The Minnesota factory is working seven days a week to churn out the product that even someone unemployed can afford and enjoy:

"People are realizing it’s not that bad a product," said Dan Johnson, 55, who operates a 70-foot-high Spam oven. ...Because it is vacuum-sealed in a can and does not require refrigeration, Spam can last for years. Hormel says "it’s like meat with a pause button."

The benefits aren't limited to Hormel employees — the Times is more than willing to patronize the people who buy it. We'll guess that the fact-checker didn't exactly call a Wal-Mart in Cleveland to check this detail:

A rising segment of the public, it seems, does have a taste for Spam, which is available in several varieties, including Spam Low Sodium, Spam with Cheese and Spam Hot & Spicy. James Bate, a 48-year-old sausage maker, was buying it at Wal-Mart in Cleveland recently. Not only was it cheap, but he said it brought back fond memories of his grandfather’s making him Spam sandwiches. "You can mix it with tomatoes and onions and make a good meal out of it,” he said. "A little bit of this stuff goes a long way."

Although at $3.20 a pound, Spam isn't that cheap, but it lasts forever and requires substantially less preparation than anything short of popcorn. And since there's no waste, you can save the money to buy that $65 Spam costume you've always wanted.

PRWeek (my old employer) is having a tournament of PR blogs, and the PR blogosphere hasn't been this excited since some shit happened with Apple's PR department about some gadget one time, probably! Thanks to his campaign of vote-trolling spam, Kerr's spitballed blog about license plates and delis defeated PR tech nerd/ Edelman blogger god Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion, and Kerr is taking the opportunity to tell Edelman—the Wal-Mart-flacking superfirm that surely makes Kerr's annual income in about an hour—that they suck the big one:

Hi everybody:

I just wanted to give you all a very sincere thank you for taking the time and clicking through to vote for my blog at PR Week's blog competition last week.

Amazingly enough, my PR Rock and Roll blog beat Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion blog by a vote of 65% to his 35%. Just to put this in perspective — Rubel is Edelman Worldwide's Internet guru with 2,200 Twitter followers, a long running blog, a periodic column in Ad Age and an invitee to many conferences.

I have to PAY to get into my conferences, 30 people follow me on Twitter, my blog has been around for two months and the only column I have is the one holding up the side of my house! :)

Believe when I tell you that I was waiting for an avalanche of votes to come in for Rubel and turn the tables on me, but it shockingly never came. I think the fact that Edelman's other competing blog got crushed may be an indication of what people think about that company?

So I thank all of you so much for taking to the time to vote.

I am on to Round Two beginning Wednesday, and we're up against something called Communication Overtones. I'll be asking for your vote again (or votes, if you have access to more than one computer), as we stumble on to victory through the social media underworld!

THANKS.

Drew

Ha, you just gonna sit back and take that, Edelman? Let's hope this starts all sorts of undercover sniping to us that we can write about.

[In fairness, Drew Kerr's blog is probably more entertaining than Steve Rubel's for the average reader.]

Hormel doesn't particularly like this explanation. Its executives prefer to attribute any gains to the marketing of the product, and that's probably fair because, when you think about it, Spam isn't simply some cheap generic...

The average price of a can of Spam is up almost 7% to $2.62, or 22¢ per ounce, according to the AP. That makes it costlier than both the average retail price of pork, 18¢ per ounce, and ground beef, 14¢, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Not exactly a bargain.

So if not for sheer necessity, why has Hormel seen Spam sales go up for seven straight quarters? The real answer is heavy marketing from Hormel—including the admirable work being done at Spam.com—and the luck of incredibly high name recognition versus competitors.

Still: the "Spamburger Hamburger" will hopefully die a quick death.

[Ad Age]

"The sender of the first junk e-mail message was Gary Thuerk and it was sent to advertise new additions to DEC's family of System-20 minicomputers. It invited the recipients, all of whom were on Arpanet and lived on the west coast of the US, to go to one of two presentations showing off the capabilities of the System-20.

"Reaction to the message was swift, with complaints reportedly coming from the US Defense Communications Agency, which oversaw Arpanet, and took Mr Thuerk's boss to task about it.

"Despite Mr Thuerk's pioneering spam it took many years for unsolicited commercial e-mail to become a nuisance. It took until 1993 before it won the name of spam - a name bestowed on it by Joel Furr - an administrator on the Usenet chat system. Mr Furr reputedly got his inspiration for the name from a Monty Python sketch set in a restaurant whose menu heavily featured the processed meat." [BBC via Slog]

Now we celebrate!

