About the Spam-O-Matic

The Spam-O-Matic was once America's finest e-mail source of my writing, and is now America's finest Web repository of my writing. Its goal is to provide you, its readers, with a truly excellent place to waste your time when you should be writing a report, socializing with your co-workers by the coffee machine, or cleaning that weird stain off your kitchen floor. Certainly the writing on this site has diverted me from all three of those activities at various points.

Like the e-mail list that preceded it, I hope the Spam-O-Matic website will elicit interaction: comments, questions, corrections, calumnies, and whatever else fits into that "Compose Message" box. This is why there is a "Contact" link on every single non-splash page of this website. Please use that link liberally. I must warn you, however, that I don't actually think you have access to millions of dollars in Nigeria, I don't look at porn that I find in my inbox, and I am satisfied enough with the current size of my penis that I don't want to pay any money to increase it. At least in this economy.

The Spam-O-Matic came into being in the fall of 1997, after I quit college. I was searching for a project to occupy my newly copious spare time, preferably something creative, since I felt that making up stories and using intricate, energetic language would make a felicitous counterpoint to my then-burgeoning data entry career. Eventually, I decided to write a parody of the dumb action movies I so enjoyed. To do this, of course, I would need to attend as many dumb action movies as I could; moreover, I needed to extract the salient features of both their dumbness and their enjoyability so I could reassemble those features into a parodic masterwork. That was the idea. So far this parodic masterwork (tentatively titled "Walther Lamm: Ass Demolisher") exists as isolated scenes and an extremely vague plot outline. But I decided to write up my analyses of the films, and this practice ended up taking way more of my time than the parody ever did.

The analyses began as long rants about movies in e-mails to friends and grew into more systematic area-by-area inventories of the features of the movies I saw. Eventually I started sending them to a lot of people I knew; most of my friends were off at college and personal missives I sent often went unanswered, and sending this stuff to a lot of people was a low-risk, high-fun (I hoped) interaction. I also revived, beginning in the winter of 1998, my much-beloved (by me, anyway) humor writing, and began sending funny essays, parodies and such to the same list of people.

Soon I figured out how to write actual movie reviews, as opposed to inventories of a movie's various successes and failings, giving my thoughts a narrative flow and an argumentative structure. (Thankfully, my very earliest attempts at writing movie reviews have been lost in the digital ether; the earliest reviews I have on my hard drive will still provide ample embarrassment.) My humor got funnier as well. Both improvements were gradual and tied closely to (a) how much attention I was paying to improving, which varied, and (b) how often I was writing, which was insanely frequently. I went to movies at AMC City Place 10 most weekends, and wrote up my thoughts quickly, trying to shape the jumble of impressions while the surge of emotion (or lack thereof) I felt from the film was still fresh in my mind. The reviews were very personal and luxuriated in irony and digression, but occasionally stuck to their purposes and made good points. I tried to get my humor published in a few places, but it didn't happen.

In the fall of 1999, I returned to college at the University of Maryland. I went to a recruitment session for that university's paper, The Diamondback, armed with the last three reviews I had written ("Mystery Men," "Universal Soldier: The Return" and "Eyes Wide Shut"). The editor of the Diversions section, the sainted Dan Piotrowski, took a very quick look and was convinced that he needed me writing for his section. The first article I wrote for him was a review of the Thai Derm, a restaurant my family has been going to almost since we moved to Silver Spring in 1985, and a restaurant that employs a waitress who smiled flirtatiously at me every time I came in until recently. (That last bit of info is not necessary to this story; I'm just pissed.) The first movie review I wrote for Dan and the Diamondback critiqued "Double Jeopardy," starring Ashley Judd, whose hottie status (I wrote) was the film's only redeeming point.

I sent the review to Dan as well as to the list, which by now I had christened the Spam-O-Matic as an ironic comment on my dissemination methodology. Now that I could see movies for free before they came out and get paid to write about them, of course, I saw (and reviewed) a hell of a lot more movies. I also figured out how to take myself out of my reviews without losing their quirkiness and made my language more precise and lively, with plenty of help.

My stint at Maryland was a time of growth for the Spam-O-Matic, as more people became more enthusiastic about my writing, to my great satisfaction. Despite this, by the end of my time at College Park, I had begun to feel somewhat confined by what I had created. Most people seemed more interested in the movies than anything else, and I wanted to try some other things by the end of my collegiate tenure. Even during my school years, I found myself wondering whether or not the Spam-O-Matickers would actually be interested in certain things I wrote, and, as a result, I did not send some of the things I wrote even though I was proud of both the effort I had put in and the resulting pieces.

I decided a website was the best answer to these problems. With a website, people could come and read what they wished, rather than having me push content into their mailboxes, and I could write whatever I wanted, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn't be forcing people's attention onto something they didn't want to read. In addition, I could have an archive of my work on the Web, which would allow people to explore the back catalogue. A number of people on the current Spam-O-Matic have no idea what "A Senator's Garden of Impeachable Verse" is, for example, and I really think they should, but it seems like a waste to resend it.

This explains why I review movies, why I used to send the reviews to people, why I don't anymore, and (most importantly) why this website is called the Spam-O-Matic despite the fact that it has nothing to do with bulk commercial e-mailing. (Suspicious ISPs, please take note.) I think that's about all that needs explaining.

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