry, Soundtrack.A. Kin, Ghent.P.Gaped and Subversion L. Contravene--just to name a few.
However, I must be bucking a trend, because according to a study just released by the Pew Institute indicates that while spam is alive and well, porn spam is on the decline. In an article in the Inquirer, Nick Farrell writes that porn scam has been replaced by "phishing" scams which try to get access to your bank accounts.
On Internet News Tim Gray shares that people trust email less but seem to have accepted that spam is just part of the deal.
Americans polled in the survey said they are coming to terms with spam much the way they have with death and taxes -- you just can't avoid it. You might say numb-to-spam is the new coping tool.
"We see a little more spam with a little less distress since Congress tried to stem the flow of unsolicited email with the CAN-SPAM Act in January 2004," Deborah Fallows, Senior Research Fellow at the Pew Internet Project, said. "Maybe people are getting used to spam, or becoming resigned to it, just like air pollution and crowded roads."
On a brighter note, it was also announced yesterday that a spammer is going to jail which is a good thing because since I started writing this entry I have new messages from Surmountable. Q. Mercado, Contusion V. Regains and Pele Q. Gibbush.
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