11. YouTube

At risk: Daredevils, fictional characters
Case 1: While trying to perform a stunt for YouTube, four teens crashed their Ford Explorer, injuring three and killing one. No details on how awesome the clip would have been, but hopefully it'd be more exciting than "ghost riding," the 2005-07 fad of rolling an idling car down the street while dancing beside it. The result of that fad, besides a few lame videos, was two deaths. Other stupid deadly stunts include subway surfing and fake stunts that end up in banner ads.
Case 2: A man who explained on YouTube how to tie a hangman's noose has been accused of inciting suicide. A few days after the news reported it, someone else posted instructions (though this user has posted plenty of other knot-tying videos, and who could hang themselves with the festive purple and yellow rope he uses?).
Case 3: Of course fictional characters die often and violently: Lonelygirl15, Harry Potter, and the radio star.


10. Myspace

At risk: The lonely
Case 1: Remarkably, no charges were filed in the case of the family who carried on a hoax relationship with 13-year-old depression sufferer Megan Meier over MySpace, then "broke up" with her and thus driving her to suicide. But this is only our first glimpse at two themes of Internet-caused deaths: Tragic romance and preying on the lonely.
Case 2: In this case, MySpace technically saved lives. Cops investigated a 12-year-old boy's MySpace death list, warned everyone who was on it, and searched his home. They didn't find weapons and he said he was just fooling around, so he was just charged with juvenile delinquency. Other death threat cases include a dog and another empty threat against high school students. But just to be safe I make my little sister keep a Google alert on her name, cause she''d be the first to go if some trenchcoated freak started shooting up the cool kids in her school.
Case 3: Of course while stupid people may reveal their murder plans on MySpace, they may be inspired by the site too. Heather Kane saw another girl on her boyfriend's profile and hired a hitman to kill her. Good thing she bumped into an undercover cop instead.


9. Facebook

At risk: Anyone who pisses off a muslim
Case 1: A Saudi Arabian father beat and shot his daughter earlier this year for chatting on Facebook. A preacher in the Islamic country called the site a "door to lust;" many Saudi women use aliases on the site and post drawings instead of photos. But there are still plenty of photos of hookups in the Facebook group "Single and Looking in Saudi Arabia."
Case 2: After a Jewish woman in Melbourne rejected a friend offer from one Ibrahim Dirani, he allegedly wrote to her, "I am Hezbollah and I am going to kill you and all of your family — promise you."
Aw,


8. Pornography

At risk: Viewers of extreme or illegal porn and the people who know them
Case 1: It's hard to feel too sorry for those who kill themselves after they're implicated in child porn rings, like these four suicides in 1998 and these six in 2004.
Case 2: Porn doesn't only kill the depraved. The story of Jane Longhurst, an English woman killed by "a man obsessed with violent sexual pornography," was tragic enough to encourage many UK lawmakers to ban extreme porn.


7. Spam

At risk: The terribly gullible
Case 1: Spammers and scammers can easily take your money if you're dumb enough to give them your passwords and financial info. But some Nigerian scams go far beyond online fraud; many scammers lure their victims to Nigeria to continue paying money in person; fifteen victims were killed after they got suspicious.


6. Blogging

At risk: Those already at risk of dying
Case 1: There's a trick to making listicles like this: Put the weakest item in the middle. Unfortunately the New York Times spent an entire trend piece on the bogus idea of "death by blogging." But Gizmodo editor Brian Lam tells me, "Only bogus to lazy bloggers. I did 75 hours this week and anyone over fifty would die doing that."


5. Ebay

At risk: The already dead
Case 1: Seung-Hui Cho bought empty clips and holsters on Ebay before his Virginia Tech rampage. He got his guns and ammo elsewhere, though Ebay notes that the sale of ammunition on Ebay is legal.
Case 2: Ebay's death profits tend to come from the memorabilia. Celebrity deaths bring predictable results, like sales of Pope tchotchkes and autographed Heath Ledger posters. But Ebay has also hosted auctions for supposed Columbia shuttle pieces, video of insurgents shooting down planes in Iraq, the car used in a murder, and O.J. Simpson's book.


4. Drugs

At risk: Druggies
Case 1: Internet drug sales are ridiculously easy (see "spam" above), so easy that every decent men's magazine did an "I ordered Viagra off the Internet" story by 2005. But that means irresponsible doctors can prescribe dangerous drugs, such as this 2002 case of deadly drugs sold online, or this case of a doctor whose patients sometimes became addicted or were hospitalized, or a 2007 case where a 57-year-old Canadian woman died after taking an illegal sedative she ordered online.


