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Setting Spam to Music

Junk E-Mail Set to Music,
and More Web Weirdness

By Buck Wolf

May 28  God bless the Internet. Thanks to e-mail, I start each morning with 10 to 20 offers of hot sex from total strangers.

I swear to the Almighty, all my supervisors at the venerable Disney organization — and my dear mother — I wasn't asking for free membership in the nude volleyball league.

I don't know why all these perverted Web sites bombard my e-mail address, assuming that I want kinky cyber pleasure at work. Who do these people think I am? How did they get my name?

Delete, delete, delete. All day long, I'm discarding propositions before breakfast that would keep Larry Flynt retching all the way through lunch.

And when the e-mail lords see that I don't want tawdry sex, they make certain assumptions. A wave of Viagra ads follows offers for hair replacement and plastic surgery discounts. Then comes my daily pitch from a kindly stranger in Nigeria, who offers me $50,000 if only I'll open a $5,000 letter of credit in his name.

If spam — unsolicited e-mail — is getting you down, you have to check out Spamradio.com, a Web site that sets junk e-mail to music. Thanks to computer automation, every day there's a new play list. You might hear a robotic reading of a New Age funeral home's offer set to techno-funk.

Then, sit tight for a rollicking, disco version of that e-mail offer to become a "real, ordained minister in just 48 hours."

And remember that prospective business partner from Nigeria? His dubious deal is also set to music, as is the constant e-mail promise that "you'll never have to touch a toilet seat again."

You can dance your junk e-mail blues away, thanks to two young British computer programmers. "The site is really self-explanatory," said co-founder Ian Morrison, 25. "We just want to let people know what a waste of bandwidth this junk mail can be."

Morrison, who sets up computer networks, says Spamradio.com has an e-mail account that receives all the junk mail that's turned into each day's playlist.

With a revolving resource of 20 songs — some of which he helped to record with a local band — and a computer program that reads e-mail, Spam Radio earned a nomination for a Webby Award, in the Weird Web Site category.

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