"Via gra or Cia-1is for 10¢ a pill. No prescription necessary!!" (Note the creative spelling, geared to slip past attempts to block e-mail containing particular words.)

Through regular channels, getting this stuff would require a consultation with a doctor, and a prescription, and it would run about $10 a pop from my local pharmacy. Even if I needed it (praise God!), I'd be a little dubious of this kind of a deal. I'd a whole lot sooner eat something I picked up off the parking strip. At least I'd have some idea of what it actually is.

My wife and I paid off the mortgage on our old place years ago. In our new place, where we've lived for six years now, we got a short term (couple of weeks) loan, paid for the new place by check, sold our old abode and paid off the bank, also by check (one payment). We have no mortgage. Our car (1999 Toyota Corona, bought new, has about 15,000 miles on it so far) is paid off. We pay off our credit card (only one) every month. In short, we are debt-free. Nevertheless, every day in our e-mail, we get eight or ten offers to refinance our mortgage or give us loans to pay off our credit card debt or our car loan, or in general, to dig ourselves a very deep hole. Sometimes we get four or five of these per day from the same outfit.

And then, of course, there are the offers of real cheap ersatz Rolex watches. What the hell is it with Rolex watches? I have a Casio digital/analog watch with features such as dual-time, stop watch, timer, calendar, five alarms, and top-of-the-hour "beep-beep" that I paid something like $45.00 for about ten years ago. Having once been a newscaster for a network affiliate radio station, I'm in the habit of keeping it right on the second. I check it with Greenwich mean time in the internet every week and note that it gains about a second a week. Since I'm no longer in broadcasting, that's good enough for me. I don't need no stinkin' Rolex! Yet I get about three or four spams a day trying to peddle me a Timex tricked up to look like a Rolex, more often than not from the same source.

I have Earthlink's "spamblocker." They send you all of this stuff, but in three separate batches:   if it's something you have in your address book, it goes directly into your inbox. Then a separate dump labeled "Known Spam," which you can scan quickly for something you might actually want, and "Suspected Spam," which you might want to check a bit more closely. It could contain a newsletter or an ad from Amazon or something like that that you might actually want to look at. Spamblocker is neat. It takes me about a minute and a half to transfer a couple of things to my inbox and then, with a mouse-click, blow the rest out into the ether.

We never—ever—give our credit card number out over the phone unless we initiated the call. Same with buying something off the internet, and then, only from well-known sources (e.g., Amazon, Elderly Instruments).

In snail mail, we average about three credit cards a week. The plastic card gets minced up with a pair of tin-snips and anything else with our names on it goes into the shredder. Same with a whole bunch of other stuff.

Don Firth