The MySpace Ho-Train.

I have an admission to make. I am a member of MySpace.

No, Mr. Chris Hanson of Dateline NBC, I am not a member so I could cruise for underage girls. Most of my friends live out of state, and MySpace is an excellent way for me to keep in contact with them.

However, over the last few days, MySpace has been pissing me off.

Over the last 24 hours, I have been getting repeated requests from hoochies trying to sign me up as my friend. And through some strange and wonderful coincidence, even though each request came through a different name, all of the sites looked exactly the same-same light blue background, same plastic bint wearing a cowboy hat, same inane "about me' section.

This is all part of what a friend of mine calls "The MySpace Ho-Train". Porn site operators create a program where they go through MySpace and carpet bomb it's members with what are essentially ads for the porn sites.

Sure, they kinda look like actual profiles. But each of them has a link which takes you to a site that features pictures that are too racy for MySpace. In other words, a porn site.

This annoys me to no end. For a wide variety of reasons.

If I wanted porn, I'd go to newsstand, plop down $6-10 dollars and buy a magazine. Because it would be cheaper and as far as I know, no issue of Hustler has ever stolen anyone's credit card information or put a virus on anyone's computer. 

I am insulted by the stupidity of these scammers. I'm sure there are people who do not have enough common sense that if they get 20 friend requests from 20 different people all with the same profile that it is a sign of something fishy. But these people are usually institutionalized and have limited or any exposure to computers. I mean really, spammers! Use some originality. Or at least change up each profile just a little bit.

What this means is that I constantly have to do maintenence to not only my  MySpace Friend Request folder but also my junk e-mail folder, which is where the MySpace friend requests go. And yes, I do mark all the requests a spam (Thank god MySpace made that an option)

And what kills me is that I have to look up each and every friend request, even though I know that they are porn. I'm sure there are a cynical few of you out there that think I look them up BECAUSE I know that they are porn. Please. That couldn't be further from the truth. I just don't want to take the chance that an old school friend or someone I knew from work or someone who has read something I've written is legitimately trying to be my friend and I insult them by rejecting them outright.

This brings up the fact that sometimes, while still being annoying, these spam friend requests can be funny. Yesterday, before the string of 20 all the same, I got one from a girl named Jen. Now, I must know about 5 or 6 Jen's, including my wife. And the photo is shot in such a way (black and white, with their head down and wearing sunglasses) that this request could quite possibly one of the Jens I know.

So I open the profile and read the about me. It starts off badly.

"Hi, I'm Lisa..."

Wh..wh...wh...what? Her name was Jen. It says so at the top of the profile.

But there is an explanation...

"I am totally clueless about computers," she explains. "I probably have the wrong photo up there. My real pictures are down below with a link that will take you to even more or my private photos"

So, let me get this straight. This bint is so clueless about computers that she screws up so bad in creating the profile that she LIST THE WRONG NAME AND A PICTURE OF A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WOMAN but gets her shit together enough to POST 5 OTHER "REAL" PICTURES, A VIDEO CLIP AND A LINK TO ANOTHER WEBSITE IN HER "ABOUT ME SECTION!?! Really? Does anyone fall for this?

Another classic I got was another spam e-mail that is making the rounds. It went something like this (actually, exactly like this, I posted it to my MySpace blog when I got it:

"i am not into this freinds trying to find dates for freinds but this colleague of mine was looking at your profile and might have a crush on you. we are trying to find her a good partner, everyone in our group has someone. u seem like a cute good hearted person,we voted 3-1 for u, here look at our freind and see if u are interested, Here is the link"

Let me air my greivances with this:

1. The misspelled "friend", or a variation thereof, not once, not twice, but three times. Why would I want to hook up with a woman whose friends...oh...sorry..."colleagues", were bad spellers? And did you know that "friend" was the word that always screwed me up during the Friday spelling bees when I was in 2nd Grade? Is that why you misspelled the word, you bastards!

2. Since we're on grammar, the "i" should be capitalized. And write out you. Really, it's only two more letters.

2. Oh, my life would have been so much better if other women besides my wife developed crushes on me.

3. And I, and this is not poor self image, am not what you call cute.

4. I won 3 to 1 in the little vote off amongst your friends, hmm? Why wasn't it unanimous, hmmm? Could that one friend voted against me because, oh, I don't know, BECAUSE I'M MARRIED!?! AND IT SAYS AS MUCH ON MY PROFILE? RIGHT THERE UNDER "STATUS"? Yeah, friends don't set up friends with married men. Haven't you ever heard that?

I know this was probably what the Portuguese computer programmer (or whatever country the shipped the computer programming out to) typed into the computer that sent the messages out and it was sent out blindly to married and inmarried people. But I just have to laugh. If they are trying to con me by "personalizing" the spam MySpace messages hoping that I would be naive enough to think they are real but by "personalizing" them they tipped their hand that they were in fact spam. They were crafty, but not smart.