Spam emails
Whoever spams me has completely misunderstood me. They seem to think I’m a sleazy, hypochondriac guy with a lot of problems down below. Not only am I cursed with a tiny member, but it’s as reliable as the old A40 Mum used to drive.
Apparently, my friends laugh among themselves at my shrunken and flawed manhood. And my long-suffering wife (I have one of hers as well as her girlfriends) is worried that she won’t be able to get her pregnant.
However, my alter ego’s appetite is insatiable. I’m in the market for a sexy Russian girl who can’t spell but has boobs the size of bowling balls.
When I’m not performing disappointingly in the bedroom, I’m swallowing dubious prescription drugs with only partially familiar-sounding names like Aspromix and Pethadinerole. My other obsession is cheap imitation watches.
While the real me usually deletes these messages without opening them, I just took a look at one, in the interest of journalism.
Apparently, if I buy Viagra from a particular store, I’ll be able to open a bottle of beer with my penis. That could be useful. Finding the bottle opener is always tricky. It gets lost in the tangle of spatulas and serving spoons in the middle drawer.
The ad says that I can even be invited to become a porn star. Well, I guess it would be more lively than cleaning the cat litter box.
Most of the time I delete spam messages on autopilot. Its eye-catching subject headings are quite easy to spot among readers’ precious emails. Often the highlight of my week, emails from readers mean a lot. I try to reply to all of them (except the unspeakably abusive ones).
The other day, while deleting the Viagra ads, I had a horrible sinking feeling. I accidentally deleted an email titled Velcro. It was undoubtedly a reader’s response to a comment I made about Velcro being one of the best inventions of the 20th century.
They were probably scolding me, saying that advances in medicine and science were much more important. They are right, of course. Velcro is not that good. He didn’t even supplant zippers the way people said he would.
When I asked my husband why men still prefer zippers on pants, he told me that Velcro would be too noisy in public restrooms and under other circumstances would be a little off-putting.
However, some inventions have been underestimated for their simple elegance and versatility. Take dental floss, for example. According to that internet bible, Google, was invented by a New Orleans dentist who recommended running a piece of floss between your teeth in the early 1800s.
However, you shouldn’t take too much credit. It wasn’t long before the Taranaki people used their mothers’ sewing cotton to remove bits of mutton embedded between their molars.
Nylon dental floss was created during World War II. Americans use enough each year to go from Earth to the Moon and back four times. I buy almost that amount for our home.
Flossing is great for all sorts of things around here: hanging Christmas decorations and pictures, training grape vines, and occasionally for teeth. I have used it to join broken necklaces and earrings.
Floss is excellent for cutting dough and cheesecake. You can successfully repair tents and backpacks or put umbrella sections back on their spines.
I’m not the only one exploring its potential. In 1994, a Virginia prison inmate used twisted string to scale a wall and escape.
Another seriously underrated item is the plastic clothespin. I have yet to figure out a better way to seal a half-eaten bag of potato chips. Rubber bands are clunky by comparison, and those bits of plastic-coated wire laughingly called “ties” never hold up.
Half the things in our kitchen cabinets and freezer are held together with clothespins, from frozen cereal and peas to rice and a strange brown powder that looks like a maternity ward for moths.
The pegs are essential to hold the music to your music stand when our daughter is busking her violin at Christmas. Some people use them to tie curtains together, squeeze out the last tube of toothpaste, or hold the end of matches so they don’t burn their fingers.
I look forward to hearing from readers about their favorite underrated inventions, and I hope the person whose message was removed will forgive me. It’s very easy these days to confuse Velcro with Viagra.