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From the Editor's Desk
While visiting my parents briefly this weekend, the phone rang about eight times over the course of 24 hours with recorded messages from different candidates. One particularly nasty battle was responsible for about six of those calls I believe. I'm not entirely sure of that last figure, because I hung up the phone within about 4 seconds. Isn't it convenient that these recorded messages don't have to abide by the do not call list. Politicians wrote the law, of course. I would love to see an amendment to that law, that if a campaign is going to call your house, it should be a real live person. Better yet, it should be the candidate him or herself. Okay, the last one is wishful thinking. But those recorded phone ads have to go. They're terrible. I can't imagine anyone actually listens to them in the first place. The only thing I can think of is that they must be really cheap to run. How else can you explain them? Surely those things aren't effective. If anything, it would turn me off to a candidate running one of those operations. Those recorded campaign calls are really no better than the spam you get in your email inbox everyday. Speaking of email spam. I bet we get 100s of spam messages every day here at the paper. Want a hot tip on a stock? I get five a day. Want to help someone get millions of dollars out of Nigeria? I get plenty of offers to strike it rich with new Nigerian friends I've never met. If you need to grow hair and lose weight the easy way. Well, my friend, you're in luck. There must be thousands of people who've found a cure for you. And they're all waiting out there in cyberspace to help you. For a small fee of course. Have too much hair in all the wrong places? Actually, I don't think I've seen an offer dealing with that yet. But wait a while, I'm sure someone's working on it. And of course, the subject lines for these spam messages make no sense at all. I'm sure they are done to get by the filters we all have on our email programs now, but seriously, are you really going to take a hard look at an email with a nonsensical subject line? Of course, it nearly got the better of me the other day. I was busily deleting emails from my inbox when I nearly deleted a legitimate email. The subject line was just one word with a question mark. Looked like all the other spams I get, but this one was real. In addition to the stock offers and magic pills, we also get "news releases" from just about every agency, organization, group and affiliation you can think of. They're all promoting the great things they do, of course, but very few have much at all to do with our little corner of the world. For the life of me, I don't know how I got on some of these lists. But, the news biz being what it is, you never know when one of those groups might do or say something that pertains to our coverage area, so we look at them. Because if the Vegetarians for World Peace ever plan to hold a rally in Thomasville, I want to know about it.
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