In every mythology there is a character known as the trickster, a malevolent entity whose only reason for existing is to annoy and befuddle humanity. The Native Americans know him as coyote, the Romans called him Pan, and Christendom fears him as the devil.
Superman had his own devil, an imp from the fifth dimension called Mister Mxyzptlk. (I’m not going to try to pronounce it. Take your best shot.) Mxyzptlk caused all kinds of mayhem for the Man of Steel, and could only be defeated by tricking him into saying his name backwards. ( Just when you were getting the hang of saying it forwards.)
copyright DC Comics
Sometimes, fantasy and science fiction catch up to reality. Here in the 21st Century, we have inadvertently opened up a wormhole to the 5th dimension and unleashed an army of Mxyzptlks upon our world. . It is called spam.
Now I’m generally not in favor of the death penalty, but I could make an exception for these cruel marketing terrorists. For a few weeks, I was deleting 5-600 annoying messages every day from entities calling themselves Grsnarp or Snikdribble who were trying to sell me something called Ug Boots and NFL jackets. Others tried to butter me up with compliments. “What a fantastic site you have here. I’ll be sure to bookmark this awesome blog…and by the way…” But of course, no human has ever looked at my brilliant commentary and insightful cartoons.
It’s just the creeps from the 5th Dimension, fucking with my head and wearing out my mouse from hitting the delete button. I finally got the appropriate security program installed and put an end to most of the cyber-garbage. Somehow, this software manages to get the imps to reverse their monikers. Now if we could only figure out a way to return their spam with a nuke attached. Do they have drones for this?
“Mixeyplick”
On the other side of the coin…if you legitimately try to contact a whole bunch of your friends at once with, say, a party invitation – many email handlers will refuse to send your mail. Some really screwed up mail handlers see attachments (like a story going to an editor) as spam. Had one, fired them.
This guy was sending 25 million spams a day before he was stopped the old fashioned way:
The Sleazy Life and Nasty Death of Russia’s Spam King
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/spamking.html
A couple more tricksters of some note are Till Eulenspiegel (possibly based on a 14th century German vagrant) and the delightful “Q” from Star Trek Last Generation, who once famously said “It’s difficult to work in a group when you are omnipotent”.