Sak

The News, Spam, and Beer

01.18.10 13:45
Section: Sak
Filed Under: Copyright - Sak, Observations

I’ve often boggled over how my friends were able to sit through an hour news cast and exercise what I saw as unnatural rigor at the disconcerting details of current events. Me, I’d get all pissed off and storm off after a taste. I figured if a taste was good enough, and I disliked that flavor, I’ll just leave the remainder of the plate and get on with my life, searching for more savory experiences. God-damned hedonist that I am.

Understanding and tolerance of the News is something that is apparently an acquired taste in those whose grasp of it I can’t help but respect. It’s a taste for the mad, the insane, the bubbling blood tingle and buzz that rises up from the experience. Maybe kinda like beer. I love how beer tastes, but I understand that there are those out there who are simply unable to tolerate it. I feel for them. Just as those close friends of mine who, after watching me storm out of the room after suffering 30 seconds of a news cast, felt sadness for my inability to chug it down and get the buzz. And so, years later I have finally come to an understanding that my mind stumbled upon merely by accident.

It’s a lesson from an ancient—in Internet terms—article discussing methods for dealing with spam email that I once read. I mean, we’re talking 1990’s Internet here, kids, back when spam filtering was a rough idea, a shoddy text file that email administrators had to actually go looking for, that wasn’t ever updated quickly enough to really be useful. Back then, there was this tiresome technique of reading the detailed header information of the spam message, and tracking down the servers from which it generated. One would trace the route of the message up-stream to the hosting provider whence it came, and send a nasty message to the mail server administrator in the hopes that they’d quash the offending account holder. It was an arduous process, and it required a bit of extra knowledge regarding the construction of email messages, the standard contact addresses that server administrators used, and mostly, staying pissed off enough to follow through to finally send a message to the originating server’s admin. For each spam email received, it turned into a lot of mad and a lot of work. Fat lot of good all that did, though in the end it ultimately produced spam blacklists and the filtering methods in use today.

There it was, staying mad.

All of this suddenly hit me the other day, while watching an interview with John Yoo, and then sitting down and browsing over the headers in a particularly interesting bit of spam that I received. I was still surging from the sensations garnered from the interview, that receiving an email from myself telling myself to go to a particular website to update my own email account by providing it with my password information was entertaining to me as much as it was frustrating. You can see how it makes no sense, much like the news does to me. Yet, there it is, and as much as I disagree with it, or am frustrated by having to sift through that crap to get at the really important messages, someone out there thinks it’s a good idea and will continue to go out of their way to generate those messages for me to delete.

The news is supposed to be objective, but no matter who’s watching it, there will be different tastes of like or dislike from different people. Some subtle, some a little more pronounced. This is just as true with those disseminating the news as those who are taking it in. The concept of truth, in news reporting, becomes something that is, eh, close enough for government work since it obviously works well enough in tossing horseshoes and hand grenades—the local horseshoe contest and the war in Afghanistan being covered on tonight’s evening news. It evolves into a strange animal with bias, not because it wants to, but because it has no other way to exist. I mean, you’ve got to stay mad enough about some issue to track down the rest of the story instead of the mere tidbits that are offered on the news, not knowing how bent those little bits are; something like working up-stream. So in the same way as trying to get to the good email messages by shuffling through the bad ones, and yet wanting to stay mad enough to try and rid oneself permanently of those bad ones, the technique becomes a matter of acquiring a taste for beer.

Not that that’s exactly a healthy lifestyle, but I guess it all depends on how much you’re addicted to beer, or the news, or being mad.

Sitting and enjoying the buzz is one thing, and certainly not to be discounted. But what matters is what you do with it. Develop a better anti-spam filter, enact some social or political change, brew better beer?

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