3. Webcams

At risk: Suicides
Case 1: Webcam suicide is one of the darkest modern phenomena, an example of loneliness and despair in a supposed age of connection and hope. Those who have fallen that far and recovered may want to forget it ever happened. Webcammer Stacy Pershall has long insisted that despite reports, she did not try to kill herself on camera in 2001 by overdosing on pills but merely took some Advil "to get a few hours sleep" — on her bathroom floor.
Case 2: While Pershall's viewers worried about her and called the cops to save her, those watching Brandon Vedas in 2003 egged him on. He OD'd on five drugs and died a room away from his unsuspecting mother.
Case 3: A father named Kevin Whitrick hanged himself after the apparent encouragement of people watching his webcam; viewers later said they thought it was a joke, and indeed they'd acted worried after seeing him die. After all, he was in an insult chat room, which brings us to another cause of death:


2. Chat rooms

At risk: Hopeless romantics
Case 1: A man rejected in real life by his chat room lover in 1999 cut his own head off with a chainsaw in her front yard. Enough said.
Case 2: Plenty of innocents have been killed by online predators like the man who killed an altar girl, the Texas A&M killer, and this guy in a rural North Carolina trailer.


1. World of Warcraft

At risk: 10 million players, particularly the already crazy ones
Case 1: World of Warcraft addiction may not necessarily be deadly for the player, but it can be hell on their family life. Of course, Kim Trenor was probably crazy long before she moved cross-country with her 2-year-old to see a guy she met on the game, and definitely before she and Royce Zeigler beat "Baby Grace" to death. But if it weren't for that damned game she never would have met the allegedly abusive Zeigler.
Case 2: WoW isn't the first game to drive addicts mad. At least one Everquest player allegedly shot herself after getting hooked on the game.
Case 3: And of course any time you put a beautiful bit of fantasy in the world, some kid will try to imitate it. Happened with Superman, happened with WoW when a Chinese boy jumped off a 24-story building. His parents sued game maker Blizzard saying he was imitating the game, in which some players like to platform-jump, an activity totally unrelated to actually playing. Again, totally not WoW's fault, but something had to convince that boy he could leap off a tower.

from Steve Rhodes

7:06pm Mar 20th
To all of you using Facebook as a marketing tool to promote your business or post your news stories, knock it off! Get this stuff off my page or remove yourself as my "friend" or I will do so. This particularly means you newspaper people who are ruining Facebook for everyone. This is my personal page where I like to keep track of friends and acquaintances, not a place of commerce. I do not appreciate being used. It's pathetic. If you want to be my "friend" because we actually are friendly with each other, or you would like to be, great. I have many newspaper pals. I want you here on this basis, but I don't want your stuff clogging up my site. Thank you."

With worldwide volumes having doubled in the past year, and ever-more sophisticated spammers singling out computer users with particular interests or problems, it can serve as a constant reminder of what is lacking for those with fragile egos — whether a sinuous body or an eight-cylinder sex drive.

Basically, a bunch of fatties and people with puny peckers get their feelings hurt each time they receive an e-mail that says, "Lose weight, lardass," or "What's with the little dick, littledick?" As tragic as this is, some folks can find the humor in it all:

Betty Maul, who owns a print and advertising company in Cherry Hill, N.J., said more than 115 junk e-mail messages had poured into her in-box one recent day by 5:15 p.m... Absent, at least for the moment, was one of Ms. Maul's favorites: a come-on for breast enlargements. "I'm already a very well-endowed woman, so that one frightens me," she said. "That's become a joke in our office. Everybody howls."

Raining E-Blows on Egos [NYT]

Related: Bauer After Going After Slice Of Tiny Market Segment

In a lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, lawyers for Mr. Ratner claim that someone has been sending insulting e-mails in Mr. Ratner's name to at least one prominent Brooklyn resident....

So far, the only public evidence of the alleged anti-Ratner e-mail campaign is a fragment of a disparaging email purportedly sent on March 3 by the developer to the president of Brooklyn Brewery, Steve Hindy....

"Just a friendly messag [sic] to let you know I will not be selling any Brooklyn lager at the Brooklyn Nets Stadium," court papers quote the email as reading. "Nothing personal, but I have to make a deal with the larger suppliers - Anheuser Busch for one - in order to really do the right thing. You're small time and always will be."

Of course, Brooklyn Lager will soon be the least of Ratner's worries. Today he'll file an additional suit against Mrs. Miriam Abacha, from whom he has not yet received a single cent of her late husband's fortune, despite her promises. Once she transfers a sum of $900 million (U.S.) to his bank account, he'll buy you whatever beer you want.

[Photo via Getty Images.]

Ratner Files Suit Over Rude Emails Sent in His Name

Two thoughts. First: A lifetime of cheap seltzer is a miracle indeed. Second: Bad for the Jews.

SodaClub.com