Tales from zineland: Why we refer to junk email as spam

I’ll get to the answer in a minute, but first I have a confession: I jumped on the ‘90s bandwagon and put out a zine. I read about Factsheet Five and talked friends into creating something called Lost Armadillos in Heat. The premise was all about people who wanted to move back to Austin, Texas, but couldn’t afford it. “Lost”—living somewhere in the hinterlands. “Armadillos”—the mascot of Austin dating back to the Armadillo World Headquarters. “In Heat”—wanting to go home. I immediately blew the premise by, you guessed it, moving back to Austin for grad school.

Lost Armadillos was an offensive humor zine. We “published” 13 unlucky issues and a companion zine Groovee CheeWaWa. Many people assumed I put it out all by my lonesome, but many many many people contributed, including the amazing cartoonist R. Murray Strickland, poet/journalist Adrienne and the queen of fanzines Krista Garcia. Mr. Bitch (who hated everything) is sadly no long with us. Neither is the legendary Albert Huffstickler, who convinced us that we needed to publish poetry—his in particular. I just manned the copy machine. Oh, I wrote some, including this piece about how Mr. Bitch met his eventually-to-be ex-wife.

I attended two zine cons in Chicago, one with Murray, another with Brad. At one we received the gift of a zine with (female) pubic hairs taped to it. I also met a “famous” poet who, when I asked who he was, screamed “I’m White Boy!" At one point during the weekend White Boy stripped naked while reading his poetry.

Lost Armadillos was named among Best Local Reads in 1995 by The Austin Chronicle. The Austin American-Statesman in 1998 named the web version a favorite local site and said, “… as close as you can get to an online hit of acid.” It’s now largely forgotten, but you can buy our bumpersticker seen above for $25 (!!!) on eBay.

Spam? I’m getting there… I fell in love with zines. Eat and Get Out! was about angry waiters. Krista, mentioned above, created Scaredy-Cat Stalker, a zine about her obsession with actor Henry Thomas from E.T. Temp Slave! had horror stories of the hell of working. Eight-Track Mind worshipped the ker-chunk of 8-track tapes. Factsheet Five had a great premise. It was a list of zines and addressed where you could send cash to get them.

Oh, speaking of Spam, the Lost Armadillos crew created Spam Sushi for the formerly annual Austin event Spamarama! It was an odd reference to Austin, Minnesota, the home office of Hormel.

OK. Here’s the story as publicized in Factsheet Five back in the day: Spam as in unwanted email refers to an event called Spam Jake Day. A guy named dinosaur_die_die_die explains: “Back in the days of Usenet text based Internet before the World Wide Web as we know it, there was a group called alt.spam.tin. Actually I think it was originally just alt.spam. Although the creation of the group likely owes something to the Monty Python sketch, it was its own beast and I believe both are from a larger SPAM zeitgeist. One of the more enthusiastic posters declared May 23, 1994 SPAM JAKE DAY, creating a snail-mail letter writing campaign in hopes of beguiling Hormel with inexplicable messages of love and adoration for SPAM.”

More specifically from Lee Harvey Oswald Smith: “The plan: on Spam Jake Day (the twenty-third of May, 1994), a lot of mail will arrive at the headquarters of Hormel Foods, the manufacturer of Spam, from all over the world. This will be from various Discordian, SubGenius and other weird religious groups; on official letterhead (which looks rather weird), and from people with long, bizarre religious titles. Each letter will claim that the sender's own group is the original Church of Spam (with appropriate embellishments), and requesting official endorsement from Hormel Foods as such.”

Hey! Today is May 23. Happy Spam Jake Day!