Final entry in the TC log for 2002, and what a marvellously…palindromic year it was, particularly on February 20th. It is, however, another 20th – July – that sticks in my mind, as I made the final step in transition from lone wolf, confirmed bachelor and anti-social animal in general to… [shock! horror!] a family man.

How things have changed. I stumbled across an earlier editorial recently, dating back to the earliest dawn of prehistory – all the way back to 1998, to be precise, in which I wrote: “The prospect of marrying someone…seems highly strange…and as for the prospect of kids, I’m firmly with Amanda Donohoe in Lair of the White Worm on THAT topic.” But here I am, married, with children. And odder still, the happiest I’ve ever been.

I will admit that the marriage itself is something of an irrelevance, in that neither it, nor anything else, could make me more loyal, faithful or in love with Chris than I am anyway. However, the immigration people do not hand out green cards on the basis of “undying adoration” – though given the current backlog, I’m not scheduled to get mine until 2005 anyway. And marriage has a nice ring of permanence to it, even if I still look at envelopes addressed to “Mr and Mrs. McLennan” and want to forward them to my mother and father.

I’ve even settled into the parenting thing with less trouble than I thought. All you have to remember is that children are just like little adults – except with no grasp of logic or sarcasm. This isn’t quite true in Robert’s case, since he is already towering six inches above both Chris and I, and has already reached Advanced Irony, if not quite perhaps sarcasm. He turned 18 on Friday, so the next time he leaves the house, we will be changing the locks. 🙂

Maybe we should also lock Emily in – she is now 15, and every time we don’t let her get some part of her body pierced, Chris is convinced she hates us. As a relatively late arrival on the scene, without the first 13 years of maternal bonding, I am less concerned, and feel sure we could trade Emily in for a more reliable model on Ebay. Together, my cynicism and Chris’s motherly instincts combine, and I like to think we strike a reasonable middle-ground as parents. Mind you, Fred and Rosemary West probably thought so too…

And so we look forward to 2003, with a great deal of optimism, and much relief that there is no ominous, wedding-shaped cloud, looming on the horizon. Though an upcoming trip to Vegas may provide an opportunity for a quickie, possibly involving an Elvis impersonator. Our business is going well, despite the best efforts of Bank of America to drive us into bankruptcy – a long, nasty story involving them holding back $27,000 of our sales for two weeks – and if 2002 was the best year of my life, I see absolutely no reason why 2003 shouldn’t be even better.

I hope the same can be said for everyone reading this too. Here’s to a merry Christmas, a peaceful New Year, and may 2003 bring you as much happiness as 2002 has brought me.

7 o’clock in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, the phone rang. Chris struggled to consciousness to answer it, for whoever was calling at that time on a holiday clearly had a crucial message to convey, right? Wrong. “BEEP…..BEEP…..” The offending creature was a fax, tarnishing even this sacred festival (well, sacred to the consumption of far too much honey-baked ham, anyway) with random efforts to deliver junk advertisements for T-shirts, financial advice, or even, in a masterpiece of recursiveness, the faxing of junk advertisements.

I think that was probably the straw for me. I’m now prepared to stand up and say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Junk phone calls, junk faxes, junk emails – life is too short to deal with them all. I think the problem is probably worse here in the States, then it was back in Britain, because here, local phone calls are free. The spammers can thus spend all day dialling numbers, without having to pay a cent.

It makes me wonder whether there might be a justification for that occasional hoax email which claims that some governmental body or other is going to tax email. If they were having to pay even 1/10 cent per email, a lot of the spammers would be loath to blitz millions of addresses as they do. Of course, there are problems with this, not least collection, given the fly-by-night nature and foreign location of a lot of them. And then, there are the legitimate mailing lists, which you actually want to get mail from, which would be crippled by such a fee.

One alternative approach is to go after the spammers aggressively. Chris Gore of Film Threat took that approach, after someone hacked their mailing list, tracking down the home info and other details of the people responsible and publishing it all on their site. This did seem to have some effect – we faxed the spammers a polite request to stop their anti-social activities, and gratifyingly, got back our fax next morning with “FUCK YOU” scrawled across it. Gore is now filing a lawsuit against them. More power to his elbow, even if it’s probably entirely futile.

If you can afford the time, perhaps the most plausible approach – and certainly the most entertaining – is that taken by the War on Spam website, who basically yank the chains of the spammers, attempting to waste as much of their time as they waste of ours. The entire process is documented, and the transcripts published on the site; it’s immensely pleasing to read the results. Probably wisely, those involved operate largely under pseudonyms such as “Jason Hardknob”, since there is nothing more dangerous than a pissed-off Nigerian, trying to fleece you out of tens of thousands of dollars, who has just realised that he has been screwed with. No praise is high enough for those who take on these dangerous jobs, which border on a divine mission.

Unfortunately, while undeniably amusing, it too is perhaps all Canute-like, for the odds are that the volume of spam will increase in the future. There will always be idiots out there who want to increase their penis size, see Hot Barnyard Action, or simply MAKE MONEY FAST!!!! At least it’ll hopefully keep them busy, and out of the way of the rest of us.