The other day Devon was looking over my shoulder at my email and saw an email with a subject line that was made of Chinese ideograms. He exclaimed: “That’s so cool!”

I sighed and said, that’s spam, Dev.

Devon said: “I don’t care, that’s so cool! I want Chinese spam!”

I said to him, “uh… no you don’t. Spam is spam, no matter how cool looking the subject lines are.”

He was adamant, “yes I do! I don’t get any emails with cool characters!”

I explained that my email address (not the gmail one) is old, and has been harvested over and over again all over the web, for a long time, and so everyone spams me. Every scammer in the world wants to solicit me for viagra and Nigerian spams and all the various crud of the internet. I then told him that I get spam in other languages too. Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and even Hindi. Everyone wants to, and does, send me spam.

Exhibit A:

I showed him the spam. He was still envious, not considering that continuously having to train one’s spam filters is not “cool.” To him, my multilingual spam has cachet.

I respect his point of view. When I was his age I thought that Japanese things were cooler than any other things on the planet. Other cultures inform and inspire and even get integrated into our own in some ways. Appreciating other cultures is a way to see the world beyond our own provincial existence.

I still wish I got less spam though.