ED Drugs

Spammers really go to great lenghts to try to squirrel past ISP filters, don’t they?  AOL (my ISP) lets you open e-mails but will disable links on all mail, and disables photos on unknown senders.  You have to actually enable them to view them.  I like the layer of protection.  This past week I got two e-mails that I didn’t recognize but felt the need to open, just in case they were personal e-mails meant for me.  The first one was from a sender in Austria.  The name roughly translated Evangelical Alliance of Innsbruck.  And the subject line read:  Progress.  It wouldn’t be unlikely that this would be for me.  So I opened it.  This was the body of the e-mail!

There was a lack of communication with a notoriously difficult neighorhood association.
When it hits, I’m knitting all the time, starting and finishing projects with passion and single-minded focus. and I want one so so badly in my neighborhood! The sooner we raise the money, the sooner we open.
I knit while watching TV, I knit while breastfeeding, I knit while waiting for meals, I knit at traffic lights when I’m driving. and I want one so so badly in my neighborhood!
an exercise in the experience of sitting here.
The same can be said for my teething birds; they’re useful, they’re perfectly-shaped, they’re elegant in this amazing way, even when stuffed inside Truman’s mouth. He’d never been consulted, you see, on the previous bad press. No one had interviewed him before painting him as the villain. We didn’t, really, talk.
I predicted today that, in five years, consumers will begin to re-embrace film and that digital cameras will level off in popularity.
The car keys would have to be given up for the entire month of July.
It’s entirely manual and requires an adaptor to work with my newer-model, everything’s-automatic camera. She had one lying, unused, in a neighbor’s garage.
You just can’t do that kind of thing in a car. There’s the brilliant red shawl, using some of this gorgeous candy-cane yarn and lots of leftover “reds” noro silk garden.
My nanny co-share buddy, Patty, had recently gone to work for Flexcar and was administering a “Low Car Diet” program.
The whole errand took about an hour and a half, likely the same time it would have took in the car, and my body has never felt so fit. Right there, next to me, was an interesting-looking headline on the Portland Tribune. We didn’t, really, talk. You realize we’re going to change the world, right?

And this was the picture that was buried within the text!

(ED Drugs, originally uploaded by Blah Blah Blog)

The second e-mail’s subject line read:  Hi!  This is from John.  So of course I’d open that!  It was from JOHN!  But it wasn’t from my friend John, it was from the same folks at the Evangelical Alliance, and it was the same weird sort of note with the same ad for drugs for erectile dysfunction!   Since the information was sent in photo format, it couldn’t be scanned for keywords like “Viagra, Cialis, Levitra”, etc., so it would sail past any filters!  Brilliant.  Notice how the the reader is instructed not to click on the link to RXNN.ORG as it’s just a photo of the link! 

If people really wanted these ads spamming their e-mail boxes, wouldn’t they turn their spam filters off, or scream at their ISP to stop the supresssion of the freedom of speech?  What makes these spammers think we’re sitting here just waiting for someone, anyone, to get clever enough to make it past all the filters so that they can finally get their underground message through to the ignorant masses?!   I wonder if anyone actually buys medications this way….