Jet Lag Wonder Drugs? At Least the Hamsters are Happy.

I was about to delete the e-mail. "Dear Dave," it began. And everybody knows that these days, most e-mail that begins with "Dear Dave" is spam.

Like, this one time, my mother sent me an e-mail, and it started with, "Dear Dave."

I was all like, "How sweet. My mother is e-mailing me." But then her message continued:

"I am Miriam Mbuto Kfaswane, the beautiful and wholesome widow of Malcolm Herman Eugene Tiger Mbuto Humpenstein Kfaswane XII of Spamistan. And if you do not come home and clean your room and pick up your dirty underwear off the floor before dinner, you are not going to get the 64.8 quadzillion US dollars I have been instructed to deposit into your Swiss bank account."

I immediately picked up the telephone and called my mother. "Listen, Mom," I told her, "I am 40 years old. I do not live with you anymore. I will leave my dirty underwear on the floor if I want to. Besides, your name is not Miriam Mbuto Kfaswane!"

At this point, my mother reminded me that she doesn't really understand the Internet, or own a computer, and probably was not the person who sent me that e-mail.

(You can read the rest of this column on my mail website at davethefox.com.)